Considerations for Cloud Desktops – Skillset


Many moons ago when I first got my driver’s license, I remember driving down the road in the small town I grew up in. All of the sudden, the engine dies. Luckily, I was able to coast into a parking lot. I parked the car and popped the hood. I’m not sure what I expected… Continue reading Considerations for Cloud Desktops – Skillset

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Bandwidth


With Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 1912 achieved LTSR (Long Term Servicing Release).  This is the first LTSR since the 7.15 release, which was almost 3 years earlier. In 3 years, a lot has changed. The protocol had many improvements that directly impacted the user experience and bandwidth utilization. With each release, since 7.11 (2016),… Continue reading Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Bandwidth

Vertical or Horizontal Load Balancing


Three years ago, I wrote the following best practices: Virtual Apps and Desktops Best Practice #4: To manage costs, focus on the right user experience instead of the best user experience. Typically, the better something is, the more it will cost.  So you need to find that happy place where you align user experience with… Continue reading Vertical or Horizontal Load Balancing

Citrix Workspace Authentication: Federated Authentication Services


I have one primary key to let me into my house. Once I’m inside my house, I can see many resources that I might want to use like a bed, bathroom, safe, TV and a freezer. However, some of these resources are secured with a different key. I might have a code to access NetFlix.… Continue reading Citrix Workspace Authentication: Federated Authentication Services

Authentication: Push


One of my goals before the end of the year is to protect my online accounts with multi-factor authentication. I’ve been protecting many of my identities with TOTP. TOTP is a great way to add multi-factor authentication to our identity.  It adds the “something I have” to the “something I know”. However, I’m now running… Continue reading Authentication: Push

Citrix Workspace Authentication: Citrix Gateway


One of the challenges with using cloud services is getting the same experience you had in an on-premises deployment. For the past 20+ years, many Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop deployments utilized a Citrix Gateway to provide an ICA proxy through the firewall. For external users, Gateway also authenticated those users. Over the years, admins… Continue reading Citrix Workspace Authentication: Citrix Gateway

SaaS and Web Apps in StoreFront


In a Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployment, many organizations use StoreFront to provide access to Windows and Linux applications and desktops.  A lesser know feature, published content, can let StoreFront publish links to SaaS and web applications in an attempt to bring all resources together into a single view. (I see the differences between… Continue reading SaaS and Web Apps in StoreFront

Logon: VM Start


Diagnosing long logon times is quite a challenge.  Citrix Director breaks our logon time down into unique phase to help focus your attention on an aspect of the entire logon process instead of logon in its entirety. Looking at my 100+ second logon time, I noticed I have a 24 second virtual machine start time. … Continue reading Logon: VM Start

Citrix VDA Performance


Winter in Minnesota.  Back the car out of my driveway, reach the road and my car immediately slides, sideways downhill.  I think I need new tires. One of the best practices I like to talk about is “Maintain, because set and forget does not work.” We all know it is important to maintain our systems,… Continue reading Citrix VDA Performance

Logon: Brokering


I just experienced a 100+ second logon time for my Virtual Apps and Desktops session. Hopefully, you are not thinking “That’s pretty fast”. If I look at the detailed breakdown of my logon time, you can see it is a mess. Something is happening with my environment to cause things to spike. I want to… Continue reading Logon: Brokering