Articles In Virtualization

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Infrastructure, Security, Virtualization

2016 was a tough year for celebrities and not an altogether great year for IT. I’m going to break from my normal annual predictions format and cover two things as we start 2017. I’m going to talk about lessons we need to learn from 2016 and things we should look forward to in 2017. 2016’s Tough Love Weak IT = Weak Cyber. For a number of years, IT budgets have been shrinking on the whole while cyber budgets increase. This is not working. Cyber is too dependent on solid IT operations to be... read more.

• January 05, 2017

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Infrastructure, Virtualization

Traditionally, to take advantage of SmartAccess or VPN, along with the new RDP Proxy functionality, Citrix Access Gateway Universal licenses were required. Standard and Enterprise appliances included 5 CAG Universal licenses for testing. Otherwise, ICA Only licensing was included to allow remote access to Citrix but no SmartAccess functionality. The platinum appliances included 100 licenses. If you are a Citrix XA or XD Platinum customer, the CAG Universal licenses were included for as many XA/XD licenses t... read more.

• October 11, 2016

By Stephen Kilcoyne, Posted in Virtualization

CITRIX SYNERGY 2016, Las Vegas, May 24, 2016 — M7 Global Partners, a consortium of leading U.S. IT consulting firms widely recognized for their commitment to serving as trusted advisors in the deployment of Citrix solutions, will showcase their technical expertise and demonstrate how organizations can leverage advanced IT infrastructure, virtualization and cloud solutions to solve their most pressing business challenges, this week at Citrix Synergy 2016 in Las Vegas. Representing M7 Global Partners o... read more.

• May 25, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Virtualization

There’s a lot of interest in new converged hardware platforms for VDI. Converged platforms present a scalable architecture where you grow capacity by adding devices that provide both compute and storage capabilities. This would be in comparison to more traditional architectures. People used to just buy servers with disk in them. These were fine as far as they went, but over time, it was a hassle to manage each individual box. Along came storage area networks and servers were relegated to providing the compu... read more.

• April 04, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Virtualization

“We are at the beginning of the age of planetary computing. Billions of people will be wirelessly interconnected, and the only way to achieve that kind of massive scale usage is by massive scale, brutally efficient cloud-based infrastructure.” - Dan Farber, Editor in Chief CNET News What if the cloud really doesn’t change everything about computing from this point forward? Business managers love the idea of the cloud. IT has always been a bit of a pain. Wouldn’t it be great if they could spend less and ge... read more.

• February 10, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Virtualization

There are a lot of traditions surrounding the New Year. Some people make resolutions. Many people start a new fitness regimen. In IT, we make predictions. Here are some of mine for 2016: Big Data for Business. Big Data and tools like Splunk are great and as they’ve been introduced to technology people, they naturally see ways that these tools can provide value to IT. People are waking up to the real value of these tools – business data. If you’re using Splunk to manage IT stuff, get in front of it as a b... read more.

• January 06, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Virtualization

The future of virtual desktops seems a little murky right now. In 2008 Gartner predicted that 40% of desktops would be virtualized by 2010. They continued to predict this target over the next several years and were still maintaining as late as 2012 that 40% of corporate desktops would be virtualized by 2013. After several years of stretching for this goal, in 2012 the rubber band seemed to snap. Brian Madden, one of the top VDI pundits, published his book “The VDI Delusion”. The book seemed to claim that... read more.

• December 04, 2015

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Virtualization

My daughter Joyce is graduating this week with a Master’s Degree in Occupational Therapy (#joytheot). Joyce has spent some time educating me on Occupational Therapy, and one of the concepts that I really like is OT’s position on Client Centered Care. I think there is a message there for us in the IT industry. Client Centered Care starts with getting its goals directly from the client. If I was to be in some kind of accident, the healthcare industry would work to put me back together. They would try to re... read more.

• June 02, 2015

By Hank Smith, Posted in Virtualization

Last week I had the privilege to attend Citrix Synergy 2015 down in Orlando, FL. In this blog I wanted to review some the key announcements Citrix made during the keynote. XenApp 6.5 Lifecycle Citrix loves XenApp, so much so that they extended the lifecycle for XenApp 6.5 to December 31, 2017. However, there is a catch; the extended date is only for customers that remain current in the Software Maintenance or Subscription Advantage and Technical Support programs. Otherwise the end of maintenance (EOM)... read more.

• May 18, 2015

By Hank Smith, Posted in Virtualization

What is vGPU? vGPU provides the ability to virtualize the GPU of a graphics card, specifically an NVIDIA K card. Most applications in VDI environments do not require a GPU; however, for CAD, engineering, and medical applications, GPUs are typically required. For more information on vGPU take a look at this article. Citrix Citrix recently announced vGPU support for mixed environments - Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp on the front-end and VMware vSphere on the back end. The requirements for vGPU are VMware... read more.

• March 30, 2015