Articles by 'Brian Wagner'

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Uncategorized

I sit down with many clients each week to discuss a Windows 7 upgrade, a virtual desktop infrastructure, or a XenApp (RDS) environment to deliver shared desktops or applications. The common theme for all of these projects is that the client is looking for a better way to deliver a desktop compared to how Windows XP was delivered. Sometimes this means leveraging automation with role-based provisioning to virtualize and deliver applications. Or it could mean using VDI or RDS to deliver the new desktop and app... read more.

• September 30, 2013

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Infrastructure

The NetScaler SDX platform is a combination of high performance hardware with a hypervisor tuned to take advantage of it. The solution offers direct mapping of specific components to virtual NetScalers, such as CPU, Memory, SSL cores, and NICs via SR-IOV. But Citrix teased us a while back that the SDX platform may also support workloads other than NetScalers. Citrix has now delivered, working with some third party vendors to offer new workloads on the SDX platform. These are the available products: We... read more.

• September 03, 2013

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Virtualization

In the last week, Citrix has released updated versions of many of the products in its portfolio. This includes, XenApp, XenDesktop, XenServer, Provisioning Server, StoreFront, User Profile Manager, Receiver, VDI-in-a-Box, and more! Below is a breakdown of each new product version and the highlights in the new version: XenApp / XenDesktop - I combined these because as you likely already know, the products have been consolidated to XenDesktop 7. This consolidation allows for shared management between XenDe... read more.

• July 03, 2013

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Virtualization

VMware has released an operating system and application management solution. Mirage, part of the VMware Horizon suite, is focused on managing both physical and virtual machines. The solution can roll out operating system upgrades, patches, and applications. Mirage was born out of an acquisition of Wanova. The product was designed to not only handle updates of O/S and applications, but to capture the contents of each machine. The contents can then be deployed to different hardware or to a VM. Mirage accom... read more.

• May 03, 2013

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Virtualization

VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) is a chance for VMware to deliver the new vision and associated message to Partners. This year it was clear...they are focused on two areas: VMware vCloud Suite VMware Horizon Suite So, what are these? The vCloud Suite is basically vSphere and the following addons: vCloud Director vCloud Connector vCloud Networking and Security vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) vCenter Operations Management Suite vFabric Application Director vCloud Automation Center The sui... read more.

• March 05, 2013

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Uncategorized

The Windows 8 Citrix Receiver, which is a “metro” app, has been released and provides access to Citrix Apps and Desktops on Windows 8 by leveraging Cloud Gateway. Once logged in, the interface has the (fairly) consistent look and feel of the Citrix Receiver I get on all my devices. My favorites show up and I can access apps and desktops without an issue. Windows 8 metro apps can be docked on the side of the screen and the “Desktop” shrinks when doing so. But, you can’t dock traditional 32-bit / 64-bi... read more.

• February 13, 2013

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Uncategorized

I've been running Windows 8 for a few months now. Most of my time I use it as I did Windows 7, in the "Desktop." But, recently I've been delving into some of the Windows 8 apps hoping I would figure out the value of this new version of Windows. I've found a few nice apps, and I like the ability to dock an app on the side of my Desktop (such as Lync, news, etc). I decided to check out the Mail app. I configured it with the info to contact our Exchange environment and it dawned on me that it is using Activ... read more.

• December 17, 2012

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Virtualization

Citrix just released a new version of the NetScaler. Version 10 adds many new features that increase scalability and functionality. The key new features are: Clustering of appliances to increase capacity.  This is huge! Instead of creating HA pairs that are active/passive, up to 32 NetScalers can be part of a single cluster that is active/active. The traffic is distributed among the cluster nodes to provide high availability, high throughput, and scalability. Action Analytics for real time traffic mo... read more.

• April 12, 2012

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Virtualization

The latest Citrix Receiver for iOS and Android added a new feature to integrate RSA Soft Token functionality natively in the app. There is little documentation on how to make this work, so this should help clarify. Open the token link that was sent in an e-mail. A list of applications will appear, and may vary based on the device, apps, etc. Choose Citrix Receiver. Enter the password if one was created by your administrator. If you are a first-time RSA user, or this is a new soft to... read more.

• March 30, 2012

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Virtualization

XenDesktop 5.6 was released, and with it the Personal vDisk is born. This technology stemmed from the RingCube purchase and could be the holy grail of VDI. The Personal vDisk separates the user's personalization and applications from the operating system. Sure, there are many solutions available today to address user personalization. Allowing users to install applications was not preferred as it required a persistent image. With the Personal vDisk, application installations can be captured  while maintainin... read more.

• March 11, 2012