Articles In Infrastructure

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

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 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