My Entisys360 VMworld 2016 Update Webinar with Bryan Zanoli!

At the end of August, along with 23,000 others, I attended VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas. While we were in Las Vegas, along with my EUC Podcast co-hosts, we recorded a Live from VMworld Podcast, Episode #10, you can find here. This year had a lot of good content, the breakouts and show floor was buzzing, and it was a great time networking with colleagues and customers. Earlier this week, with one of our Principal Architects, Bryan Zanoli, I presented on a VMworld 2016 Update Webinar.  You can find more details and the recording for the webinar below!  Enjoy. Did [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The best Software Defined Storage and All-Flash Hyper-Converged Infrastructure platform for vSphere and XenServer just got better! Announcing Atlantis USX 3.0!

It's been a whirlwind year for Software Defined Storage player Atlantis Computing with USX and All-Flash Hyper-Converged Infrastructure platform HyperScale. In fact, it was only a year ago that USX 2.0 was announced and received Best of VMworld 2014 for Storage and Backup products.  If you look at the progression it's quite impressive what Atlantis has accomplished from a product and packaging perspective in just the last year, including adding XenServer, which is huge for customers doing End User Computing from Citrix. As we move toward the end of the year, I'm happy to share the Atlantis USX 3.0 announcement and the new [...]

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. [...]

PernixData FVP 2.5 – Quick and Painless Host-Side Read and Write SAN or NAS Storage Performance Acceleration

A year or two ago I started keeping tabs on PernixData, a Silicon Valley based storage performance acceleration startup, around the time well known and regarded industry expert Frank Denneman joined as their Chief Technologist. Frank joined several other former VMware elite including Poojan Kumar and Satyam Vaghani, the great minds behind VMware data products and creator of the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS). With such an all-star former VMware team, I knew PernixData would be bound for greatness, but I have just recently started evaluating their FVP products on my own (starting with FVP 2.0). FVP 2.5 released a [...]

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