Provisioning Services Archives | Page 2 of 3

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 Dane Young, MBA|January 12th, 2015|Citrix|2 Comments

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 Dane Young, MBA|November 24th, 2014|Citrix, HPE, Microsoft|1 Comment

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 [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|November 24th, 2014|Citrix, HPE, Microsoft|2 Comments

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 [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|November 24th, 2014|Citrix, HPE, Microsoft|4 Comments

HP Discover 2014 Presentation TB3997 – Make your workforce more productive: Get the right solution, right now, for your mobile workers with HP ConvergedSystem for Client Virtualization

I recently presented a joint-session with HP and Tony Sanchez at Discover 2014 (TB3997) in Las Vegas (http://h30614.www3.hp.com/Discover). Below is the description of the session with exported images from the slide deck. Speakers: Travis Kuter, EG Alliance Manager, HP (www.hp.com) Tony Sanchez (@tonysanchez_ctx), Solutions Architect, Citrix Systems (www.citrix.com) Dane Young (@youngtech), Solutions Architect, Entisys Solutions (www.entisys.com) TB3997: Make your workforce more productive: Get the right solution, right now, for your mobile workers with HP ConvergedSystem for Client Virtualization Compute from anywhere. This is how workers get their jobs done today. Come to this session and talk to the experts from Citrix, HP, and [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|June 11th, 2014|Citrix, General Technology, VMware|0 Comments

Citrix Synergy 2014 Presentation SYN257 – The sky’s the limit with Moonshot! Insider information on implementing XenDesktop on HP’s revolutionary platform

I recently presented a session at Citrix Synergy 2014 SYN257 (http://www.citrixsynergy.com). Below is the description of the session with the attachments and images from the slide deck. Speaker Dane Young (@youngtech), Solutions Architect, Entisys Solutions (www.entisys.com) SYN257: The sky's the limit with Moonshot! Insider information on implementing XenDesktop on HP's revolutionary platform In 2013, HP began a journey to revolutionize the cloud, big data, social and mobility landscape with a new class of servers: Project Moonshot. The game has now changed with a focus on hosted desktop infrastructure (HDI), made possible with AMD x86 Accelerated Processing Unit (APU)-based cartridges. These cartridges [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|May 8th, 2014|Citrix, General Technology|14 Comments

GPU Tech Conference (GTC) 2014 Presentation – If You Build It, Will They Come? Better Question Is, Will They Stay?

I was recently asked to present an session at the GPU Tech Conference 2014, sponsored by NVIDIA (http://www.gputechconf.com). Below is the description of the session with the attachments and images from the slide deck. Click here to listen to the 30 minute recorded session online: http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2014/video/S4948-virtual-development-lifecycle.mp4 Speaker Dane Young (@youngtech), Solutions Architect, Entisys Solutions (www.entisys.com) Building on S4726 (Intro to Virtualization) and S4783 (Virtual is Better than Physical), this session will take the audience through the most crucial phases of the development lifecycle: Pilot, Production Build, and Roll-out. Regardless of your motivations and business drivers to virtualize, if users don't catch [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|March 26th, 2014|Citrix, General Technology, VMware|1 Comment

Scale-Out File Server Role and Citrix Provisioning Services vDisk Stores: My Thoughts and Recommendations

Updated: The focus and root cause in this blog post has changed since I initially wrote it. There are tons of good nuggets in the first section, so I decided to leave them so readers could follow my troubleshooting logic... Over the last couple months I've been playing and working extensively with Windows Server 2012 R2. Citrix's release of XenDesktop 7.1 and PVS 7.1 added full support for Windows Server 2012 R2, so I figured it was time to re-evaluate my current standards and deployment preferences around XenDesktop, Provisioning Services, etc. In my current setup, I'm using a CIFS Store [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|January 4th, 2014|Citrix|13 Comments

Missing ICA Session Performance Counters on XenDesktop VDA

I've not been able to nail down why the "ICA Session" performance counters are missing on several of my XenDesktop pools. Digging around I only found resolution for XenApp servers (CTX127151), and the DLL file is not in the same location for XenDesktop. Symptoms On XenDesktop virtual desktops the Performance Counter for ICA Session might be removed or not registered. This can have an adverse effect on the operation of tools and processes which rely on these performance counters, such as HDX Monitor for XenDesktop, Director, and EdgeSight System Monitoring tools. Resolution To resolve the issue, re-register the ICA Session Performance Counters by [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|December 26th, 2013|Citrix|1 Comment

Creating Provisioning Services & XenDesktop Virtual Desktops on Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V using PowerShell!

Click to download: WS2012_HyperV_PVS_XenDesktop_StreamedVM_Setup_Wizard.ps1 I was recently asked to do a hypervisor performance comparison using LoginVSI against Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V 2 and the newly released Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V 3. For this scenario we would need to spin up a number of virtual desktops on Hyper-V 2.0 and Hyper-V 3.0 using Citrix Provisioning Services and Citrix XenDesktop for the connection broker. This was a very exciting project for me, but seeing that Windows Server 2012 is not yet supported for use with PVS or XenDesktop, I had to be a bit creative in the virtual machine creation process. [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|September 8th, 2012|Citrix, Microsoft|8 Comments