Entering the Atomic Age, the Intel Nuke (NUC) that will Change Desktop Virtualization History! Powered by MaximumBit Desktop365

Over the last several months I have had the honor of evaluating a killer new solution that will forever change the Desktop Virtualization industry! The Intel NUC (pronounced nuke) small form factor is very disruptive and innovative, but it's the power of ViewSonic's distribution and MaximumBit Desktop365 that will truly make this a game changer. Think of this as VDI Out-of-the-Box (not VDI-in-a-Box)! The automation and management platform that MaximumBit built enables this tiny  device to support a full Desktop Virtualization solution in less than an hour from unboxing, hopefully opening up new markets to the value of Citrix products. [...]

By |May 12th, 2015|Citrix|1 Comment
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Kicking into Overdrive: Introducing HyperScale, powered by HP and Atlantis USX!

Over the last several years there have been a number of different technology innovations that have truly captivated my attention. Atlantis Computing’s ILIO product evolving into USX Software Defined Storage (SDS) is definitely one of these attention grabbing technologies! When I first learned about ILIO, I personally experienced the value software-based I/O acceleration and data reduction technologies can bring to Server Based Computing (SBC) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments, for both Citrix and VMware End User Computing. This was definitely game changing in the way I positioned, architected, and built SBC/VDI virtualized environments. With the evolution into USX, Atlantis [...]

By |May 5th, 2015|Atlantis Computing, Citrix, HPE, VMware|2 Comments
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Installing and Configuring Atlantis USX 2.2 for VMware vSphere and NOW Citrix XenServer!

Introduction and Overview Several months ago, I wrote a getting started guide for Installing and Configuring Atlantis USX 2.0 on VMware vSphere. Since that time, two additional releases have become available and new to USX 2.2 is the ability to manage, present, and consume storage from Citrix XenServer! Read more about the USX on XenServer announcement here. At Atlantis Connect in early February, my friend and fellow Citrix Technology Professional, Thomas Poppelgaard did a session with Mark Nijmeijer where Atlantis USX 2.2 was installed and configured on Citrix XenServer live (in beta at the time). To learn more about Atlantis Software Defined Storage and USX, visit www.atlantiscomputing.com. USX 2.2 officially released [...]

By |February 23rd, 2015|Atlantis Computing, Citrix, VMware|2 Comments
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Creating a Bulletproof Citrix Licensing Server Infrastructure using NetScaler Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) and CtxLicChk.ps1 PowerShell Scripts

Click Accept to Download the Configuration Guide, Visio, and CtxLicChk.ps1 PowerShell Script  I Accept the Terms and Conditions provided on the Copyright and Disclaimer page. Click to Download the Configuration Guide, Visio, and CtxLicChk.ps1 PowerShell Script from ShareFile.com I was recently doing Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop design workshops with Nick Rintalan and Brendan Lin from Citrix Consulting Services (CCS), along with my colleague Victor DiMascio from Entisys. As we were discussing some of the intricate details of the architecture decisions, we touched on a topic that has stumped many a Citrix architect for the last several years (myself included).  The underlying question [...]

By |February 11th, 2015|Citrix|28 Comments
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Citrix WorkspacePod, an HP Moonshot Architect’s Perspective

TLDR: Citrix WorkspacePod summarized in one word: Bundling. For about the last year and a half, I have been affectionately called Mr. Moonshot among my peers and colleagues.  Thanks everyone, you're too kind! Naturally, at Citrix Summit when one of the big keynote announcements on WorkspacePod surfaced, I started getting a lot of questions. I'm no expert on DataON, so I can't comment on that particular piece. For all I knew, DataON was a commodity/whitebox storage company, and have never even really looked into their Cluster-in-a-Box (CiB) product family. Who knew! Enough about DataON, that's not the focus of this [...]

By |January 23rd, 2015|Citrix, General Technology, HPE, Microsoft|5 Comments
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XenServer 6.5 Dynamic Memory and NVIDIA GRID vGPU? Now Fixed in 6.5! Go For It!

Earlier this year I wrote a blog post highlighting an issue that a coworker ran into with XenServer 6.2 Dynamic Memory Control (DMC) and NVIDIA GRID vGPU. You can find that article here: XenServer Dynamic Memory and NVIDIA GRID vGPU, Don’t Do It! Talking with a couple Citrix and NVIDIA folks including Rachel Berry, Jason Southern, and David Cottingham, I have been informed that this was fixed and validated with the XenServer 6.5 release (aka Creedence). Considering XenServer 6.5 has officially released for web today, it's safe to say DMC is now good to go, provided you're running XenServer 6.5! [...]

By |January 13th, 2015|Citrix, NVIDIA|1 Comment
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Citrix and Atlantis Partner Together to Deliver the First Hyper-Converged Solutions for XenServer 6.5! All-Flash No Less!

Following the heels of the Sanbolic acquisition announcement, today was yet another big day for Citrix in the world of Software Defined Storage! This announcements has more to do with Citrix partnerships, and what they were able to achieve working with one of their longest standing partners in the storage capacity and performance optimization space, Atlantis Computing. This announcement is near and dear to me as I was on staff with Atlantis in August at VMworld when USX 2.0 was launched and awarded Best of VMworld for 2014. Both of these announcements highlight the importance of Software Defined Storage, although [...]

By |January 13th, 2015|Atlantis Computing, Citrix|1 Comment
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Hot off the Presses: Citrix Acquires Sanbolic, Creators of Melio FS. What’s Next?

The news is out! Citrix has acquired Boston based Software Defined Storage (SDS) company Sanbolic. Click here to read the full press release. Several months back Eva Helan (Co-founder, president and COO of Sanbolic) put me in touch and I had a call with fellow geek Andy Melmed (VP, Enterprise Architecture). Folks who have been in the Citrix space a while know Andy, but this was my first time chatting with him. Among other things, Andy told me a little bit about his history of working at Ardence (pre-Citrix acquisition) and later on the ISV certification team at Citrix (i.e. [...]

By |January 12th, 2015|Citrix|2 Comments
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XenServer 6.2 Dynamic Memory and NVIDIA GRID vGPU, Don’t Do It!

Updated 2015.1.13: XenServer 6.5 (aka Creedence) has been released to web and this has been resolved in this release. Click here to read my updated article for DMC and vGPU on XenServer 6.5 A couple months back I was working with a colleague of mine (Richard Hoffman on LinkedIn or Twitter) on a blue screen issue he identified on a fairly up-to-date XenServer 6.2, XenDesktop, NVIDIA GRID K1/K2 and vGPU deployment. In his case, he was experiencing crashes related to dxgmms1.sys, nvlddmkm.sys, and various other XenServer errors: xenopsd internal error: Device.Ioemu_failed("vgpu exited unexpectedly") xenopsd internal error: Failure("Couldn't lock GPU with device ID [...]

By |January 2nd, 2015|Citrix, NVIDIA|6 Comments
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Using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 to Deploy Windows 7 XenDesktop Master to HP Moonshot (m700, m710) Part 1

Last week I was at the Citrix Technology Professionals (CTP) meetup at Citrix’s Santa Clara office and was having a discussion about Moonshot with Aaron Parker. Aaron is commonly regarded as the master of App-V and MDT, so naturally he was curious to see if I had yet used MDT to deploy the Windows Operating Systems to HP Moonshot. If you’ve not had a change to see Aaron present this content, I highly recommend you watch his Synergy/E2E session or review his content on ‘Hands off my gold image!’ MDT in fact is what I use for all my EUC [...]

By |November 24th, 2014|Citrix, HPE, Microsoft|1 Comment
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