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Published: Tuesday, 18 May 2021

When you are a returning visitor on my website you probably already know that I have done several product selections for VDI monitoring. Out of those selections I have knowledge and experiences with a large list of monitoring solutions around the VDI landscape…….for Windows operating systems. When a customer asked me to execute a product selection for Linux VDIs with the focus on End User Experience monitoring I could not use lot of my experiences. In this article I will write down my experiences during the product selection.

Read more: Monitoring Citrix Linux VDIs

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Published: Tuesday, 26 February 2019

The infrastructure of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (formerly known as XenDesktop and/or XenApp) exists of several components. Also Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops need to communicate with other components within the total IT infrastructure. In this article I will go through the several components and their communication ports with other components.

Read more: Citrix VAD Communication Ports

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Published: Wednesday, 16 January 2019

In the earlier article How to combine multiple Citrix environments within different domains I discussed the possibilities to combine multiple Citrix environments available within different domains. With one of the solutions was based on SAML authentication, which has the disadvantage that you still have two access points. In this article I will go into more details which options you have to combine such a solution into a single portal.

Read more: Different NetScaler Gateways within a single portal solution

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Published: Thursday, 13 December 2018

Logically the number of sites is part of each Citrix Design. This topic is also addressed in the Citrix Virtual Desktop Handbook. There are three reasons specified in the handbook which validate the use of multiple sites: network, risk tolerance and security. The guideline however is to keep the number of XenDesktop sites (should we now call those Virtual Apps and Desktop sites?) should be kept to a minimum to reduce architectural complexity and administrative effort. I totally agree on this topic, but next to design environment other factors are there causing that multiple Citrix sites are in the picture which are not designed with multi-sites in mind. Reasons could be the acquisitions/mergers of companies or out-sourcing a business application to an Application Service Provider (ASP). In this article I will focus on this kind of multisite scenarios and what the options are to combine those from an end-user perspective.

Read more: Combining Citrix Sites within different domains

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Published: Monday, 05 November 2018

For one of my customers I needed to set-up a Citrix FAS environment for using SAML authentication to achieve a single username and password (and providing this information once). To verify that the goals would be reached I first set-up Citrix FAS into my own (demo)environment, followed by a production environment on the customer infrastructure. I did this based on instructions created by fellows in the Citrix community and logically the Citrix documentation. In this article I’m not going to create another configuration article as those are already available. I will point you to these articles and share in this article tips and tricks of occasions I encountered. Most are already available somewhere on the Internet, but it is scattered and not always issue to found.

Read more: Citrix Federated Authentication Service (FAS) Tips and Tricks

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Published: Thursday, 05 April 2018

In the second part  we discussed the steps under the hood for each MCS deployment type when creation the machine catalog, when VDAs are added and what happens when the user session is ended. In this part we will continue with the steps when updates are required on the base disk and more detailed information about the configuration settings during the Machine Catalog wizard.

Read more: Citrix Machine Creation Services Demystified Part III

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Published: Tuesday, 06 March 2018

In the first part article we discussed the first steps for creating and maintaining Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS). We talked quickly about creating the master image, followed by the available MCS deployment type with their characteristics. In this article we will discuss what happens under the hood when creating a MCS machine catalog per deployment type.

Read more: Citrix Machine Creation Services Demystified Part II

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Published: Tuesday, 06 February 2018

Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS) is already available for a pretty long time. Developed as an alternative for Citrix Provisioning Services (and a reaction to VMware Linked Clones). A topic for discussion between the MCS proponents and the PVS proponents. Loved by the easiness to use it, however also not much documentation available about it (because of the easiness??). In this article I would try to demystify Machine Creation Service, based on practical experiences with (troubleshooting) MCS at a customer.

Read more: Citrix Machine Creation Services Demystified Part I

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Published: Tuesday, 12 December 2017

Probably most people would say this is no brainer and actually it is. Of course the type of disks used for your VDI infrastructure matter for the user experience and performance of VDIs. In this article I will do a walk-through of a PoC where we have been required to investigate the impact of the disk performance on a VDI infrastructure.

Read more: Does a disk type matter for VDI infrastructures?

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Published: Tuesday, 25 July 2017

In the earlier article series Failover (im)possibilities I wrote about the failover/load balancing possibilities in XenDesktop 7.x, where part 5 was about Desktop 7.12. In this article I will discuss the XenDesktop 7.13 and 7.14 release and will also go into a bit more detail what is expected in future releases (where possible).

Read more: Failover (im)possibilities of XenDesktop 7.x Part 7 After the XenDesktop 7.13/14 release

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Published: Thursday, 16 February 2017

At one of my projects we were discussing the high level design decisions and one of the discussion topics were setting-up the Delivery Controllers high available and redundant. During the talk we discussed the necessity of using Load Balancer appliances in front of the Delivery Controller. Based on that talk I thought it was a good idea to write an article about this topic including my opinion.

Logically we need to start which communication streams are being used to the Delivery Controllers which should be taken into account. Communicating to the delivery controller has three communication streams.

• Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) communication

• StoreFront communication Application enumeration/ICA file creation (XML broker)

• NetScaler (and StoreFront) STA communication

Let’s dig deeper in each communication stream.

Read more: Load Balancing Citrix Delivery Controllers via a Load Balancer necessity?

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Published: Tuesday, 31 January 2017

In the earlier article series Failover (im)possibilities I wrote about the failover/load balancing possibilities in XenDesktop 7.x, where part 5 was about Desktop 7.11. In this article I will discuss the XenDesktop 7.12 release and will also go into a bit more detail what is expected in future releases (where possible).

Read more: Failover (im)possibilities of XenDesktop 7.x Part 6 After the XenDesktop 7.12 release

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Published: Tuesday, 06 December 2016

In the earlier article series Failover (im)possibilities <<LINK to part 4>> I wrote about the failover/load balancing possibilities in XenDesktop 7.x, where 4 was about Desktop 7.9. In this article I will discuss the XenDesktop 7.11 release and will also go into a bit more detail what is expected in future releases (where possible).

Read more: Failover (im)possibilities of XenDesktop 7.x Part 5: After the XenDesktop 7.11 release

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Published: Wednesday, 05 October 2016

On 14 September Citrix released XenApp/XenDesktop 7.11. Each release Citrix adds several enhancements to the product. One of those enhancements is the new functionalities to the Zones component (which became available in version 7.9). The enhancement is a re-inventing of the Zone Preferences in Presentation Server 4.5/5 or Worker Groups in XenApp 6.5. In this article I will show the functionality, the configuration possibilities, how it works (in cooperation with the Application Priority) and if the functionality is fully comparable with the Zone Preferences and/or Worker Groups functionality.

Read more: Zones in Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop 7.11

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Published: Thursday, 14 July 2016

In the earlier article series Failover (im)possibilities I wrote about the failover/load balancing possibilities in XenDesktop 7.x, where part 3 was about what is available in XenDesktop 7.7. In this article I will discuss the XenDesktop 7.9 release (and corresponding the 7.8 release when this applies) and will also go into a bit more detail what is expected in future releases (where possible).

Read more: Failover (im)possibilities of XenDesktop 7.x Part 4: After the XenDesktop 7.9 release

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Published: Tuesday, 26 January 2016

In the earlier article series Failover (im)possibilities I wrote down how fail-over could be done in the past (aka as the XenXApp 6.5 era), how it’s currently can be done (and what’s missing in comparison with the past) in XenDesktop 7.5/7.6, the near future based on current available Technology Previews (XenDesktop 7.7) and enhancements that Citrix could make in our vision. On 28 December 2015 Citrix released the XenDesktop/XenApp release. In this article I’m taking a look if the features available in the used Technology Preview are available/implemented as expected. Secondly I’m describing the (im)possibilities of the Zones feature that was mentioned about a month ago, which was not available in the (public) Technology Previews.

Read more: Failover (im)possibilities of XenDesktop 7.x Part 3 After the XenDesktop 7.7 release

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Published: Tuesday, 15 December 2015

In this article series I’m describing the Failover possibilities within the XenDesktop product based on the server components. In part 1 <<LINK>> I started explaining shortly the differences between Load Balance and Fault Tolerance, followed to mention that one is none for the components. For each component at least two machines should hold the functionality. As the article is about (disaster) failover in the case of two or more datacenters the article continued quickly describing the component, where the past, the current situation, the near future and wishes per component are described. In part 1 the database and the access portal were discussed. In this article I will continue with the Published App/Desktops (aka VDAs) and the PVS infrastructure.

Read more: Failover (im)possibilities of XenDesktop 7.x Part 2

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Published: Wednesday, 22 July 2015

In the first part article I started describing the steps to select a monitor solution for a SBC/VDI infrastructure. In that first part I described the first two steps. The first step is determine the actual information needs, which leads to a wish list. This wishes are categorized on importance based on the MoSCoW principle. After all wishes are known step 2 can be done, checking if there is already a product and/or functionality is available within the organization that can fulfill the wishes. If a product is available you can stop the selection process and focus on implementing/improving the product or functionality already available. If the outcome is that additional tooling is required we can continue with step 3, which is actually the start of this second part.

Read more: Selecting a Monitor solution for SBC/VDI infrastructures Part 2

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Published: Tuesday, 26 May 2015

At one of my customers there were needs for additional insights in their Citrix XenApp infrastructures. I was assigned the task to do a research of products that could fulfill the gap they currently have. When I just got this assignment I was wondering how I should start with this task. After I came up with the plan I thought it would be nice to write it down in an article series. The article series will exist of two components. The first article(s) will describe the process and the used techniques/methods and my experiences of selecting a monitor solution for SBC/VDI infrastructures (personally I think this can be used for almost any product selection, but that’s up to you). The second component will exists of providing more information of three products, which I have looked at more in-depth during this assignment. In this part 1 I will start with describing the first components about the process, methods and experiences, which I have divided in five steps.

Read more: Selecting a Monitor solution for SBC/VDI infrastructures Part 1

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Published: Thursday, 26 February 2015

In this article (series) I will describe and discuss the PVS components you should consider when creating a PVS design. In part 1 I discussed a PVS Farm, Site, Device Collection, View, Store, Database and Load Balancing. In the second part I will continue describe design consideration for PVS components.

Read more: Citrix Provisioning Services Design Part 2

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Published: Thursday, 11 September 2014

Every product has his oddities, which can be time consuming if you are not familiar with those characteristics of the product. Also XenApp 6.5 has some of those characteristics which are not well-known or not documented well in the Citrix documentation or specific situations I have encountered at customers environment. In this article I will write down situations encountered at XenApp implementations at customers including a solution, work around or the way you should work with it.

Read more: XenApp 6.5 (Troubleshooting) Tips and Tricks Part 1

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Published: Wednesday, 16 July 2014

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

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Published: Wednesday, 23 April 2014

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).

Read more: PVS Advanced Settings: What do with it

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Published: Wednesday, 27 November 2013

At one of my customers we were designing a XenApp 6.5 farm where XenApp server will be located in several data centers with firewall in between and where we will also use the IMA Worker Mode. It’s clear which ports are used for the communication between the client and server. Although Citrix provides the communication ports for server communications used for their products in a sheet, it’s not fully explained when those ports are used/required for which communication moment. So answering the question for the customer ended in setting-up a small environment and actually checking the port required for the communication (based on using the Windows Firewall). In this article I will share my experiences.

Read more: Communication ports used by XenApp 6.5 (with the IMA Worker Mode enabled)

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Published: Monday, 29 April 2013

One of the remarks the RDS Team got out was the difficulties IT departments had was the installation of the RDS components. It was unclear which components were needed/required and where they should be installed. Because Microsoft is aiming with RDS is created on the low complexity environments, it will become more important to provide clear guidance of the installation steps. The RDS team reacted on this remark by adding a complete new feature within the installation part for creating RDS Deployment Scenarios. In this article I will describe those scenarios and how they can be implemented.

Read more: RDS Deployment Possibilities

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Published: Wednesday, 23 January 2013

One of the new features within Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2012 is Fair Share of Resources. Actually Fair Share was already introduced in Windows Server 2008R2 but the feature is extended in Windows Server 2012. In this article I will describe how Fair Share of Resources is functioning, what can be configured and how it works in practice.

Read more: FairShare of Resources in RD Session Host

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Published: Thursday, 22 November 2012

One of the new features within RDS (both Session Host as Virtual Machine) is called User Profile Disk. User Profile Disk is according Microsoft the successor of Roaming Profiles and Folder Redirection. In this article I’m will show you how to enable the User Profile Disk, how to configure the settings of the User Profile Disk, How it’s works and what the differences are with Roaming Profiles, Folder Redirection and User Experience Virtualization (EU-V).

Read more: RDS User Profile Disk

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Published: Wednesday, 27 July 2011

Most of my SBC implementations are including a Citrix XenApp version and you are getting used to settings and behavior of certain features. At one of my latest projects I was implementing a Windows 2008 R2 RD Session Host infrastructure (without Citrix XenApp). This was not the first time  I was implementing a Microsoft Terminal Server , but nowadays Microsoft is offering a nice universal printer driver solution and it was the first time for me that I was using the Microsoft universal printer solution called Microsoft Easy Print.

Read more: Where Microsoft Easy Printer configuration differs with Citrix Univeral Printing