The two not much mentioned components in a PVS High Available infrastructure
- Details
Just as almost every product and solution PVs can be set-up and configured so the PVS infrastructure is high available. Within the PVS infrastructure there are several components related to the High Availability of PVS. Some of these components like PXE and TFTP are well described in several good articles for creating a High Available solution. However within the PVS infrastructure there are also some components/configurations settings that are not much mentioned around the HA topic, but can have a big impact on the High Availability of your PVS infrastructure. In this article I’m going to describe which components should be taken into account, why and how you could/should use them in a High Available PVS infrastructure.
Read more: The two not much mentioned components in a PVS High Available infrastructure
Advanced Citrix Load Balancing Scenarios with Worker Groups
- Details
In the article Citrix Load Balancing Policies explained I described where and how to use Citrix Load Balancing. One of the most used scenarios is redirecting user to a specific group of servers defined in a Worker Group. At some customers we were also using Citrix Load Balancing for that use case, but during those projects some additional concepts were introduced and we should get it working with the already defined Load Balancing Policies. In this article I’m going to describe the scenarios and how that can be accomplished with the defined Load Balancing policies.
Read more: Advanced Citrix Load Balancing Scenarios with Worker Groups
Citrix Provisioning Services PowerShell scripts
- Details
In the article series Unattended Installation Citrix Provisioning Services I already touched the PowerShell possibilities of PVS showing how to configure farm and server settings via PowerShell. In the same project I already wrote some additional PowerShell scripts to partly automate some tasks within the PVS infrastructure, so no mistakes could be made. Although they are not rocket science I decided to share them, as some commands are not fully obvious when reading the PowerShell Guide.
PVS Advanced Settings: What do with it
- Details
When configuring Citrix Provisioning Services you will find the Advanced button within the properties of each PVS servers. There are pretty some settings available within this advanced part and when you are going to search for documentation you will find out that not much information is available about those settings, nor about what the setting is about or which value should be configured on which circumstances. When I was writing a detailed design I talked to several people and even those who changes the default values could not really explain why did choose the specific setting. I dived into this advanced settings and what I could find about these settings are written down in this article (as promised in the presentation PVS Design Decisions and Real Life Experiences).
Unattended Installation Citrix Provisioning Services Part 4
- Details
In the previous Unattended Installation Citrix Provisioning Services articles I explained how PVS can be installed automated via scripts. In this part I’m going to describe some of the peculiarities I have encountered with the unattended installation of Citrix Provisioning Services.
Read more: Unattended Installation Citrix Provisioning Services Part 4
Please tell me: What offers Persistent VDI over traditional desktops
- Details
Currently many VDI implementations are based on the so called persistent VDI methodology. The user gets a (virtualized) desktop in the data center, which is installed and configured (mainly) via the traditional available deployment systems. When I’m talking and discussing about Persistent VDI’s my alter-ego is banging against the door again. In this opinion article I will describe my vision why my alter-ego is coming back when talking about Persistent VDI.
Read more: Please tell me: What offers Persistent VDI over traditional desktops
The case of the magic unknown Citrix Provisioning Services feature
- Details
On one of my projects we are using Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) for our XenApp 6.5 environment. At this project several teams are responsible for the different stages in the infrastructure (DTAP, Development, Test, Acceptance and Production).
After a while one of the guys of the test environment came to me asking me how and why we are using fixed IP addresses within the PVS image. I told me that this could not be the case as the design was written based on a DHCP based IP address and I was pretty sure that none of this colleagues in test has the knowledge available to configure fixed IP addresses within the possibilities PVS is offering. In this article I will start describing which documented options are available within PVS to use a fixes IP address within the PVS image, followed by showing the magic unknown feature in Citrix Provisioning Service the test colleague encountered accidently.
Read more: The case of the magic unknown Citrix Provisioning Services feature