Citrix Project Avalon- Excalibur Tech Preview now Available for Download

Citrix has just released Excalibur, the first public tech preview of Project Avalon. Project Avalon was announced at Citrix Synergy in San Francisco earlier this year. Here are some highlights of this tech preview.

• Simplified, unified, and expanded FlexCast 2.0 architecture
  
  
• Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8
  
  
• SuperCodec for Optimized Graphics
  
  
• Intelligent configuration tools
  
  
• Delegated Administration
  
  
• Personal vDisk Improvements

Documentation and support forum info can be found at the link below. You must have a MyCitrix account to access and download the tech preview material. I should have this up and running in our lab shortly so stay tuned for some more Excalibur related posts. Cheers.

Avalon Excalibur Tech Preview

Citrix Profile Management and VDI – Doing it Right Part 3!

Dan Allen finishes up his series on Citrix User Profile Management. Below is a link to Part 3. I recently posted Parts 1 and 2 so be sure to check those out as well. A MUST read for all XenApp/XenDesktop administrators. Enjoy.

Citrix Profile Management and VDI - Doing it Right Part 3!

Citrix Profile Management and VDI – Doing it Right Part 1 & 2

Back in February, Citrix blogger Dan Allen posted an informational blog called "Citrix Profile Management and VDI- Doing it Right".  In my opinion, this was probably one of the best (if not THE best) collection of information regarding user profile management. Earlier this week Dan followed up with a part 2 blog, which went even deeper into profile management and provided a detailed, real world use case scenario. I highly encourage you to take them time to read both posts. As I have stated before, I think user profile management is the most under rated and under planned part of a VDI deployment. There are sooooo many options and ways to slice the user profile pie. Most of the big name vendors, (i.e. Citrix, VMWare, and Microsoft) offer built in solutions, and there are a slew of 3rd party vendors that specifically address user profile management. Dan's blogs have been blasted across the social media networks this week, but I thought I would provide the link to both posts for your viewing pleasure. For anyone out there dealing with virtual app or virtual desktop deployments, these blogs are worth a read. Enjoy.

Citrix Profile Management and VDI- Doing it Right Part 1

Citrix Profile Management and VDI- Doing it Right Part 2

Citrix Personal vDisk 5.6.5 Administrator's Guide

Citrix has released a new admin guide for vDisk.  It's only 9 pages long and has some good information. Worth the read if you are using, or plan to use vDisk in your VDI environment.

CTX134148 - Citrix Personal vDisk 5.6.5 Administrator's Guide - Citrix Knowledge Center

HDX Monitor 2.0.7 Test Drive

Citrix released a new version of the HDX Monitoring tool. I took it for a spin this morning in our lab environment. Right off the bat I noticed it seemed to respond a little bit faster than the earlier version. The ability to drop it in the system tray is pretty handy as well. Below are some screen shots. If you have ever used this tool before, it looks the same as the older UI. There are some additional options in the "Settings" menu. A link to the blog post is also below. Cheers.

http://blogs.citrix.com/2012/07/20/hdx-monitor-2-0-7-published/

Study (approved by VMware) proves that Citrix XenDesktop delivers a better user experience than VMware View for virtual desktops over the WAN while using significantly less bandwidth

Approved by VMWare huh? Interesting. 

Study (approved by VMware) proves that Citrix XenDesktop delivers a better user experience than VMware View for virtual desktops over the WAN while using significantly less bandwidth

The New IBM SmartCloud Desktop Infrastructure (SDI) Reference Architecture with Citrix Desktop Virtualization

Big Blue recently released their reference architecture for Smart Cloud. IBM has an architecture for both VMWare View and Citrix XenDesktop. Check out the link below for information on the Smart Cloud architecture, with XenDesktop. 

The New IBM SmartCloud Desktop Infrastructure (SDI) Reference Architecture with Citrix Desktop Virtualization

Best Practice for Upgrading a XenDesktop 5 Site

We are currently in the process of upgrading to XenDesktop 5.6. Figured I would share some links I used along the way. It's all pretty straight forward but you need to be aware of some gotchas as it relates to the introduction of vDisk.

CTX128748 - Best Practice for Upgrading a XenDesktop 5 Site - Citrix Knowledge Center

XenDesktop 5.6 on Citrix eDocs

Great Little Step by Step by Terence Luk.@terran0925
Upgrading Citrix XenDesktop 5.5 to 5.6

Citrix XenDesktop, Real World Use Cases