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Published: Tuesday, 13 December 2016

Several years ago there were numerous products on the market offering a Server Based Computing (SBC) solution. VDI was introduced and even more products became available. However, in the last years many of these products are not here anymore. In the current landscape the big three dominating this market are: Microsoft RDS, VMware Horizon View and Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop. However, now another player is coming to the stage; Systancia. They have already been in the market for years, but were working in a kind of stealth mode in their home country France.

Systancia, an application and desktop virtualization software vendor, is a French corporation recognized for its AppliDis solution. AppliDis has grown rapidly over the past few years and was elected Best VDI Solution by experts in the field in 2014 among the industry's historical players. Now also including France's leading offer in terms of security of access following its acquisition of IPdiva, Systancia expertise has gained international presence since the French Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations (CDC) - now BPI (Banque publique d'investissement) - alongside A plus Finance, became a shareholder of the company.

In this review I’m going to be taking a look at their flagship product, AppliDis. Let’s start with a quick infrastructure overview of the product, before we are going to start the installation.

Read more: Systancia AppliDis

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Published: Wednesday, 23 September 2015

In this article series I’m installing and configuring VMware View 6.2 (with a XenApp administrator perspective). In Part 1 I discussed the global view infrastructure, followed by the installation of the basic components: Connection Server, Agent and Client. In this second part I will continue with describing the basic configuration of the RDS hosts.

Read more: VMware View 6.x (from a Citrix XenApp administrator perspective) Part 2

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Published: Thursday, 10 September 2015

As most of you know I work primarily as a Citrix architect implementing XenApp/XenDesktop infrastructures. However I also like to work with other similar product, so in the past I also deployed RDS only infrastructures. Besides it is always good to know how similar products work, to advice your customers between the differences and unique points of the product. Therefore it was time to install VMware View in my lab environment. In this article I will go through the infrastructure, installation, and configuration and user experience of the product. Logically I will compare it the current version of XenDesktop 7.x to show the differences and similarities.

Read more: VMware View 6.x (from a Citrix XenApp administrator perspective) Part 1

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Published: Tuesday, 08 April 2014

In the first part article I started trying to explain XenDesktop from a XenApp view. We discussed the installation, the requirement to create machine catalog and the way to set-up Published Applications or a Published Desktop creating a Delivery Group. In this second part we will continue with other components available in XenApp and how they are available (if available) in XenDesktop.

Read more: XenDesktop/XenApp 7.x from a XenApp Adminstrator view Part 2

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Published: Thursday, 09 January 2014

XenDesktop 7.x is already available for a while and Citrix really tried to push the message that the framework where XenApp (IMA: Independent Management Architecture) is built on will be replace with the XenDesktop (FMA) architecture. In other words the XenApp functionality will be embedded within the FMA/XenDesktop product. The first big step is set with XenDesktop 7, this version even has a specific XenDesktop App edition, that should provide the functionality of XenApp. However other versions of XenDesktop offer the XenApp functionality. Actually I noticing that many XenApp customers have difficulties to understand how XenApp is integrated within XenDesktop 7. In this article I will try to explain XenDesktop with a XenApp view in mind, trying to explain how the XenApp functionality can be found within XenDesktop.

Read more: XenDesktop/XenApp 7.x from a XenApp Adminstrator view Part 1

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Published: Wednesday, 13 November 2013

Microsoft just released (18th of October 2013) R2 of Windows 2012. In this review I’m going to describe which changes are available in this release compared to the first Windows 2012 release for the Remote Desktop Services (RDS)/Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).

Read more: What’s changed in Windows 2012 R2 on RDS

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Published: Thursday, 25 October 2012

Microsoft has just released Windows 2012. Microsoft has made a lot of improvements to both the RDS as VDI components. Several articles are already published describing those enhancements, but I did not see a complete overview of the whole suite. In this review I will go through all steps for the Session Host (SBC) component. I will start with the installation.

Installation

Microsoft improved the whole installation procedure a lot. It’s now possible to add roles and features via Server Manager to remote servers. This enables a much easier deployment of RDS infrastructures. This can already been seen when starting the add roles and features component. Besides the Role based or Feature based option a new option is displayed called Remote Desktop Services Installation. RDS can still be installed and configured via the Role based option; this will show the same set-up as Windows 2008R2 for example. The specific RDS option makes it easier to set-up a RDS infrastructure, because it is based on scenarios (and therefore adding the necessary components).

Read more: Window Server 2012 RDS

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Published: Tuesday, 11 May 2010

On the 24th of March 2010 Citrix releases XenApp 6 also known as XenApp for Windows 2008 R2. In this article I will review this first Citrix version available for Windows 2008 R2. Notice that this XenApp 6 also will only run on Windows 2008 R2 (so no Windows 2003 or Windows 2008 R1 support). (Logically) I will focus on the most interesting new features and how already existing features have changed. For more information on other non changed features check the reviews of earlier reviews of Citrix XenApp/Presentation Server on this website.
 

Read more: Citrix XenApp 6

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Published: Tuesday, 03 November 2009

I already wrote this article earlier in which I describe the new features and enhancements in the Windows 2008R2 release. If you have wrote the article you have noticed that Microsoft changed a lot to the Terminal Services infrastructure. One of the major changes is the addition of a VDI solution into the previous Terminal Services architecture. This addition is causing the first change, which is not technical: the name change from Terminal Services to Remote Desktop Services. In addition all the roles have been renamed to reflect the new name. It is import to know and understand these new roles names for the rest of this review. Therefore I will display the changed names again.

In this review I will focus on the RD Session Host (previously known as Terminal Server, so I will not go into detail about the VDI component. However most parts described in this review are applicable to the VDI component like the RD Web Access and RD Connection Broker, but I won't describe the RD Virtualization Host component and corresponding configuration in this article (probably I will make a separate article about is later on). Because I already mentioned the new enhancements and features in the previous article I will concentrate in describing the configuration of these new features and enhancements.

Read more: Windows 2008 R2 RDS