The First Commercially Available, High Performance, Multi-Monitor Raspberry Pi for Citrix! Featuring Raspberry Pi Zero!

Last year, I showed how an inexpensive $77 endpoint could be used for Citrix and VMware virtualized environments, to drive a single 4K display. You can find that video here and full blog post here. Over the last couple years there has been a lot of buzz and excitement around the Raspberry Pi, and its application and use within a Citrix environment as a high-performance endpoint, for its low price point. As I had talked with customers, many had become disinterested, due to its inherent limitation as a single monitor (only) solution. A multi-monitor Raspberry Pi option had been made [...]

My Presentation at the Inaugural Portland Citrix User Group Community (CUGC) Meetup – FSLogix, Windows 10 and Office 365!

Last Thursday on August 31st, I had the honor of presenting at the inaugural Portland Citrix User Group Community (CUGC) Meetup, representing FSLogix and talking about the pains of deploying Windows 10 and Office 365. I was joined by Andy Tynes, their VP of Worldwide Sales, who presented the company overview and first couple slides. Below you will find a copy of my slide presentation from this meetup. Looking forward to presenting at many more CUGC meetups in the coming months and years! Enjoy. FSLogix Presentation for Portland CUGC - AUGUST 2017 About Me… Dane Young, MBA daneyoung.com Twitter: @youngtech Virtualization Practice Manager [...]

My Pride. My Joy. Delivered as a Service. Introducing Entisys360 Workspace Cloud!

Over the last couple months, many of you have wondered, and some of you have asked, where I've been and what I've been up to. Long story short, I've been very busy and heads down working with our incredible team at Entisys360 to build a product we are publicly announcing to the market, called our Entisys360 Workspace Cloud offering! This is our latest development to enable Desktop Transformation, through a Digital Workspace for our valued clients. It goes beyond Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), and provides a fully integrated, fully managed, Workspace-as-a-Service environment for our mid-market and enterprise clients. This [...]

The $77 Compute Stick Endpoint for Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop and VMware Horizon Virtual Desktops, that Supports 4K Displays!

Over the holiday, I gifted a neat little compute stick for a family member, called an ASUS VivoStick PC (VS10). This gift was purchased as an inexpensive home theater PC, as it had Windows 10 and all the supported codecs for Audio/Video/Pictures and could run Plex Media Server. I originally had purchased a Roku 4 device to give, but in testing, I found out that it didn't support all of the video codecs that would be needed. So, I decided to throw in the towel and buy a full Windows PC for best long-term use, as that's what I've been [...]

Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop 7.11 Proof of Concept Installation and Configuration using Windows Server 2016 and NVIDIA GRID K2 GPU Cards!

During Microsoft Ignite this week in Atlanta, Georgia, Microsoft announced the launch of Windows Server 2016 with volume licensing versions being available for download mid-October. This was a bit disappointing, as I was hoping to have final Windows Server 2016 ISOs available this week in the Volume License Service Center and MSDN libraries. Oh well, looks like we'll have to wait another couple weeks…While the full licensed products are not quite available, Microsoft did release Windows Server 2016 Evaluation. You'll note, this build is no longer considered Tech Preview, so it should be fairly close to the GA which will be released [...]

NVIDIA GRID Days 2016 Recap, Key Takeaways, Technical Deep Dive and Lessons Learned!

Last week in Santa Clara, I was honored by NVIDIA to be one of thirteen professionals to join NVIDIA enterprise graphics teams for the first ever GRID Days event! GRID Days was a fun packed two day event networking with industry professionals, and getting an inside look into the NVIDIA enterprise graphics teams, namely GRID, Quadro, and Tesla. During this event we had exclusive access to the testing and development teams, product management and marketing, executive sponsors, along with management and support teams. Wow! Much of the roadmap and content required that all professionals sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), so [...]

Installation and Configuration of Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop 7.8 AppDisks and AppDNA for a Basic Proof of Concept

I am really excited to see Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.8 has released to web! With this release, there are too many exciting new features to detail out here, instead just take a look at my buddy Thomas Poppelgaard's detailed list here. I've summarized some of the components I'm most excited about below… What's New in 7.8 (More details…): AppDisks has finally shipped!  Woohoo!! Full integration in Studio for AppDNA and AppDisks.  More details… Enhanced support for Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V)! Now there is no longer a dependency on the management and publishing servers in studio. Simply point Studio to [...]

Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) 7.6 vs. 7.7, VHD vs. VHDX and Scale-Out File Server Update

A couple years ago I was troubleshooting through a Versioning and Merge VHD issue with Provisioning Services (PVS) 7.1 and Windows Scale-Out File Server (SOFS), which resulted in my recommendation to create a Maintenance store for vDisk Versioning. I am happy to see in the last two years this has completely improved and dare I say is fully resolved, specifically with the recent release of PVS 7.7. In this blog post, I'm going to share a little bit of testing data from my experience with PVS 7.7, along with a couple recommendations. Let's get started! A couple notes about PVS [...]

Citrix XenApp XenDesktop 7.6 Feature Pack 3 with Windows 10 VDA and Thinwire Compatibility Mode!

I recorded a short video demonstrating the latest innovations from Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.6 Feature Pack 3 (FP3), Windows 10 VDI and Thinwire Compatibility Mode (aka Thinwire+ or Project Snowball)! Check it out and let me know what you think! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg-szSun1nU&feature=youtu.be In this video, Dane Young, Citrix Technology Professional (CTP) and Virtualization Practice Manager at Entisys Solutions demonstrates the user experience of Citrix XenApp XenDesktop 7.6 Feature Pack 3 with Windows 10 Virtual Delivery Agent. Also shown in this video is the new Thinwire Compatibility Mode (aka Thinwire+ or Project Snowball)! Amazing user experience from a Surface Pro [...]

Integration, Implementation and Performance Guide for Unidesk for vSphere with Atlantis HyperScale and USX! Featuring XenDesktop and AppSense

As mentioned in a previous blog post, May 2015 Atlantis Computing released an integrated hardware/software Hyper-Converged Infrastructure platform called HyperScale. As a refresher for those not as familiar with Atlantis, here's a high level overview of their current three platforms (ILIO, USX, and HyperScale): Since HyperScale launched I've had many customers and colleagues inquire about cross product integration with other End User Computing software solutions including Unidesk, View/XenDesktop, AppSense/RES, and others. This post will focus primarily on Atlantis and Unidesk integration, notably the thought leaders for layering technologies as we know them today. If you're not familiar with Unidesk, here's a [...]