Getting Started with NVIDIA Virtual GPU (vGPU) Software 8.0 for Citrix Hypervisor (XenServer) 8.0 with Windows Server 2019!

If you've been following my blog posts over the last couple weeks, you have probably seen two major products have released to web, one shortly after the other. Here are two of my more recent posts: NVIDIA Virtual GPU Software v8.0 Just Released! Now Supporting Windows 10 1809 and Windows Server 2019! - Dated April 16th, 2019 Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer) 8.0 Just Released! Now Supporting Windows Server 2019! - Dated April 25th, 2019 As you can see from the dates on these two blog posts, XenServer 8.0 was released within two weeks of NVIDIA vGPU Software v8.0. Many of us in the Citrix/NVIDIA community were left wondering if this [...]

Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer) 8.0 Just Released! Now Supporting Windows Server 2019!

As you may have seen, Citrix just released their latest and greatest Hypervisor (formerly XenServer) version 8.0 to web!! As the version number indicates, this is a MAJOR RELEASE. While there are a lot of awesome new features in this release, I primarily wanted to write a blog post to highlight the fact that this is the first release of Citrix Hypervisor that officially supports Windows Server 2019! That's awesome. This has been long awaited by many Citrix Hypervisor (aka XenServer) fans like me, and I am stoked to give it a whirl! As with previous releases, Citrix Hypervisor still [...]

What I Learned from CXD-252 Moving to the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Service with Microsoft Azure Course

It's not every day I get an opportunity to take an official in-person or virtual classroom lecture and lab course! It's quite easy to get busy working and consulting in the field with clients, that official classroom based training takes a backseat. So, when the opportunity arose to take a five-day online class and knock out a new requirement for my early days Citrix partnership, I was excited to see what new things I might learn. While this course is not brand new (it released in early 2018), it has been well updated and stays somewhat current with the changes [...]

Just in time for the New Year, Citrix Chained Reboot Scripts now support Citrix Cloud and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (CVAD) 7 1811!

The end of the year always comes a time of reflection and planning. As I look into the future projects I am embarking on, I realized that it has now been more than 8 years since my first Citrix Chained Reboot script was released to the web in 2010! This is pretty awesome to reflect, seeing that this was one of the first community resources that encouraged me to launch my first blog site. Now, time for some updates... As more clients begin moving their control plane to Citrix Cloud, I felt it was appropriate to do some testing and [...]

Is Getting Started with Windows Server 2019 and Citrix Cloud Apps and Desktops Service Even Easier? Let’s Have a Look…

Yesterday I wrote a blog post, which you can find here, talking about Windows Server 2019 with Citrix Apps and Desktops 7 1808 (Current Release), which received a bit of buzz online. One online protagonist (who shall remain nameless) reached out to see if Citrix Cloud Apps and Desktops Service with Windows Server 2019 worked as advertised, and was just as easy to implement. To which my thought was, I don't see why not, Citrix Cloud is Agile, DevOps oriented, evergreen and even more leading edge in the development cycles than its on-prem brethren, it should be a snap! Then [...]

With Windows Server 2019, Getting Started with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Has Never Been Easier! Here’s How…

Introduction and Overview Microsoft Windows Server 2019 General Availability (GA) released on October 2nd 2018. In this blog post, I'll show how getting started Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops has never been easier! If you're not familiar, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is the rebranding of XenApp and XenDesktop, Citrix flagship product for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Remote Desktop Services (RDS) deployments. In a production deployment, you may decide to break up the logical components of the Citrix architecture, as demonstrated in the Technical Overview on Citrix Product Documentation: In this blog post, I'll demonstrate how easy it is [...]

Installation and Configuration of VMware Horizon 7 for NVIDIA GRID and Blast Extreme!

Yesterday VMware released to web Horizon 7, which will likely be the most significant product launch for their End User Computing portfolio this year. Along with Horizon 7 come a number of very exciting new features that have been outlined in great detail in the following blogs: What's New With VMware Horizon 7 Introducing True SSO (Single Sign-On) in VMware Horizon 7 Network Ports Diagram Updated for Horizon 7 Taking a Closer Look at Horizon 7: Desktop & App Virtualization Reimagined VMware Horizon Blast Extreme Acceleration with NVIDIA GRID VMware Instant Clone Technology for Just-In-Time Desktop Delivery in Horizon 7 [...]

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 [...]

Free MDT Tools and PowerShell Scripts to Fully Automate the Deployment and Configuration of Hyper-V Server 2016, Failover Clustering, and Storage Spaces Direct for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure!

In the previous blog post I demonstrated how to build a proof of concept environment using Windows Server 2016 with Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct using virtual machines on VMware vSphere. Expanding on the concepts that I covered in the previous post, I'm going to show you how to fully automate the installation and configuration process using Microsoft's free hypervisor and deployment software, namely Hyper-V Server 2016 and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 Update 1. If you follow the steps in this post, at the end you will have a fully automated, entirely free Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform including shared storage [...]

Introduction and Evaluation of Windows Server 2016 TP4 Hyper-V using Storage Spaces Direct for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

This is a two part series. To read the second post, click here. A couple years ago Microsoft released a new feature in Windows Server called Storage Spaces. From the customers that I work with, the feature has not been widely adopted, but has attracted much interest from Microsoft shops, particularly those looking to leverage for Hyper-V SMB storage or for scale-out private clouds. I suspect this is mostly due to one of the original limitations of Storage Spaces, requiring all hosts in the cluster to see the local storage, either directly or through JBOD SAS expanders, which are not [...]

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