Citrix Startup Company #AppEnsure Releases Free tool to automatically measure response time & throughput for all applications! – via @douglasabrown
Another cool application!
AppEnsure, a leading provider of application performance solutions for cloud and virtualized environments, today announced the first free product to aid IT operations with application performance monitoring and management. AppEnsure Free is the first free solution to automatically measure response time and throughput for all applications, including custom developed and purchased, in all locations; physical, virtualized, public and private cloud.
AppEnsure Free helps IT Operations rapidly troubleshoot and diagnose application performance problems within minutes and prevents war room meetings. The solution is easy-to-use and deploy and gives immediate insight into common application issues such as slow response time.
“IT Operations teams are the first ones blamed when an application is performing poorly,” reports Bernd Harzog, Performance and Capacity Management Analyst at The Virtualization Practice. “Giving these teams visibility into application response time and throughput will arm them with the necessary data to quickly resolve performance issues.”
“We developed AppEnsure Free to help IT Operations,” said Colin L.M. Macnab, CEO and co-founder of AppEnsure. “Time and time again we talk with companies struggling with their current performance management systems and we wanted to give companies a solution – at no cost – to help them ensure mission critical applications are performing as expected and to eliminate blame during war room meetings and bridge calls.”
AppEnsure Free costs absolutely nothing for a perpetual 5 servers…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Google + Microsoft = Process Explorer 16.0 – #Google, #VirusTotal – via @lseltzer
This is kind of cool!
The latest version of Process Explorer, one of the top tools in Microsoft’s popular Windows Sysinternals suite, has incorporated support for the popular VirusTotal service run by Google.
The Sysinternals tools were written by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell before Microsoft bought their company many years ago. Russinovich continues to develop the tools in his spare time at Microsoft while working on their Azure cloud service.
To quote the “What’s New” section on microsoft.com:
Thanks to collaboration with the team at VirusTotal, this Process Explorer update introduces integration with VirusTotal.com, an online antivirus analysis service. When enabled, Process Explorer sends the hashes of images and files shown in the process and DLL views to VirusTotal and if they have been previously scanned, reports how many antivirus engines identified them as possibly malicious. Hyperlinked results take you to VirusTotal.com report pages and you can even submit files for scanning.
VirusTotal was created and built up by Hispasec Systems, a Spanish security consulting firm. Over the years it became wildly popular to the point where it needed a cloud infrastructure on the scale that a company like Google could provide. Google took the service over in 2012 [Corrected from 2007]. Read more…
IT Store by RES, enable IT Self-service – #ITaaS, #RES – via @douglasabrown
This is an area where a lot of companies now are looking too invest, and for good reasons. There are so many repetitive tasks and activities that should be automated to reduce the efforts required by IT staff.
Douglas posted these great blog posts including videos from Bob and Sean at RES:
A Vision Fulfilled – Bob Janssen RES Software IT Store Video Blog
Technical Mass – RES Software IT Store
And it looks really cool I must say, RES have been working on this for a while and we’ve heard about it. And now it’s here and I must recommend to have a look at it.
AUTOMATED SELF-SERVICING VIDEO
NEW EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING
Have a look at this and read more here at the RES IT Store: http://www.itstore.com.
//Richard
Why huge IaaS/PaaS/DaaS providers don’t use Dell and HP, and why they can do VDI cheaper than you! – via @brianmadden
Yes, why do people and organisations still think that they can build IaaS/PaaS/DaaS services within their enterprise’s and believe that they will be able to do so with the “same old architecture” and components used before? It’s not going to be comparable to the bigger players that are using newer and more scalable architectures with cheaper components.
Enterprises just don’t have that innovation power that companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon has! And if they do then most of the time they are stuck in their old way of doing things from a service delivery point of view, stopping them from thinking outside of the box though the service delivery organisation isn’t ready for it..
This is a great blog post on this from Brian, great work!!
Last month I wrote that it’s not possible for you to build VDI cheaper than a huge DaaS provider like Amazon can sell it to you. Amazon can literally sell you DaaS and make a profit all for less than it costs you to actually build and operate an equivalent VDI system on your own. (“Equivalent” is the key word there. Some have claimed they can do it cheaper, but they’re achieving that by building in-house systems with lower capabilities than what the DaaS providers offer.)
One of the reasons huge providers can build VDI cheaper than you is because they’re doing it at scale. While we all understand the economics of buying servers by the container instead of by the rack, there’s more to it than that when it comes to huge cloud provider. Their datacenters are not crammed full of HP or Dell’s latest rack mount, blade, or Moonshot servers; rather, they’re stacked floor-to-ceiling with heaps of circuit boards you’d hardly recognize as “servers” at all.
Building Amazon’s, Google’s, and Facebook’s “servers”
For most corporate datacenters, rack-mounted servers from vendors like Dell and HP make sense. They’re efficient in that they’re modular, manageable, and interchangeable. If you take the top cover off a 1U server, it looks like everything is packed in there. On the scale of a few dozen racks managed by IT pros who have a million other things on their mind, these servers work wonderfully!
Nutanix NX-3000 review: Virtualization cloud-style – #Nutanix, #IaaS
A great review of the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform! 🙂
What do you get when you combine four independent servers, lots of memory, standard SATA disks and SSD, 10Gb networking, and custom software in a single box? In this instance, the answer would be a Nutanix NX-3000. Pigeonholing the Nutanix product into a traditional category is another riddle altogether. While the company refers to each unit it sells as an “appliance,” it really is a clustered combination of four individual servers and direct-attached storage that brings shared storage right into the box, eliminating the need for a back-end SAN or NAS.
I was recently given the opportunity to go hands on with a Nutanix NX-3000, the four nodes of which were running version 3.5.1 of the Nutanix operating system. It’s important to point out that the Nutanix platform handles clustering and file replication independent of any hosted virtualization system. Thus, a Nutanix cluster will automatically handle node, disk, and network failures while providing I/O at the speed of local disk — and using local SSD to accelerate access to the most frequently used data. Nutanix systems support the VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors, as well as KVM for Linux-based workloads.
[ The Nutanix NX-3000 is an InfoWorld 2014 Technology of the Year Award winner. Read about the other winning products in our slideshow, “InfoWorld’s 2014 Technology of the Year Award winners.” | For quick, smart takes on the news you’ll be talking about, check out InfoWorld TechBrief — subscribe today. ]
Nutanix was founded by experienced data center architects and engineers from the likes of Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. That background brings with it a keen sense of what makes a good distributed system and what software pieces are necessary to build a scalable, high-performance product. A heavy dose of innovation and ingenuity shows up in a sophisticated set of distributed cluster management services, which eliminate any single point of failure, and in features like disk block fingerprinting, which leverages a special Intel instruction set (for computing an SHA-1 hash) to perform data deduplication and to ensure data integrity and redundancy.
A Nutanix cluster starts at one appliance (technically three nodes, allowing for the failure of one node) and scales out to any number of nodes. The NDFS (Nutanix Distributed File System) provides a single store for all of your VMs, handling all disk and I/O load balancing and eliminating the need to use virtualization platform features like VMware’s Storage DRS. Otherwise, you manage your VMs no differently than you would on any other infrastructure, using VMware’s or Microsoft’s native management tools.
Nutanix architecture
The hardware behind the NX-3000 comes from SuperMicro. Apart from the fact that it squeezes four dual-processor server blades inside one 2U box, it isn’t anything special. All of the magic is in the software. Nutanix uses a combination of open source software, such as Apache Cassandra and ZooKeeper, plus a bevy of in-house developed tools. Nutanix built cluster configuration management services on ZooKeeper and heavily modified Cassandra for use as the primary object store for the cluster.
| Test Center Scorecard | |||||||
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| 20% | 20% | 20% | 20% | 10% | 10% | ||
| Nutanix NX-3000 Series | 10 | 9 | 10 | 9 | 9 | 8 |
9.3 EXCELLENT
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Continue reading here!
//Richard
#XenMobile Mobility promotion from #Citrix – #EMM, #BYOD, #XenDesktop
XenMobile mobile device management (MDM) or enterprise mobile management (EMM) capabilities for the price of Software Maintenance!
Personally I wonder if this is a move triggered by VMware’s acquisition of AirWatch where Citrix now is kind of pushing it’s MDM solution out the door to really get some more market, and at the same time push VMware to give their new MDM capabilities away together with Horizon View…
This is an interesting and good action, thank you Citrix!
XenApp and XenDesktop Platinum Mobility Promotion
Promotion effective From January 31, 2014 to September 30, 2014
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The XenApp and XenDesktop Platinum Mobility Promotion is a limited-time promotion that offers new or existing XenApp or XenDesktop Platinum customers with perpetual licenses current on Subscription Advantage (SA) the ability to receive FREE XenMobile MDM edition licenses or get 20% off XenMobile Enterprise licenses with the purchase of first year Software Maintenance for all licenses obtained via this promotion. For either XenMobile promotion options, the maximum number of discounted licenses customers can purchase is based on the total number of XenApp and XenDesktop Platinum licenses owned. XenMobile MDM edition provides key device-level security capabilities for users accessing XenApp and XenDesktop desktops and apps on mobile devices. The mobile device management (MDM) solution lets you:
XenMobile Enterprise edition supports the next step in your EMM strategy by complementing the device-level security capabilities of XenMobile MDM edition with app-level security features. These include:
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Continue reading here!
//Richard
#XenApp 7.5 is launching! – #Citrix, #HSD, #DaaS, #VDI
Wow… this is really interesting and “weird” I must say…
XenApp is back! 🙂
And of course AppDNA is in there as well to simplify software/application management on this platform.
Description
New Citrix XenApp 7.5 makes it simple to deliver any Windows app to an increasingly mobile workforce, while leveraging the cost saving and elasticity of hybrid clouds and the security of mobile device management. Learn more at http://www.citrix.com/xenapp
Hear more about it in this video!
The video above was removed because of that it was accidentally published too early.. but you can find it on YouTube here:
//Richard
#Citrix #NetScaler Traffic Domains ins and outs – via @barryschiffer
Another great blog post by Barry!!! Keep up the great work!!
Citrix NetScaler Traffic Domains are a way of segmenting network traffic for different applications or even tenants. You are able to use a traffic domain to create fully isolated network environments on a single NetScaler instance. An instance is a single appliance or a HA setup of two appliances.
Citrix NetScaler Traffic Domains were introduced with NetScaler 10.0. At first NetScaler Traffic Domains started as a somewhat hidden feature which you could only configure by CLI. As of version 10.1 Traffic Domains are fully configurable in the NetScaler GUI which makes it a lot simpler to use.
In a way NetScaler Traffic Domains could compete with the NetScaler SDX platform. With Traffic Domains we segment networks on a single NetScaler instance instead of the SDX where we create a virtual appliance per network segment.
A downside of using NetScaler Traffic Domains is the fact that some features are only supported for usage inside of Traffic Domain 0. Traffic Domain 0 is the default Traffic Domain, all services run inside Traffic Domain 0 unless explicitly specified.
An example of non supported features are NetScaler Management and NetScaler Gateway. For a complete list of supported features follow this link.
For non supported features for which you need isolation you have two options, NetScaler SDX or additional NetScaler appliances (virtual or physical).
My expectations are that we will see more and more features being supported on NetScaler Traffic Domains. An amazing feature would be to enable management functionality on Traffic Domains where you would only be able to manage or create services assigned to that Traffic Domain. This would be especially useful for multi-tenancy or multi management in situations where for example one team manages Mobility and one team managing a web application.
A few use cases Citrix describes for NetScaler Traffic Domains:
- Use of duplicate IP addresses
- Use of duplicate NetScaler entities
- Multi Tenancy
A use case I’m actually using NetScaler Traffic Domains for is the ability to deliver services in a DMZ as well as an internal network.
Internal Network services like Microsoft Exchange Client Access Services and Microsoft App-V are heavy on traffic and I don’t like those services traversing the firewall in the DMZ. This also works great combined with Direct Server Return (DSR) which is blocked by most firewalls. Check out more on DSR combined with App-V on this article by Ingmar Verheij.
#Citrix #ShareFile StorageZone Controller logs – #BYOD
This is great blog post by Dan about where to find that little extra info when you’re having issues with StorageZone controllers!
When troubleshooting issues with the Citrix ShareFile StorageZone Controller the first place to look will be on the Monitoring page of the StorageZone Controller configuration page. If there are items in red on that page I’d next recommend looking in the logs for more details information.
The logs for the StorageZone Controller are located by default at c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Citrix\StorageCenter\SC\logs.
Within this directory multiple logfiles exist. The main ones you should check are:
- cfgsrv_%date%.txt – StorageZone configuration logs
- sc_%date%.txt – ShareFile StorageZone “ShareFile Data” logs
- CIFS_%date%.txt – ShareFile StorageZone Connectors for Network File Shares logs
- sharepoint_%date%.txt – ShareFile StorageZone Connectors for SharePoint logs
You can enable extended logging for…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
GREAT VIDEO – #Citrix #XenDesktop vs. #VMware #Horizon #View installation video
This is really funny! Have a look at this video to see how you can compare a XenDesktop and a Horizon View installation side-by-side!
And another thing that is kind of funny is that VMware still compares Horizon View with XenDesktop 5.6: https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMware-View-vs-Citrix-XenDesktop-Datasheet.pdf
//Richard
The IT Melting Pot! 