At a start-up of a project often the requirements and wishes of the organization are sky-high. Everything should be possible and included. Sometimes it just looks like they are ordering a dish at restaurant and ask to add all ingredients that are possible (Everything on Top). Logically when the project is actually starting and/or evolving those requirements and wishes are reflected to the available budget and the current infrastructure/environment, so the goals and targets are adjusted. However sometime everything should actually on top and I participated in such a project. In this article series I will describe the experiences during this project. Instead of using the standard approach I will discuss the biggest discussion points during the project and how those discussions ended. But first I will start with a short description of the current infrastructures and the requirements of the project.

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).

Introducing Relay Server

To start the article it’s good to explain what the RES Relay Server actually is. The RES Relay Server is introduced in RES Workspace Manager 2012. Before the Relay Server all Workspace Manager clients (called Agents) are directly connecting to the SQL database where the configuration and logging of RES Workspace Management is stored. In case of real large environments this could be resource intensive on the SQL database. Also in the case of several offices/more sites the traffic between the agent and the database will be transferred over (slower) WAN links. In the last scenario RES Workspace Manager (RES WM) could be used with a second mirrored database, but this involves more hardware and software costs. The relay server component can be used for such scenarios. The relay server is separate component, which can be installed on a Windows machine. The agent server will communicate with the database and caches all the information. The agent will be connected to the relay server and retrieve the settings from the relay server.

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.