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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 to Deploy Windows 7 XenDesktop Master to HP Moonshot (m700, m710) Part 2

Back to Part 1: Overview and Windows 7 Image Customization Creating an MDT Application to Install AMD Catalyst Control Center Next, let’s create an application package to install the AMD Catalyst Control Center. To do this, we need to download the latest from http://www.hp.com/support/moonshot/1500chassis-software-download: Run the .exe to extract to a directory (cancel installation after extraction). For my environment, I’ll use ‘C:\imageprep\14.301.1001-140915a-176768C-HP-WHQL’ this is just a temporary directory that we’ll import into MDT: In the MDT console, right click Applications and click New Application: Select Application with Source Files: Type AMD for the Publisher and Catalyst Control Center for the [...]

Using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 to Deploy Windows 7 XenDesktop Master to HP Moonshot (m700, m710) Part 3

Back to Part 2: Creating MDT Applications and the Moonshot Task Sequence Installing and Configuring Windows Deployment Services for Unattended PXE Now for a little piece that I didn’t previously document in my MDT posts…Configuring Windows Deployment Services. Seeing that Moonshot nodes don’t have physical or virtual optical drives, we need PXE boot to get the devices on the network and connected to MDT to install the image.  This process is actually pretty straight forward, let’s get started… Open Server Manager and click Manage in the top right, then Add Roles and Features: Click Next, Next, Next. Under the Server Roles [...]