Articles In Infrastructure

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Infrastructure, Security, Storage

One of the most common attack vectors for cloud servers is through Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) or Secure Shell (SSH). When administrators build servers in the cloud, Microsoft and AWS had typically assigned a public IP to ease management of the servers. There is no VMware Console equivalent in the cloud, so RDP or SSH are the only way to manage a server. The problem starts when that public IP is assigned. Hackers are constantly running scans on the IP ranges owned by the cloud providers, and as soon as a... read more.

• July 10, 2019

By Tom Stanley, Posted in Infrastructure

Splunk is shining its light on Dark Data and enabling companies to extract real business value from their machine data. As the value of that newly exposed information increases, it is important to be able to access it from anywhere, even from mobile devices. Although a Splunk mobile app has been available for a few years, connecting to an on-premises Splunk Enterprise deployment was difficult. The mobile device needed some type of VPN software to access Splunk dashboards, or there were more complicated meth... read more.

• July 01, 2019

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure, Virtualization

As of August 2018, the Citrix Workspace app has replaced Citrix Receiver. The Citrix Workspace app securely aggregates all of your applications and data, whether on-premises or in the cloud, from any device into a single unified app. Below is a sample screenshot of the Workspace app: In order to take full advantage of the Workspace app, it needs to be integrated with the Workspace service which is a fundamental component of Citrix Cloud. The service is responsible for aggregating and delivering all of yo... read more.

• June 21, 2019

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Infrastructure

Subscription-based pricing is all the rage and I think there are some gaps regarding expectations all around. Let’s start with the math and we’ll end on philosophy. Traditionally, you might buy a piece of software for say, $100K. You would generally pay about 20% a year in maintenance, $20K. If you were amortizing this expense over five years this would be like a $40K a year budget impact ($20K amortization plus $20K maintenance). Easy enough, if the subscription price of this software is less... read more.

• June 20, 2019

By Hank Smith, Posted in Infrastructure

Many companies are moving a variety of workloads to the cloud. This blog covers the tools available for managing Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instance costs in AWS. The goal is to understand what is available and other technologies that are available to control EC2 costs. EC2 is the function that allows customers to create various instances of virtual machines within AWS. Why move workloads to the cloud (AWS in this case)? There are a variety of reasons why companies are choosing to move to the cloud incl... read more.

• May 30, 2019

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Infrastructure, Virtualization

I remember when Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server edition was released, and the integrated capability of having more than one user access a server at a time was born. Sure, Citrix had created this already with WinFrame on Windows NT 3.51, but Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server edition brought the functionality to the native operating system. We take this for granted now, with every administrator of a Windows server environment heavily relying on RDP for their day-to-day jobs. But it was an exciting time. But the... read more.

• May 08, 2019

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Infrastructure, Virtualization

To follow up on my previous blog about the Cloud First world we live in, I thought it would be helpful to highlight an area where the cloud offers a great AND low cost solution for Citrix disaster recovery. The costs of having workloads in the cloud are typically the largest obstacle for our customers to start the journey to the cloud. Citrix teamed up with Microsoft to deliver an option that reduces cost for production workloads and almost eliminates cost for disaster recovery. How does it work? The cost... read more.

• May 08, 2019

By Tom Stanley, Posted in Infrastructure

Splunk allows the transformation of dashboards into forms, which present controls for users to enter search criteria. This allows you to have text boxes, pulldown lists, checkboxes, radio buttons, and other controls at the top of the form. The user’s selections from these input controls are stored in tokens that you can use in your queries or to control various aspects of the form. You can also add these input controls to specific panels on your form, not just at the top of the page. This makes it... read more.

• March 01, 2019

By Tom Stanley, Posted in Infrastructure

When extracting fields from events in Splunk, typically each field has a single value. For instance, in a firewall packet event there is a src_ip, src_port, dest_ip, dest_port, action, etc., each with a single value. But there are occasionally fields which have more than one value. One common field type that often has multiple values is an e-mail address field, such as from or to. Splunk deals with these values by allowing fields to hold multiple values, which it refers to as simply a “multivalue fiel... read more.

• March 01, 2019

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Infrastructure, Virtualization

Overview Citrix acquired Unidesk in early 2017, and quickly integrated the App Layering technology into the stack. This included the ability to separate and individually manage layers for the OS, Platform Tools, and Applications. Applications can be baked in to the final image (template) or mounted elastically on demand based on user provisioning. Here is an overview diagram from Citrix: The ability to support User Layers has been in the “Labs” (previews of potential functionality for futur... read more.

• October 16, 2018