Articles by 'Brian Wagner'

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

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Virtualization

XenServer 6.0.2 was just released. It adds some new features and includes all hotfixes and driver updates that were available for XenServer 6.0. The new features are: Emergency Network Reset - when upgrades go awry or you just want to start fresh with the networking configuration, this new feature will reset the host networking back to defaults Some additional Linux operating systems Support for .Net 3.5 and .Net 4.x for XenServer Tools You can find the release notes here: http://support.citrix.c... read more.

• March 06, 2012

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Virtualization

Just a few years ago, the diagram below was a common occurrence in the enterprise space: The solution did provide secure remote access for users using SSL to connect back to the Citrix environment. But it also had several drawbacks: Costly - the typical environment consisted of two load balancers, and at least two CAGs and two Web Interface servers. Lots of hardware and software to maintain Access Gateways or CSG servers (CSG runs on Windows which means Windows Updates, etc) Citrix Web In... read more.

• February 20, 2012