Sadly this year I missed PubForum, Rich however, made it all the way to Dublin and brought us some awesome pictures and videos, you can check them out on his blog.

I stayed in Fort Lauderdale really jealous of Rich. However the guys (AlexY/AlexD) who organize PubForum were kind enough to think of people like me and all those who didn't make to Dublin, for the BeerForum, ops.... I mean PubForum.

They recently posted all the videos and presentations for PubForum 2008, and you can do exactly what I did, download them all.

One session in particular caught my attention, Simon Frost, a colleague of ours here at Citrix, presented on the topic "AppReceiver", and he did a fantastic job explaining how Citrix will aggregate all its clients into one universal application receiver client.




You can meet all the rock start who put together this awesome user group event, during Citrix Synergy in Huston from May 20th to 23rd.

See...

Daniel Feller over at Citrix posted this great article about virtualizing XenApp environments.  In my ten years of architecting XenApp infrastructures, I get this question just as often as Daniel.  If I had a dollar for every time I had that question, I wouldn’t be working or writing this post…
Here is part of Daniel’s post:  Enjoy!!!
Being

Alessandro Perilli over at virtualization.info posts that the rumor that has been floating around for a while now might be gaining momentum.  What is it?  that EMC may spin off VMware.  This has been floating around the street for a while now, but hasn’t really gotten legs.  I called some old friends from my days

Pubforum is the oldest and most fun SBC community events I have had the pleasure of presenting at. Today it's creator, Alex Yushchenko, let me know that he has posted a gigantic amount of content to the Pubform site, all free for download!

You will find Presentations starting from PubForum 2005 Dublin. Most of the presentations are encoded with 512bit or 768bit, 320x 240
or 640x480. Some of the files are quite big so make sure you got enough
bandwidth and download capacity. Most of the times the associated PowerPoint slides should also be available. They date from the latest (2008) Pubforum in Dublin to the one in Dublin in 2005.


This collection is very much worth taking a look at. There are some quite interesting sessions like:


Dave Northey "Getting the most of Microsoft Windows 2008 Hyper - V"
Alex Yushchenko
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First modifications available for xenApp Web \ Service (Web Interface) 5.0 HideApp hides applications, folder or content in...

At my training class in Brisbane last month, one of the students, Sharin Yeoh, demoed Microsoft Office 2007 running locally on a Linux desktop via Thinstall packages on Wine. My inner geek response was "This is the coolest thing I've ever seen!" As we watched Sharin poke around the applications, the whole class sort of had a simultaneous thought: "If we can run Windows apps in Linux, why do we need Windows?" This sounds like a crazy idea, and probably not realistic. But it's fun to think about... First things first, what is Thinstall and Wine? Most of you probably know that Thinstall is VMware's application virtualization product. It lets you package Windows applications into single-file EXEs that can then be copied or streamed to any Windows desktop. The apps run right out of the packages and don't conflict with apps that are natively installed on the Windows machine. Wine is an open source implementation of the Microsoft Windows API that can be...

This may be old news to some of you but it has proven to be so popular that I thought it was worth a mention here.  This is a topic that came up on the forum a month or two back but I'll post it here to save you the trip.  Basically someone asked how the PKG mechanism worked and Chris Lord, a Senior Program Manager for Microsoft Application Virtualization, posted this response: ======== ======== If you'd like to read the thread in its entirety see http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2880423&SiteID=17. J.C. Hornbeck | Manageability Knowledge Engineer

Does anyone know why Dell is not sponsoring Citrix's Synergy conference next week? I though the two companies were on good terms, what with Dell now selling PowerEdge servers with embedded XenServer. Maybe Dell spent all their event money being a platinum sponsor of VMworld last year or being a platinum sponsor of VMwold Europe this year? Or maybe Fake Steve was right when he said that Dell will not bounce back from their current earning slump?

Much has been written about the many new features of Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services. Now, with the upcoming release of Citrix XenApp 5.0 (Project Delaware), Citrix updates its best-selling product and ports it to the new platform. Brian Madden analyzes whether it is still worth buying Citrix XenApp / Presentation Server on top

Flip. Flop. Flip. Flop... Flip! Ever since the RDP 6 / Bear Paw rumors came out five years ago, I've gone back-and-forth as to whether the increased features in Terminal Server will impact Citrix's Presentation Server business. I originally thought Citrix was screwed. Then I didn't. Then I did. Then I wasn't sure. But now that Windows Server 2008 has been released, and now that its Terminal Services capabilities have been used in the field, I feel confident saying that Citrix has nothing to worry about. In other words, I do not feel that the native capabilities of Terminal Services on Windows Server 2008 are a threat to Citrix at all. I know that several other folks have written about this before (and some of this has even been captured in our automated industry news bot), but I'd like to officially go on record as to specifically why I think Citrix has nothing to worry about. Terminal Server 2008's interesting features Citrix and Microsoft have always been in a...

Intro: 

When I crearted this little app I had in mind allowing rapid access to my your remote servers right from the Windows Vista's sidebar.  It's been well over a year since version 1.0 of the Remote Desktop was released on Frameworkx.com, and this app currently has a bit over 700,000 downloads.

No doubt this little gadget became very popular among Windows Vista users; it was built streamlined and simple as an extension to the Microsoft's Remote Desktop Client. Now version 2.0 we simply added features our users asked, like - favorites, history management, dropdown list, and others.

I decided to share it with our Citrix audience, since we are all about access, and I believe this is a neat way to connect to your XenApp servers.

Installation:

Remote Desktop Gadget can be downloaded straight to your Windows Vista's sidebar. No extra software or component is required.

Remote...

This article continues with the series on creating terminal service based scripts by explaining the inner workings of the script that we created previously.

Yesterday I posted about a new version of SFT Explorer being available and today I was tipped off about SFT-Check being updated as well.  I've commented on SFT-Check before as well so if you're not familiar with that tool then you can read my previous post or get the skinny straight from the horses mouth: http://www.virtualapp.net/sft-check.html I know I'm repeating myself so don't say you were never warned if something goes awry.  This is not a Microsoft tool and as such we make no warranties or guarantee's, nor does Microsoft support the use of this tool in any way.  This is one of those 'use at your own risk' type of things but I've heard a lot of good things and think you'll find it very helpful. J.C. Hornbeck | Manageability Knowledge Engineer

This whitepaper recently released by out guys in consulting covers the design considerations on how policies can impact your XenApp (Presentation Server) 4.5 environment...

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There are numerous ways to apply a configuration or security setting onto a group of servers within a Citrix Presentation Server environment. Because policies are so unique, diverse and customizable, there is no single, correct method toward policy design. However, this document will give the key areas to consider when deciding on the appropriate approach to implementing a setting using a policy.  
This design consideration will look at the following types of policies and the comm on practices associated with them:

Citrix Presentation Server policies: These policies are defined within the management console on Presentation Server and only apply to connections using the Citrix ICA protocol but not the Microsoft RDP protocol. Presentation Server policies...

Helge pointed me out to his blog just recently, and you know what - he has really userful content there. He just recently blogged about a neat little app that allows you to manipulate REG_LINKs. Very useful for your XenApp environments when configuring your remote apps and streaming profiles.

Here's a snippet of hos post:

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Recently I got into a very interesting discussion with my colleague Nicholas Dille on various aspects of Windows x64. One question he brought up was especially intriguing: Knowing about registry redirection, it is not astonishing to find that the 32-bit version of the registry key HKLM\Software\Classes (aka HKCR) gets to be HKLM\Software\Classes\Wow6432Node. But there is also HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Classes!? How can there be two different Wow6432Node 32-bit keys for one 64-bit key?

It soon dawned on us that one of those two Wow6432Node keys must be a registry link to the other, meaning that...

So in the last post I showed you the first few pictures that I draw during my conversations with folks that either want to know “why application delivery” or for folks that have an application delivery infrastructure, but are only doing XenApp.  The next steps here are to now tell the story of “delivery” instead

Recently, VMware announced that the beta of their application virtualization solution, codenamed Project Northstar, had reached the second beta. Even more recently, it was announced that VMware will be renaming Thinstall to ThinApp. All this justifies a look at this beta 2 it would seem.

One of the most obvious things to note when one first takes a look at Thinstall at it's current incarnation is the absolute lack of management tools. I was amazed at the fact that I actually needed to go into a folder in Program Files to find a batch file which I then would need to execute to generate the actual Thinstalled application. Well, as it turns out, I did not just sound like a bad idea to me but to VMware as well. In beta 2 of Project Northstar, a wizard is available to take you through the entire build process, including the creation of
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Microsoft has released a tool into beta that allows for offline virtual machines to be updated. The tool uses PowerShell to create interaction between SCVMM 2007, SCCM 2007, WSUS to facilitate the upgrading of offline virtual machines.

The increasing use of virtual machines—for purposes ranging from support of older operating system environments to power savings—has created new challenges for IT.In particular, virtual machines may be left offline (stored in a non-operating state) for extended periods of time. Storing virtual machines in this manner conserves resources when the server capacities of the virtual machines are not needed.


However, offline machines do not automatically receive operating system, anti-virus, or application updates that would keep them compliant with current IT policy. An out-of-date virtual machine poses a risk to the IT environment. If deployed and started, the out-of-date virtual machine may be vulnerable to attack or may...

HP mentioned earlier that they were going to offer the Citrix XenServer as an option in select HP Server models for $399. Dell at approximately the same time was rumored to be offering the VMware ESX3i embedded hypervisor for free on selected Dell server models.

No need to speculate anymore. Last week, Dell announced that they will be offering the VMware ESX3i hypervisor as well as the embedded Citrix XenServer hypervisor (called XenServer Express Edition). These embedded hypervisors are available as options in two new virtualization optimized servers: the Dell PowerEdgeT R805 and R905. The addition of these embedded hypervisor cost:


$99 for ESX3i
$299 for XenServer Express


The $200 price difference is obvious but I'm sure that XenServer experts would point out that for those extra $200 you get a GUI with XenServer Express.


What's also interesting is that Dell took
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A few months back I posted a heads up about SFT Explorer version 1.1 being available and the next thing I know it's up to version 1.4.  Guess I need to start paying a little more attention.  Anyway, if you're not aware of what this tool is then check my previous post or just read the description from the download location. As always, this is not a Microsoft tool and as such we make no warranties or guarantee's, nor does Microsoft support the use of these tools in any way. With that said, I hear a lot of good things about it and think you'll find it useful.  SFT Explorer can be found at http://www.virtualapp.net/sft-explorer.html. J.C. Hornbeck | Manageability Knowledge Engineer