In our post entitled “What Licenses Do I Need,” we discussed the licensing required, from both Citrix and Microsoft, for a XenApp or XenDesktop deployment. But there was still an unknown factor: When that post was published, Microsoft had recently...
Best Practices, Citrix, Cloud Computing, Virtualization
Data Gravity and Cloud Computing
Last July, Alistair Croll wrote an interesting post over at http://datagravity.org on the concept of “data gravity” – a term first coined by Dave McCrory. The concept goes like this: The speed with which information can get from where it...
Microsoft, Virtualization
Does Shared-Nothing Migration Mean the Death of the SAN?
You’ve probably heard that Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 supports what Microsoft is calling “Shared Nothing” live migration. You can see a demo of that here, in a video that was posted on a TechNet blog back in July: Now...
Citrix, Licensing, Microsoft, Virtualization
What Licenses Do I Need?
Earlier this week, I had a long discussion with a client (you know who you are) about what licenses they would need for a deployment of “zero client” devices. We’ve written a lot about Microsoft and Citrix licensing, about XenDesktop...
Best Practices, Business Practices, Citrix, Cloud Computing
It’s Been a Cloud-y Week
No, I’m not talking about the weather her in San Francisco – that’s actually been pretty good. It’s just that everywhere you look here at the Citrix Summit / Synergy conference, the talk is all about clouds - public clouds,...
Citrix, Licensing, Microsoft, Virtualization
Thin Clients vs. Cheap PCs
We have, for a long time, been fans of thin client devices. However, if you run the numbers, it turns out that thin clients may not necessarily be the most cost-effective client devices for a VDI deployment. Just before writing...
Best Practices, Citrix, Virtualization
Top 10 VDI Mistakes (According to Dan Feller)
Dan Feller is a Lead Architect with the Citrix Consulting group, and has written extensively about XenDesktop. We found his series on the top ten mistakes people make when implementing desktop virtualization to be quite enlightening. In case you missed...
Citrix, Virtualization
Machine Creation Services and KMS
We’ve written extensively here about the challenges of using Citrix Provisioning Services to provision VMs that require key activation (i.e., Vista, Win7, and Server 2008/2008R2). We publicly rejoiced when the news broke that PVS v5.6, SP1, supported both KMS and...
Backups, Business Practices, Disaster Recovery
BC – DR – BIA What Does It Mean?
Most companies instinctively know that they need to be prepared for an event that will compromise business operations, but it’s often difficult to know where to begin. We hear a lot of acronyms: “BC” (Business Continuity), “DR” (Disaster Recovery), “BIA”...
Citrix
Will My Application Work?
I've been working with Citrix products pretty much as long as there have been Citrix products, and one of the toughest questions to answer over the years has been, “Will my application run in a Citrix environment?” Often, the answer...