Virtualization Tips » XenDesktop

Citrix Receiver for Apple Mac has arrived

Brian — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:32:14 +0000

You may not even know what Citrix Receiver for the Mac will do for you. But if you do then you are probably pretty happy today. So if you have a Bring your own computer program with Mac users or you would just like a more seamless process to run Windows apps on your Mac. Then this new receiver from Citrix will be worth testing.

So what does Citrix Receiver for Mac do? Well along with Citrix XenApp and Dazzle, you will be able to search for and run all of your favorite Windows apps as if they were locally installed on your Mac. You will be able to select your apps with Dazzle (kind of a iTunes looking enterprise app store), you can then launch your apps from the Applications folder. You can even drag those windows apps to the doc and run them from there.

How to optimize Windows XP for XenDesktop

Brian — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:04:50 +0000

I found a new white paper released from Citrix today that talks about steps you can take to really optimize your XP images. Sure everyone thinks about things like turning off a few unused services, screen savers and power saving features. But this paper takes a deep dive into a list of settings that you can manually change and explains others that are available in the XenConvert optimizer tool from Citrix. Head on over to Citrix and grab the doc here.

Offers a better alternative than replacing the default user profile (which isn’t supported and doesn’t help for users that already have profiles)
Makes a distinction between private mode (1:1) and standard mode (1:many) desktops
Provides the actual registry keys/values for all optimizations (to ensure that all settings can be set by Group Policy or login scripts)
Gives best practices for optimizing the user profiles (like installing UPHclean)
Excludes configurations and steps that don’t help (like defragmenting a disk before performing a volume copy)
Details what registry changes are included in the XenConvert Optimizer tool (so you know what all those checkboxes are doing)

Microsoft VECD license is a total joke

admin — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 03:53:03 +0000

For those of you that have taken a deep look into VDI or have deployed solutions you should be familar with the latest Microsoft trick to milk more cash from corporations. As far as I’m concerned this is a cheap way to charge more money for now added features and pad their pockets because they did not jump into the VDI game.

Ok to explain things a bit more. Basically Microsoft requires you to purchase your desktop license (XP/Win7) of course. But if you want to do a VDI solution using XenDesktop you mush also purchase a RS or terminal services license and a VECD license. This VECD is listed as needed if you wish to run a workstation OS in a data center. This license can cost from $23 to $100 plus depending on what your end point device is and if its covered under Software Assurance. This is all additional cost on top of the Citrix XenDesktop license that you need to purchase.

I was blown away when the Microsoft rep’s were explaining this to us in a recent call. And the fact they can tell people this with a straight face amazes me.