Blog

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 Timothy Karl, Posted in

One of the most important responsibilities for a Citrix Administrator is to maintain the health of Citrix Virtual Desktop Agents (VDA). Registration and session launch issues can lead to unavailable desktops, disconnected sessions, and unusable environments. When virtual desktops are not available, it leads to a loss of employee productivity and incurred costs to the business. To help maintain the health of Citrix VDAs, Citrix now offers a VDA Health Check as part of their Smart Check toolset. Smart Check... read more.

• April 12, 2018

By Eduardo Blanco, CISSP, Posted in Security

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect May 25, 2018, and much like in the months approaching Y2K nearly two decades ago, many organizations are still scrambling to fully understand its impact, relevance, and scope. GDPR is a unified set of laws that create stricter regulations for EU Subject data along with steeper penalties for non-compliance than the previous EU Data Privacy Directive it replaces. Some organizations may have to make sweeping changes to how they process and... read more.

• February 08, 2018

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

From Dark Reading on 1/24/18: Intel provided another update on advice for patching: https://newsroom.intel.com/news/root-cause-of-reboot-issue-identified-updated-guidance-for-customers-and-partners/ From Dark Reading on 1/23/18: Intel Says to Stop Applying Problematic Spectre, Meltdown Patch Cause of reboot problems with its Broadwell and Haswell microprocessor patching now identified, the chipmaker said. Intel is now advising its customers and partners to halt the installation of patches for its Bro... read more.

• January 24, 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 Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finalized its Digital Identity Guidelines in December 2017 and published the following four documents: NIST Special Publication 800-63-3, Digital Identity Guidelines Presents an executive summary of the series along with a glossary. NIST Special Publication 800-63A, Digital Identity Guidelines, Enrollment and Identity Proofing Provides requirements for enrollment and identity proofing of applicants for access to resources at each Identity Assuran... read more.

• January 12, 2018

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

Earlier this week, the public was apprised of a major hardware vulnerability in Intel, AMD and ARM. This vulnerability affects practically every computer and mobile device in use today.   First and foremost, you should patch all devices up to the current releases to ensure you receive the latest protection combined with Endpoint Detection and Response software. The articles linked below present the information in detail.   The following Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) are associate... read more.

• January 05, 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