Application Delivery - Your Business at your Fingertips.

Always been a fan of server virtualisation, simply because of the portability of virtual servers once they have been through the virtual infrastructure sausage machine.

Data Center contingency becomes much easier, its a case of finding the most cost effective way of replicating the virtual servers from storage solution to remote storage solution and then providing the host hardware to run those virtual machine when the shit hits the fan (usually there are network routing and DNS issues to deal with too but hey, it doesn’t half make things easier once you virtualise)

Data replication though, it can be expensive stuff, so can the redundant hardware needed on the remote site, awaiting activitation when a ‘plane lands on your data center’ (not sure how many times that has happened, but always seem to be the number one threat when having discussion on the subject).

Desktop virtualization (or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is a server-centric computing model that borrows from the traditional thin-client model but is designed to give administrators and end users the best of both worlds: the ability to host and centrally manage desktop virtual machines in the data center while giving end users a full PC desktop experience

 If you talk to CIOs who really “get” virtualization, the benefit that excites them the most is not cost savings but agility. I’m talking about the ability to say yes, quickly, to a business side request. Virtualization is helping smart IT leaders morph from “no” people to “yes” people. That’s a huge shift for many IT organizations and companies. But in order to be a yes person, you need to have enough carefully-managed virtual infrastructure on hand.

Michael Rose, Research Analyst at IDC, discusses the rise of best practices for virtual desktop infrastructures in this executive interview sponsored by Citrix Systems.

Many companies are now talking about virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) as a way of delivering desktops virtually to end-users. Is this becoming a viable technology for mainstream enterprise customers?

Now that Apple are due to release the 3G iPhone and the development kit, it won’t be too long before a number of different ICA clients are released which will allow you to run Windows applications and Windows Desktops sessions on your iPhone.  

Not using the local resource on the iPhone, the Citrix ICA clients allow access using the ICA protocol to a number of different Citrix platforms.

VMware have release a beta of its up and coming ‘ThinApp’ solution which I have a very strong interest in.

Some key features are:

• Virtual applications can communicate with each another
• There is no agent required to launch virtualised applications (this enables total portability)
• Virtual applications are compiled into industry formats such as ‘exe’ and ‘msi’ files (this enables complete integration into your existing application deploy mechanism).
• Virtual applications can be updated centrally

This article describes how to change the service console IP address, gateway address and hostname on your ESX Server 3.x host.  These settings can be changed using the Virtual Infrastructure Client or from the physical or a remote console connection (ILO, RSA, DRAC, etc)

Here is a quick demonstration video showcasing the new look and feel of Citrix Web Interface 5.

What is SmartAuditor?

At the very basic level, it is a recording of an ICA session for playback later. This could be used for troubleshooting (record a user that has intermittent issues for platback later when the issue arises) or compliance (record all users of the HR application to have proof of what session did what). This is 1st rev some of the things you may wish for are not included (Record session on the fly after session has started, searchable files, or the fact you have to disable session sharing to get the thing to work…).