Articles by 'Timothy Karl'

Blog Author - Timothy Karl

Tim has over 10 years’ experience in the design, development, and deployment of Windows infrastructure technologies. His experience also includes the high-level design of complex thin client and server-based computing environments. He is highly fluent in all aspects of Windows and Citrix infrastructure technologies.

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure, Storage, Support

OneDrive is becoming a popular tool to store files as it provides anywhere access and user collaboration. Getting OneDrive to work in VDI can be challenging. Here are some tips and tricks for optimizing OneDrive in VDI: Use Profile Containers – A profile container captures a user’s profile into a virtual disk that is attached to a user’s VDI session. It provides performance that closely matches a local profile with all the benefits of a roaming profile. Using this solution with OneDrive g... read more.

  • March 22, 2023

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Virtualization

On July 14, 2022, IGEL announced the general availability of Microsoft Teams optimizations in Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) using IEGL OS endpoints. IGEL OS is the first Linux-based OS to support Teams optimizations with AVD. Prior to this, the Teams optimizations were only available in the AVD clients for Windows 10/11 and macOS. The media optimizations for Teams allow for local offloading of audio and video for calls and meetings. This means that the audio and video traffic bypass the virtual desktop sessi... read more.

  • September 13, 2022

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Virtualization

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7.15 LTSR will reach End of Life (EOL) on August 15, 2022. Customers using this version who wish to remain on the LTSR track must upgrade to 1912 or 2203 LTSR before then or risk being on an unsupported platform. Besides supportability, there are additional benefits for upgrading to 1912 and 2203 LTSR. Additional OS Support for Infrastructure components and VDAs 7.15 LTSR supports up to Windows 10 for Desktop OS and Windows 2016 Server OS. Both 1912 and 2203 LTSR allow you... read more.

  • June 22, 2022

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure, Security, Support, Virtualization

Citrix recently released the first new LTSR version of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops in over two years. Here is what I feel are the top 5 new features and enhancements available in 2203: #1 - Microsoft Teams Optimizations Citrix has added a lot of functionally to Microsoft Teams optimizations over the last two years that were until now only available in current releases. These new functionalities in the latest LTSR release include: App sharing Multimonitor screen sharing DTMF support Proxy server... read more.

  • April 15, 2022

By Timothy Karl, Posted in

Historically, it has been complicated and challenging to manage VDI images across on-premises resource locations and across public clouds, with lots of different platforms, tools, and technologies involved. There are vendor specific components that are always changing and evolving. It is not a seamless experience. Citrix Image Portability Service for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (CAVDS) helps solve this problem. It is a new Citrix Cloud service in tech preview that allows you to migrate images from on-... read more.

  • January 27, 2022

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure, Storage, Support

One of the common issues I see in VDI are FSLogix profile disks taking up a lot of space. Users’ profiles grow organically over time as they use VDI. If an IT administrator doesn’t monitor and perform regular maintenance on the profile shares, they can run out of space. When this happens, users are unable to log on and active profiles start to become corrupted. Adding more storage can temporarily get things back online; however, that might not always be an option as adding more storage and expan... read more.

  • September 16, 2021

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure, Security

With anti-malware scanning software it is very important to have the proper malware exclusions in place. A misconfiguration of these settings may lead to performance issues which can may cause outages of critical applications and services due to file contention and locking. IT administrators need to find a balance between a malware-free environment and affecting the reliability and performance of any applications or services. Anti-malware exclusions can come from a variety of sources. Each anti-malwar... read more.

  • July 02, 2021

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure, Support

Today, over 85% of organizations worldwide operate on Microsoft Active Directory. In many cases, Active Directory has been in place for decades and has not been well maintained for security posture. Hackers often target Active Directory as an easy way for gaining access to a customer’s environment. Gotham has developed an Active Directory Security Risk Assessment offering to provide specific actionable guidance to mitigate security risks in your Active Directory environment. The assessment focuses on... read more.

  • March 31, 2021

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure, Security

Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 reached end of life on January 14, 2020. This means that Microsoft will no longer be releasing free security patches, updates, or support when something goes wrong. Although these operating systems won’t instantly stop working or become security risks overnight, there are risks with staying on these operating systems for an extended period of time. What happens if I stay on these operating systems? There is a huge risk of being exploited by cyber crimina... read more.

  • January 16, 2020

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure, Security

On December 17, 2019, Citrix released a critical advisory regarding a vulnerability that allows for remote code execution: CVE-2019-19781 - Vulnerability in Citrix Application Delivery Controller and Citrix Gateway (https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX267027). The vulnerability exploits a directory traversal attack on the /vpn directory on the NetScaler. It allows for remote execution of code under the user nobody. Gotham previously alerted customers to this vulnerability. Citrix plans to release a perma... read more.

  • January 15, 2020