Articles In Infrastructure

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

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Infrastructure, Support

As IT administrators, we are often asked how we can be more proactive to reduce exposure to issues that may arise. In Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.18, a new feature was introduced to help identify issues from user locations to the Citrix environment hosting the applications and desktops. This feature, Application Probing, has a few requirements, but is not too difficult to set up and can provide immediate value. Application Probing requires the following: Citrix XenApp / XenDesktop 7.18 or newer runni... read more.

• June 28, 2018

By Hank Smith, Posted in Infrastructure, Virtualization

Citrix Cloud is a cloud-based platform, residing in Microsoft Azure, used to deploy and manage Citrix products, desktops, and applications. It manages public, private, and hybrid cloud-based Citrix environments, as well as on-premises implementations. Here are just a few of the numerous reasons to consider moving to a cloud-based management solution for your Citrix environment. Stay up-to-date on the latest version of Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp seamlessly. Upgrades can be costly, time consuming, and disru... read more.

• June 28, 2018

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure

Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) is a feature of NetScaler that provides for disaster recovery and continuous availability of applications when there are points of failure in a wide area network (WAN). GSLB can balance application loads across data centers by directing client requests to the closest or best-performing data center, or in the case of an outage, any surviving data center. In a typical GSLB deployment, proximity-based load balancing methods are used to determine the location of the client a... read more.

• June 28, 2018

By Tom Stanley, Posted in Infrastructure, Support

Part 1: Adding the Timeline Visualization Why a Timeline? One important metric when delivering user desktops is the amount of time the user has to wait for the desktop to launch. It’s hard to ensure user acceptance of the delivered environment if they find it slow before their desktop even becomes available. Various processes run to build up the user environment from many configuration layers, including group policies retrieved from busy domain controllers, policies from desktop delivery software li... read more.

• January 19, 2018

By Hank Smith, Posted in Infrastructure, Security, Support

Throughout my years of IT consulting, patching servers and desktops has been a sore subject with customers. It’s always been something that is required, but in many cases not performed. The benefits of patching in a timely manner include feature enhancements, bug fixes, and of course security updates. But for many of our customers, patching is time-consuming and resource-intensive, and gets in the way of IT teams focusing on more strategic and tactical matters. As a result, patches aren’t maint... read more.

• December 21, 2017

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure, Virtualization

As our customers renewed their Citrix licensing this past year, some have seen SD-WAN in their list of available licenses. A question I often get asked is what is this SD-WAN license and how did I use it? There are two components to Citrix NetScaler SD-WAN: WAN Optimization and Virtual WAN.   WAN Optimization has been a part of the Citrix product portfolio for years, since the acquisition of Orbital Data in 2006. It is basically a network optimization device that provides QoS functionality. The tec... read more.

• December 21, 2017

By Ken Phelan, Posted in AppDev, Infrastructure, Security, Storage, Virtualization

Recently back from AWS:ReInvent, I’m still processing all the data. AWS is Amazon’s Web Services. Amazon is currently hosting 3 times more cloud services than their closest competitor (Azure), making them the 800 pound gorilla of cloud computing. AWS:ReInvent is the trade event they recently held in Las Vegas. Writing a blog helps me process, so here’s my blog about the show. Thanks for helping me process. First of all, ReInvent is huge. Content was being delivered in three different hote... read more.

• December 05, 2017

By Tom Stanley, Posted in AppDev, Infrastructure, Virtualization

Machine Learning is a broad concept covering algorithms that can receive input data and use statistical analysis to predict an output value within an acceptable range. It analyzes past data to predict future data and to provide context for the current values. In a sense, the machine has learned how this metric “behaves” and can put parameters around the current value (standard deviation, probability bands, etc.), adding knowledge that isn’t obvious if all you have is the single, current me... read more.

• November 17, 2017

By Tom Stanley, Posted in AppDev, Infrastructure, Security, Virtualization

The tech news has been abuzz recently with stories about how machine learning is making impressive strides in areas like autonomous vehicles, face recognition, and language translation. You can now be automatically tagged in Facebook photos of events you don’t even remember attending. But, while these are impressive achievements that may enhance some of your personal experiences, they have little bearing on your business. You might be surprised to find out these are just some of the more exciting appl... read more.

• November 10, 2017