Citrix on myvirtualcloud.net

Disaster! I moved my Citrix Farm to VMware Cloud in 8 minutes

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 16:13:36 +0000

I hope you are all having a great day at home. I recently posted on Twitter that I have executed DR from on-prem to the VMware Cloud on AWS of my entire Citrix Farm, including Active Directory, Delivery Controllers, VPN, and persistent desktops. As it got much attention, I decided to record a video; it's only about 4 minutes. Some things must be seen to be believed!

Why Datrium DVX is Best for VDI - by Simon Long and André Leibovici

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 14:38:17 +0000

I have written in the past about how awesome Datrium DVX is for VDI, and how it removes numerous challenges in deploying and scaling solutions in single or multi-datacenter rollouts.

Most HCI vendors are continuously claiming to solve VDI challenges, but they are regularly focused on the day-one rollout – not the problems to operate VDI environment in the long run.

Citrix and Datrium Unlock Flash-based Economics for 6,000 AF Desktops at $9 per User

Mon, 13 Nov 2017 07:13:48 +0000

Couple weeks back I had the wonderful opportunity to present Datrium tech and the Open Convergence evolution alongside my colleague Mike McLaughlin and the Citrix Ready team. Along with LoginVSI we crafted and validated a reference architecture for 6,000 XenDesktop virtual desktops running on a single Datrium platform while enjoying benefits of AllFlash performance at a cost of $9 per month per user over a three year ROI (list prices).

New 'Acropolis File Services' with Native Support for VMware Horizon UEM and Citrix Profile Manager

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 08:15:46 +0000

Nutanix has been primarily used to host virtual machines in the format of VMDKs and vdisks, but now it is also possible to natively store unstructured files such as user-generated content such as Office documents, and Windows user profiles and settings.

The One with the GPU Graphics Performance

Sun, 11 Jan 2015 11:00:12 +0000

Those who follow my articles know that I have always been a big supporter of VDI as a method to simplify desktop administration, reduce costs, improve user experience, increase productivity, provide remote access and enable BYOD, and provide an effective disaster recovery solution for workspaces. Whilst VDI has delivered on these promises, there has been previously room for improvement in a few areas.

Service Level Automation for XenDesktop with Nutanix

Tue, 06 May 2014 08:17:26 +0000

Yesterday I had the opportunity to present a TED-like talk at the GeekSpeak Tonight Session at Citrix Synergy Conference. The talk was about hyper-convergence and web-scale technologies and how they redefine the way VDI is architected and deployed.

The session was mostly vendor agnostic, where I discussed high level concepts about distributed file systems and web-scale technologies. Sometimes it's hard to see that it was an agnostic presentation because people automatically fall back to what the company "Nutanix" does, but the same presentation could have been done for other hyper-converged infrastructures and market players.

Join Nutanix and Me for Citrix Synergy 2014

Tue, 29 Apr 2014 13:30:08 +0000

Wow! How exciting.... for the first time ever I am attending a Citrix Synergy Conference and I also have been given the opportunity to present a Thought Leadership session during the conference. Citrix was one of the End-User Computing pioneers and makes me very grateful to be presenting with such amazing group of individuals.

Nutanix Shadow Clones Explained and Benchmarked

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 03:20:31 +0000

One of the Nutanix features that drastically improve VDI performance and end-user experience is Shadow Clones. I briefly discussed Shadow Clones in the past. However, before explaining how Shadow Clones work let’s recap how VMware View Linked Clones work (the same is valid for XenDesktop MCS).

Join me for the Dutch VMUG and Citrix Mobility Conference

Sun, 02 Mar 2014 10:46:12 +0000

Dutch VMUG

If you are located in Amsterdam make sure you attend the Dutch VMUG User Conference. The event is happening on March 6th, in Den Bosch, Holland. This is a nice size VMUG with approximately 600 attendees.

CBRC-like Functionality For Any VDI Solution with Nutanix

Mon, 03 Feb 2014 08:47:00 +0000

It is amazing when your world turns upside down and a technology that used to be awesome becomes mostly irrelevant. It amazes me how fast technology evolves and help organizations to achieve better performance and lower OPEX.

For a long time I have discussed the benefits of CBRC (Content Based Read Cache) available with Horizon View 5.1 onwards, allowing Administrators to drastically cut-down on read IO operations, offloading the storage infrastructure and providing greater end-user experience.

Here are few of the blog posts I wrote on CBRC technology: Understanding CBRC (Content Based Read Cache), Understanding CBRC – RecomputeDigest Method, Sizing for VMware View Storage Accelerator (CBRC), View Storage Accelerator Performance Benchmark, CBRC and Local Mode in VMware View 5.1, View Storage Accelerator (CBRC) Hashing Function.

CBRC helps to address some of the performance bottlenecks and the increase of storage cost for VDI. CBRC is a 100% host-based RAM-Based caching solution that helps to reduce read IOs issued to the storage subsystem and thus improves scalability of the storage subsystem while being completely transparent to the guest OS. However, CBRC comes at a cost.

When the View Storage Accelerator feature (CBRC) is enabled, a per-VMDK digest file is created to store hash information about the VMDK blocks. The estimated size of each digest file is roughly:

Making an Educated Decision on View 5.0 or XenDesktop 5.5

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:26:00 +0000

I want to start this post saying that I often try to focus my blogging on the technical aspects of VDI, without putting too much focus on pricing or market. If you are an avid reader of my blog you know exactly what I am talking about. However, discussions about best product, best protocol or most aggressive ROI are often present in my circles.

Desktop Virtualization Momentum to Build Though More a 2011 Opportunity

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:45:00 +0000

Barclays Capital released yesterday their Q4 VMware channel survey. They are raising their FY10 license growth expectation to 10%, up from 5.5% to reflect the improving server demand environment.

However there is an interesting comment about the VDI market.

We expect VMware to continue to make inroads in desktop virtualization with its new VMware View virtual desktop infrastructure platform, though we are more bullish on Citrix System’s ability to monetize the opportunity in 2010 given the maturity of their platform and established
XenApp installed base (Citrix claims 100 million) which is a natural advantage as it attempts to convert customers to desktop virtualization.

Getting up to speed on XenDesktop really quickly

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:55:00 +0000

Do you need to learn XenDesktop really quickly, over a weekend? Bellow are are some VERY useful links if you need to get up to speed on XenDesktop really quickly...

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX121478 (Enterprise Design Guide)

http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/index.jsp?lang=en (Online Documentation Library)