Citrix Synergy 2013 Keynote

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May 222013
 

The keynote kicked off this morning in Anaheim, CA at 10:08 local time.  (My comments are in parenthesis)  First up is Mark Templeton, CEO (while “Going Mobile” by The Who was played in the background).  Mark kicks off by welcoming everyone to Synergy.  He starts by reviewing Citrix Cloud Platform.  The largest of which is 40,000 servers.

Sharefile
He segues into Sharefile and how they are focusing on corporate customers.  He announce storage zones connectors.  This allows you to connect storage zones to securely share information from Sharepoint and other apps to share data.  He says it now supports Windows Azure.
Microsoft Relationship
Mark then reviews the relationship with Microsoft and all the work they are doing to integrate Server 2012 and Windows 8. (In a related twist, Microsoft is not in attendance on the vendor floor at Synergy.)
Desktop Player for Mac
He introduces Desktop Player for Mac – allows you to run Windows VM’s on a Mac (Sounds like VMware Fusion with some added features.)  They are releasing a tech preview and it will be available in the coming months.


Cisco Partnership
Mark reviews the relationship with Cisco.  The integration they have done with ISE, Nexus and Cisco ONE and UCS.  He reviews the Cisco relationship specifically around NetScaler.

Innovator Awards
Mark announces the Innovator Awards.  3 customers are reviewed in video interviews about how they are using Citrix Technology:  Miami Children’s Hospital, University of San Paulo, Brazil and ESSAR.  The winner is the University of San Paulo.
Going Mobile
Mark says he keeps hearing that customers want to mobilize their business.  What’s driving it:
  • Consumerization and BYOE (Bring your own everything)
  • Generations – The new generation is all mobile
  • Disruptions – The reality is that we are disrupted by everything going on in the world..
What we are seeing is that the magnitude of the disruptions is increasing as well as the velocity.  Things like Tele-working, global expansion, offshoring, re-orgs, acquisitions.  Mark states that he was talking to a CIO who told him that “DOS” is the new strategy.  “Don’t Own Stuff”.  Another CIO’s stragety was “MAC”.  “Moves Adds Changes” – becoming efficient at moves, adds and changes.  He sees 3 big things happening: Workflow Transformation, Workplace Reinvention and Workforce Engagement.  Mobile Workstyles are the answer.  Start with apps and desktops that are most common in the enterprise.  Most of those still run on Windows.

XenDesktop 7
Mark announces the release of XenDesktop 7.  Citrix had to rethink the FlexCast management architecture.  Here’s the changes:
  • 1 package to download – as few as 8 clicks for setup.
  • 2 consoles – XD Studio and XD Director.  Studio for configuring, Director for monitoring and support.  HDX Insight ingrates to give insight to the HDX connections being made (to some amazing detail).
  • 3 manual tasks:
    •  workload provisioning – provision more efficiently
    • app by app publishing – publish many at a time
    • Windows app migration – analyze apps
HDX Mobile
HD video on any device.  100% increase in WAN efficiency.  smooth scrolling, natural gesturing and popup keyboard controls.  Supports native mobile functions (GPS, sensors and cameras).
Mobile SDK for Windows Apps
Announces the ability to create a front end for mobile to existing windows apps.  (Allows developers to make apps more touch friendly.)
Demo
Mark introduces Brad Peterson, Chief Demo Officer.  Brad opens XenDesktop Studio.  He walks thru the wizard to provision new applications in a “Bulk Publish” (very quick and easy).  Now he’s going to provision new desktops.  He walks thru that wizard (also very quick) that provision new desktops for user.  He switches to Director, which is browser based.  He starts by talking a look at trends and how many connections are being made.  He shows the new network tab and picks Mark’s connection.  He shows that latency is fine for his app in the datacenter but there is extra latency to the endpoint.  That is what is causing the slowdown.  He switches to an iPad Mini and shows flash video and a windows mobile video running extremely fluid to this iPad mini.  (Very impressive framerate and perfect audio sync).
Intensive Apps
He talks about the heavy use desktops.  Those with big CPU, GPU, networking and storage requirements.  “How do you cloud-enable these apps?” he asks.  He calls this extreme SaaS-ification.  He then introduces Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and Co-Founder, Nvidia. They bring Brad back out to demo nvidia’s new graphics technology.  He does a demo by running Adobe Photoshop on a iPad Mini.  He opens a photo and starts to stretch and manipulate it all with touch on the Mini.  He shows the 3D effect in photoshop and rotating the picture and the frame rate.  (Amazing demo on a Mini.  Frame rates are really good).  He then switches to a Mac running four different desktops in receiver.  One shows graphic rendering an a CAD design of an Audi R8.  Next desktop shows a video recorded in 4k and they start to edit the video.  (Completely fluid, no lag seen at all.)  Jen talks about how Nvidia created the virtualized GPU.  A normal cpu can run 1 thread, their GPU’s can run 15,000 threads.  So they created a new GPU with vitalization hardware built in.  The last demo shows Leap Motion.  This is an add-on to a laptop or desktop that let’s you use hand gestures to control instead of keyboard and mouse.  His demo shows Google Earth and how he is controlling it with just hand gestures.  Today they announce that the nvidia Virtual GPU is now integrated into XenDesktop 7.  XenDesktop 7 comes in 4 editions: VDI Edition, Enterprise Edition, Platinum Edition and App Edition.
XenApp 6.5 Feature Pack 2
Announces the availability of Feature Pack 2.  It’s features include:
     Graphics Sharing
     Mobile SDK,
     Lync 2013 support
     Seamless local app integration
     Automated P2V by AppDNA
in June they will ship XD7 and Feature Pack 2
XenMobile
It does Mobile Lifecycle Management.  Worx Enroll is the self service registration of the device.  Worx Home then controls all the mobile settings and apps.  Brad comes back out to show how it works.  He shows registering a iPhone 5 and then grabs a bunch of apps from the Store inside of Worx Home.  The apps are a mix of mobile and windows apps.  He shows the support option and how their users can do an online chat that uses GoToAssist natively.  He shows the XenMobile console.  He does a selective wipe of the device, only removing the apps that the Worx Home installed (nice demo that receives loud applause.)  XenMobile comes in the MDM Edition and Enterprise Edition and App Edition.  Shipping in June.
MDX Technology
This is managing the security and control of the apps and how they interact with each other.  It includes secure app containers, micro VPN, app specific lock, wipe, conditional access policies and federated identity and SSO.  He shows Worx Mail which is a native mail app.  WorxWeb which is a secure mobile browser.  ShareFile which provides secure file sharing.  Brad comes back out to show another demo.  He shows an app that is provided by Worx Home that only has the ability to copy data to the approved applications and not everything on the device.  He shows copying text from a business app and then tries to paste the data into a personal email.  However, there is no paste option.  The idea is to prevent data from “leaking out.”
Worx App SDK
Mark announces the Worx App SDK to Worx enable any mobile app.  This is available today.  There are over 80 Worx enabled apps.  These are available in the Worx Enabled App Gallery.
NetScaler
Mark announces that the NetScaler SDX is now open for 3rd party services.
Mark summarizes with “The power of Any”.  Work Anywhere, Made Anywhere.  When people work better, they live better.

Horizon Workspace and View Persona: They’re dating, but not married.

 Desktop Virtualization, Tips and Tricks, Troubleshooting, VDI Design  Comments Off
Apr 172013
 

Here’s what I want to do:  Login to my View desktop, create a word doc.  Save it to my Horizon folder and then open it on my mac as Horizon data sync’s it down to me.  This process works by design and works very well.

Here’s were we go astray:  Now I want my VDI desktop to be a floating pool with Persona Management.  I use Persona in the lab because I want a floating desktop but still want my profile (IE links bar, etc) saved between sessions.  Now let’s try this scenario:

Login to VDI desktop.  Save a document to my horizon folder.  Logout of VDI desktop (persona is saved to network share, horizon data copies file to all my devices).  Open horizon Workspace on my iPad and delete the document (the document disappears from all my devices). Login to my VDI desktop (persona pulls down my profile – including the Horizon directory from the CIFS share).  Unfortunately Horizon data now sees this document as a new version and it reappears on all my devices.

The solution to this dilemma is to exclude the Horizon directory from persona management (via GPO).  However, when you do this you get a warning message that your Horizon Folder has been deleted upon each logon.  When you click OK, your Horizon folder is recreated and all of your data comes down from the server.  However, if your Horizon data repository is large, this could be a huge chunk of data each time you login to your floating-pool VDI desktop.

Hopefully VMware will correct this in the future with Workspace, these two features are great to use together.  Persona for the quick login with user persistence and Workspace for sharing data between all your devices.

I’ll post any updates here if I find a workaround.

 

 

 

Utilize ThinApp Streaming with Horizon Workspace and View Desktops

 Administration, Desktop Virtualization, Tips and Tricks, VDI Design  Comments Off
Apr 022013
 

I’ve been diving deep in the lab with Horizon Workspace (review coming!).  Workspace can be used (with limited functionality) from just the web page portal but it is best used when you install the GUI apps for Windows, OSX, IOS, and Android.  One thing to note is that when the Workspace app for windows is installed, it will automatically deploy ThinApp packages to the clients that have it loaded (if the app is entitled to them of course).  So if you have the Workspace client installed in your View desktops, you can deploy ThinApp packages to them.  If I have the client loaded in my Windows home PC, I can get my ThinApp Apps there as well.  For my View desktops, I may want to stream my ThinApp packages.  If I have a logon storm of 100 users at 8am, I don’t want 100 network copies of Adobe Reader coming off my ThinApp share at the same time, crushing it.  For the home users, I want those pushed down locally.  Let’s remember: Adobe Reader XI comes in about 312MB when ThinApped.  Not exactly a download I want my remote users to start when they click on the Reader icon on their home PC and wait for the download to complete before seeing reader.  So for the home users, I want to have the full app downloaded to their endpoint operating system before the icon appears.  For my View Desktops, I want to present the icon immediately but only download the app when the user clicks the icon (after all, my View desktops are on a high speed network link to the ThinApp Network Share).  How do I accomplish this one way for the View desktops and another for the home users?

First, I’ll mention that there is no way to differentiate this by application in Workspace today (v1.0 remember?).  This is differentiated by the OS instance that the Workspace App runs on.  By default, when you install the workspace client, all ThinApp packages are set to download fully to the Windows Operating System.  If you would like to stream the apps you need to install the Workspace Apps silently using the command line options to change the default as explained in this page from the documentation from v1.0.

Here’s the example from the docs on how to run the installer:

VMware-Horizon-Workspace-1.0.0-12345.exe /s /z HORIZONSERVER=https://HorizonWorkspaceHost.com SSLBYPASS=1 /v DOWNLOAD=0 POLLINGINTERVAL=60

Where /v lets you specify the ThinApp Specific variables.  The one in question is DOWNLOAD=0.  0 means use streaming for your apps, 1 means download the full app to the OS where the workspace app is installed.  1 is the default.

If you have already installed your Workspace apps on your endpoints or in your View desktops, all is not lost.  You can just edit the registry (with a GPO if you like).

Here’s the key:

HKLM/Software/Wow6432Node/VMware, Inc./VMware Horizon Apps/DownloadPackages  REG_DWORD 0 or 1.  (0 is stream ThinApps, 1 is Download (the default)).

One thing to note:  The ThinApp sandbox for that package will not roam to the users endpoint on a home PC (or anywhere without some form of profile management).  The users profile is not in the Horizon Data folder so this information does not get shared with the other Horizon Data.  A little bit of a limiting factor, but something we can hope for in the next version.

Release: VMware Horizon Mobile 1.2

 Desktop Virtualization, Software Releases, VMware News  Comments Off
Nov 062012
 

The first release from the End User Computing announcements at VMworld comes Horizon Mobile 1.2.  Here’s the overview from the release notes:

VMware Horizon Mobile enables enterprises to securely provision and manage corporate mobile workspaces on Android smartphones in isolation from employees’ personal environments. This dual-persona solution makes corporate data more secure and enables enterprises to take advantage of employee-owned mobile devices.

Using Horizon Mobile features, you can enhance productivity by creating purpose-built, preconfigured native mobile workspaces based on each employee’s responsibilities. Administrators can easily keep track of and manage corporate assets and applications on mobile devices through a Web-based portal. Security is seamlessly integrated with existing infrastructure to meet regulatory and compliance needs.

If you like to take it for a spin, head over to the download page here.

32-Node VMFS Clusters and Sparse Virtual Disks for View? Not just yet.

 Desktop Virtualization, Storage, VDI Design  Comments Off
Oct 312012
 

I was doing a little research for a customer yesterday and they asked a great question: “Now that View 5.1 supports vSphere 5.1, can we use 32-node clusters with View 5.1?”

First a little background.  Today you can only create 8-Node Clusters in vSphere if you are using iSCSI or Fiber Channel storage.  The reason is because the number of hosts that can share a file on VMFS in vSphere 5.0 and prior is limited to 8.  If you are using NFS with View 5.1 and vSphere 5.0 or higher, you can have 32-node clusters for your View desktops.  vSphere 5.1 changed this limitation by changing the file locking mechanism and now allows for 32-node clusters to share a read-only file.  Secondly, vSPhere 5.1 introduced Sparse Virtual Disks.  These Sparse Disks are virtual disks presented to the desktops that can shrink as easily as they expand.  This is a real benefit and may rival linked clones one day to most efficently deliver a pool of desktops on storage.  You can read more about these two technologies from Cormac Hogan, Sr. Technical Marketing Architect at VMware.

As I’m sure you know by now, as of last week, View 5.1 and 5.1.1 are now supported with vSphere 5.1.0a.  So the question was asked: now that they are supported together, do we get those cool new features that Cormac was referring to?  Unfortunately, the answer is no, not yet.  I searched for a long time trying to find an answer.  When I came up empty, I just emailed Cormac directly.  He responded this morning, “…both features are waiting on a future release of View.”

Bummer.  Hopefully we’ll get the chance to get these two great features very soon.

Have a great and safe Halloween.

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