My workspace journey
On many moonless evenings, I will be outside, next to my telescope snapping pictures of clusters, nebula and galaxies for my astrophotography hobby. But there is a balance of creating a great image vs just wasting time. Once it gets past 2am or the temperature drops below 0 Fahrenheit, I’m done. But do I have… Continue reading XenApp Best Practice #2: Optimize
In the Mobilizing Windows applications for 500 users design guide, we made the recommendation to allocate 8vCPUs for each virtual XenDesktop 7 App Edition host (formerly known as XenApp). Spreading this out across a server with two Intel Xeon E5-2690 @2.9GHz processors and 192 GB of RAM, we were yielding about 200 users per physical… Continue reading Sizing XenDesktop 7 App Edition VMs
We get so excited with the thought of VDI, we often forget to take a step back and focus on what we are trying to do. Here is a recent example… We need to find a way to get an application to our users. Our first problem is that many of our users are not… Continue reading Just the Apps
Control, control, you must learn control! – Yoda The control layer is about creating a single, cohesive foundation for the solution that supports the user-layers (users, access and resources). You can NOT do the control layer if you haven’t defined your user layer, access layer and resource layer. The control layer of the XenDesktop 7… Continue reading Control layer in the XenDesktop 7 Blueprint
Users Access Resources The Resources layer is the next stage of the blueprint. Resources are the desktops and applications that we want to deliver to each user. This is also where many people get stuck because the perception is that there are a lot of options. There can be a lot of option until you… Continue reading Extending the blueprint to focus on your resource layer
Based on the XenDesktop 7 Blueprint, we have already created a definition of our user layer. The next step is to define how users will access their environment. Just like a house, you have doors and locks. In order to gain entry, you have to have the right keys for the right door. Defining the… Continue reading Blueprint for Accessing your desktops and apps
The users matter first. This is why we have a blueprint for XenDesktop 7 because we want to avoid starting wrong. We want to make sure that the first thing we focus on are the users. Think about it this way, when building a house, one of the first things you have to figure out… Continue reading Begin your XenDesktop blueprint with your users
Here is a little secret… Most XenDesktop environments are extremely similar. In fact, if you ignore the numerous hardware combinations out there, the similarities increase greatly. You have user groups (some internal and some external) that need access to some type of resource, whether it be a desktop or an application, which is supported on… Continue reading Do you have your XenDesktop 7 Blueprint?
Test your Citrix muscle… True or False: Always use Provisioning Services Answer: False There has always been this aura around Machine Creation Services in that it could not hold a candle to Provisioning Services; that you would be completely insane to implement this feature in any but the simplest/smallest deployments. How did we get to… Continue reading True or False: Always use Provisioning Services
