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).

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.

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.

In larger infrastructures there is already a monitor product available like HP Open View, Tivoli Monitoring and Microsoft System Operations Manager. Many Citrix administrators have a kind of love-hate relationship with such products. They provide lots of interesting information, but can be overwhelming and last but not least the required agent is not easy to install and/or stable. At one of my project the monitoring team was not confident that the agent of that product was suitable to install on the Citrix XenApp Session Host as those were provided by Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS). Logically we would like to have monitoring of these servers in place, so we needed to find a solution which can be used together with the monitor product. Finally the solution leads to a general way to monitor Citrix XenApp server without installing a monitor agent on the Citrix XenApp Session Host.

In the previous Unattended Installation Citrix Provisioning Services articles I explained how PVS can be installed automated via scripts. In most cases these articles are enough for most infrastructures. However if you would like to set-up more PVS environments it would be nice if could reuse the scripts and/or the answerfiles by making them variable. For one of my customers this was the case and I did that using PowerShell (their default scripting language). So actually this third part is more a PowerShell for dummies articles (I do not have much PowerShell knowledge, but this assignment showed me how powerful PowerShell is) than about the unattended installation but it gives a good insight in the possibilities.

With Citrix Provisioning Services the client (called target device) need to use “something” to connect to the PVS server to start the streaming process of the operating systems within the vDisk to target device. The default connection is using the PXE technique combined with TFTP, but Citrix also offers another technique called Boot Device Manager (BDM). In this article I will go both options using pros and cons (through my eyes) and how you can work around the cons (of both techniques). At the end I will give my vision which technique to use (in which scenarios).

Unattended installation of Front-End products like Citrix XenApp 6.5 or Windows 7 is really commodity nowadays. Unattended installations of back-end components are done less, which is actually logically. Such components are not installed in large amounts and are only executed once (per version). However more and more back-end components can be installed silently, mainly for the large enterprises. For such environments where the amounts of servers are higher, the efforts to set-up an unattended installation are worth doing those actions in comparison with manually install those servers. Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) offers unattended installation and configuration and at one of my project we needed to install more than 10 Provisioning Services servers. This is definitely a use case to use the unattended possibilities of Citrix Provisioning Services. In this article I will explain how you can install Citrix Provisioning Services unattended including my experiences with it so far.

For the last years BYOD is a hot and trending topic, many many articles are writing about it. Actually if you search for my chosen title many article can be found, in which the answer to the question about BYOD will be there for a long(er) time.

As this is a 100% opinion article I will start with writing down the pros and cons of BYOD trough my eyes. Followed I will write down (again through my eyes) reasons why BYOD can be sees as a hype or a reality. Finally I will write down my vision of BYOD.

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.

Although User Environment Management (UEM) becomes more and more important in almost every company it is getting easier to convince the IT people and management of purchasing the UEM. However there are still people who just see such a product as a logon script replacement, which can also be done using scripting or Group Policy Preferences. I’m not writing this article to discuss or argue about that statement as you can do actually a lot of the same configuration with scripts or Group Policy Preferences for the basic set-up like printer assignment, network mappings and so on. However UEM products offer much more other functionalities like Profile Management, E-mail management, Trouble Shooting tools, Performance Management and additional Security Management. This last one can be a real important added value for lot of companies, but is often not taken into account by the decision to use/purchase a UEM product. In this article I will focus on the security part showing/describing the features available in RES Workspace Manager 2012 (most of those features are also available in other UEM products as well) and provide you with use cases where those features were implemented and created an added value for that company.

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.

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).

When I checked the statistics of the VanBragt.Net Virtualization website I noticed that several connections were based on search for Citrix Load Balancing. That brought me to the idea to write some more about it. In the same time in one of my project the Load Balancing part came into the picture so I can also share/use my personal experiences in the article. This article will describe when and why you would like to use Citrix Load Balancing and how you need to configure it.

Before we really start the article handles Citrix Load Balancing Policies which should not be confused with Citrix Load Evaluators which are often also called Citrix Load Balancing. The Load Evaluators are used to divide users equally over servers based on user load and/or used resources. However Load Balancing Policies are a step before that process by specifying which group of servers should be used to start the session on.

Update: As Andrew stated in the comments this component will only work when connecting via Access Gateway, Web Interface of Cloud Gateway. Old methods (like TCP via HTTP) often used on Thin Clients will ignore the configuration.

A few years ago Citrix launched the first version of XenClient. With this launch a big supplier (Citrix) started a product virtualizing the operating system on client hardware. When Citrix launches the technical people love the technique, but many people are/were wondering which business needs such products will fulfill. Although several suppliers followed, even Microsoft announced the availability of Hyper-V in the Windows 8 client; still the technique is not really adopted and is not hyped like other virtualization techniques. In this article I will describe my opinion why I think Client Hypervisors will become important, but by other reasons than current often used.