Archive
#App-V 5.0 Capacity Planning – #Microsoft via @micheroth and @vkleinerde
This is a good article, have a look at this if you’re planning some App-V 5.0 capabilities!
The following recommendations can be used as a baseline to help determine capacity planning information that is appropriate to your organization’s App-V 5.0 infrastructure.
 Important |
|---|
| Use the information in this section only as a general guide for planning your App-V 5.0 deployment. Your system capacity requirements will depend on the specific details of your hardware and application environment. Additionally, the performance numbers displayed in this document are examples and your results may vary. |
Determine the Project Scope
Before you design the App-V 5.0 infrastructure, you must determine the project’s scope. The scope consists of determining which applications will be available virtually and to also identify the target users, and their locations. This information will help determine what type of App-V 5.0 infrastructure should be implemented. Decisions about the scope of the project must be based on the specific needs of your organization.
| Task | More Information |
|---|---|
| Determine Application Scope | Depending on the applications to be virtualized, the App-V 5.0 infrastructure can be set up in different ways. The first task is to define what applications you want to virtualize. |
| Determine Location Scope | Location scope refers to the physical locations (for example, enterprise-wide or a specific geographic location) where you plan to run the virtualized applications. It can also refer to the user population (for example, a single department) who will run the virtual applications. You should obtain a network map that includes the connection paths as well as available bandwidth to each location and the number of users using virtualized applications and the WAN link speed. |
Determine Which App-V 5.0 Infrastructure is Required
| Important |
|---|
| Both of the following models require the App-V 5.0 client to be installed on the computer where you plan to run virtual applications. You can also manage your App-V 5.0 environment using an Electronic Software Distribution (ESD) solution such as Microsoft Systems Center Configuration Manager. For more information see Deploying App-V 5.0 Packages by Using Electronic Software Distribution (ESD). |
- Standalone Model – The standalone model allows virtual applications to be Windows Installer-enabled for distribution without streaming. App-V 5.0 in Standalone Mode consists of the sequencer and the client; no additional components are required. Applications are prepared for virtualization using a process called sequencing. For more information see, Planning for the App-V 5.0 Sequencer and Client Deployment. The stand-alone model is recommended for the following scenarios:Full Infrastructure Model – The full infrastructure model provides for software distribution, management, and reporting capabilities; it also includes the streaming of applications across the network. The App-V 5.0..
- With disconnected remote users who cannot connect to the App-V 5.0 infrastructure.
- When you are running a software management system, such as Configuration Manager 2012.
- When network bandwidth limitations inhibit electronic software distribution.
Continue reading here!
//Richard
#XenDesktop 7.1 on #Hyper-V Pilot Guide! – #Citrix
This is a great PoC guide, some thing I would have done differently in detail but overall great work!
You’ve heard of XenDesktop 7.1, experienced a demo and worked through the Reviewer’s Guide. Now where do you turn when you’re ready for a PoC, pilot and preparations for a full-scale rollout?
Here on the Citrix Readiness and Enablement Team, we’re always looking for ways to empower our customers to be successful on their projects. To this end, we’ve taken one of our most popular hands-on lab guides used to train hundreds of internal and external students and reworked it for consumption by the masses. The XenDesktop 7.1 on Hyper-V Pilot Guide can be download fromhttps://citrix.sharefile.com/d/scaa256260df4ab3b. In this guide we cover the following topics with step-by-step instructions and screenshots:
– Configuring System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Installing the Agent
– Setting Up SQL Server Mirroring for a XenDesktop site
– Setting up the XenDesktop Site
– Joining a Controller to an Existing Site
– Configuring StoreFront and Installing Certificates
– Configuring NetScaler for StoreFront Load Balancing
– Installing the VDA Software on Desktop and Server VMs
– Creating Catalogs of Machine for Desktops and Servers
– Creating Delivery Groups for Desktops and Servers
– Delivering Installed and App-V Applications
– Provisioning Services Configuration and Optimizations
– Using the XenDesktop Setup Wizard
– Setting up Remote Access with NetScaler and StoreFront
– Internal and External Connectivity Scenarios
– Load Evaluator Policies
– Monitoring with Director
– Exploring Configuration Logging
– Exploring Delegated Administration
– Working with PowerShell
And much more!
Take a look through the document and let us know your thoughts…
IMPORTANT: This guide is designed to be used as a reference for building PoC and/or pilot environments. Production environments should always be…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Almost perfect.. #ShareFile StorageZones on Azure is now generally available! – #Citrix, #Azure
This is a great addition I must say, but some things are missing!
One thing that I’m missing is the full integration with Azure storage containers! You still have to specify a temp/cache storage location that today ShareFile controller requires to be on a CIFS share when you have multiple controllers. And if you put the controller up in Azure as well, how do you then get that CIFS share and make it highly available? There is no CIFS exposure directly from the Azure storage, you have to setup a couple of VM’s in Azure, do something like DFS to expose is.. and then all of a sudden you have a whole file service to manage there as well.. and to monitor and all of a sudden you need AD and monitoring and reporting of it.. phuuu…
So I hope that in next version we can specify an Azure storage container for that cache/temp storage as well! 😉
The other thing I’d really like to see is NetScaler support in Azure, so that we could do proper AAA/CS/LB of the controllers in Azure as well so that we can get a simple and fully cloud based service in Azure! 🙂
BYOD and a growing global workforce are generating demand for instant access to data, offline productivity and seamless collaboration from anywhere. Organizations are challenged with reconciling these forces with leveraging existing investments, protect intellectual property and meet regulatory compliance requirements – driving interest in ShareFile StorageZones. StorageZones offers IT the flexibility to store data in secure Citrix-managed datacenters in multiple worldwide locations, or on-premise within their own datacenters.
At Citrix Synergy 2013, we announced new ShareFile StorageZones options with Microsoft Windows Azure. We are now pleased to announce the general availability of ShareFile StorageZones on Azure with the release of ShareFile StorageZones Controller software version 2.2. This release includes support for Windows Azure storage containers, therefore if you have a Windows Azure account, you can use an Azure storage container for your private data storage instead of a locally maintained share. Hosting ShareFile data natively in your Microsoft Azure account helps IT build the most cost-effective and customized solution for their organization. This customer-managed solution integrates ShareFile with Microsoft Azure’s Binary Large Object (Blob) storage, a cloud service for storing large amounts of unstructured data that can be accessed from anywhere in the world via HTTP or HTTPS.
Product Overview
Azure storage is customer-managed storage hosted in the Windows Azure cloud. File uploads are initially deposited into a temporary storage area shared by all StorageZone controllers. Then, a background service copies those files to the Windows Azure storage container and deletes the local cached copy of the file(s).
Typically with CIFS based StorageZones, the Controller servers are installed on-premise in the customer’s datacenter. However, if a customer is hosting virtual machines in Azure, they could install the StorageZone Controller software on instances running in their Azure account and not necessarily on-premise.
Read the ShareFile StorageZones on Azure Storage Technical Brief and watch the video Installing and Configuring ShareFile StorageZones v2.2 with Microsoft Azure to learn more about this solution.
Check out our Citrix and…
Continue reading here!
//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 Triumphs at V3 Technology Awards 2013 for Best Virtualisation Product – #IaaS
This is great! A great product takes another award!!! 😉
V3 Readers Award Nutanix with Prestigious Industry Recognition in Highly Competitive Category
Nutanix also won the Best of VMworld 2013 Gold Award for Private Cloud Computing!
LONDON, December 3, 2013 – Nutanix, the leading provider of hyper-efficient, massively scalable and elegantly simple datacentre infrastructure solutions, has been awarded for its continuing innovation in optimising datacentre infrastructure at the V3 Technology Awards 2013. During a ceremony at the Waldorf Hilton Hotel, the company was awarded Best Virtualisation product, beating a host of well respected and larger, more established organisations in the virtualisation market.
V3.co.uk is a leading source of news and analysis for technology professionals, written by a team of expert IT journalists in the UK and Silicon Valley. The awards were hotly contested this year, with more than 450 entries from 150 companies.
“It’s great to see a new company like Nutanix being recognised at the V3 Technology Awards, among the industry giants. It wasn’t an easy task whittling down the hundreds of entries to create the shortlist, and then V3 readers voted in their thousands for their favourites, making this a significant achievement and a well-deserved win. Well done Nutanix!” said Madeline Bennett, Editor, V3 and The INQUIRER.
Alan Campbell, Regional Director of Western Europe at Nutanix, commented on the success: “Nutanix is a company that is constantly innovating and striving to provide the best platform for its customers, so this recognition by a highly respected publication is a testament to the hard work of our team. Virtualisation is a rapidly evolving technology which we are proud to be at the forefront of and to receive an award in the UK, a key market for us, is an honour.
As the fastest growing enterprise…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
New #Nutanix Platforms for Graphics, Performance and Economical Storage – #IaaS, #XenDesktop, #BYOD, #NVIDIA
This is really cool!!! Great job as usual Nutanix!!
and Economical Storage
Enterprises continue to embrace converged scale-out architectures to make their datacenters simpler and easier to manage. Nutanix—the leader in converged infrastructure—brings these benefits to all parts of enterprise IT, providing the flexibility and power to run any virtual workload within a single infrastructure. Nutanix has added several new products to its family of Virtual Computing Platforms:
NX-7000 series platform for
powering graphics intensive users
Virtual desktop computing has become mainstream in all size organizations, and throughout all industries. Despite its successful and pervasive enterprise deployment, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has been unable to deliver many graphics-intensive applications and services with the same level of performance as when running on physical workstations.
To address this need, Nutanix has partnered with NVIDIA and Teradici to broaden its VDI portfolio, and integrate cutting edge acceleration for graphics rich desktops. The NX-7110 supports configurations with both NVIDIA GRID K1
and K2 GPU technology, as well as Teradici PCoIP APEX cards. The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform is the industry’s first converged infrastructure to support every type of VDI user, from task and knowledge workers to power and data scientists. Leveraging VMware’s SVGA driver technology along with NVIDIA GRID, the NX-7000 supports multiple rendering models, including Soft 3D, vSGA and vDGA.
Existing Nutanix environments can dynamically deploy NX-7110 appliances into a unified cluster that is centrally managed, while maintaining graphics intensive users in a separate desktop pool. Additional benefits include the delivery of maximum compatibility and portability to any user. For the first time, organizations have the confidence to move away from more expensive and rigid physical workstations, and virtualize their entire portfolio of desktops. The NX-7110 is now generally available.
NX-6020 delivers more economical
data storage
The NX-6020 supports VMs with very large datasets, such as SQL databases, big data
analytics projects and VDI deployments with full clones. It provides a 25% increase in available capacity. With both in-line and post-pr
ocess compression, it delivers between 42TB and 68TB of effective capacity in a space-efficient 2U platform. In addition, Nutanix has focused on cost-reducing other components within the appliance delivering a more economical data storage solution.
NX-3000/6000 series gets more powerful CPUs for 30% faster performance
Nutanix has updated the existing NX-3000 and NX-6000 product families with four new platforms featuring Intel’s Ivy Bridge server CPUs. As a 100% software-defined solution, Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform can rapidly adopt new technologies.
These new appliances benefit from 25% more CPU cores, faster clock speeds and a reduced power profile. This translates to a 30% increase in performance for VMs running on Nutanix, as well as support for higher VM densities. Each of these new platforms can be seamlessly added to any existing Nutanix cluster to immediately take advantage of the most advanced CPU technologies.
Read more here!
//Richard
#Windows #Azure Desktop Hosting Deployment Guide – #RDS, #BYOD – via @michael_keen
This is great! Have a look at this guide!
Hello everyone, this is Clark Nicholson from the Remote Desktop Virtualization Team. I’m writing today to let you know that we have just published the Windows Azure Desktop Hosting Deployment Guide. This document provides guidance for deploying a basic desktop hosting solution based on the Windows Azure Desktop Hosting Reference Architecture Guide. This document is intended to provide a starting point for implementing a Desktop Hosting service on Windows Azure virtual machines. A production environment will need additional deployment steps to provide advanced features such as high availability, customized desktop experience, RemoteApp collections, etc.
For more information, please see Remote Desktop Services and Windows Azure Infrastructure Services.
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Hyperscale Invades the Enterprise and the Impact on Converged Infrastructure – via @mathiastornblom
This is really interesting! Look at this video!
In this whiteboard presentation, Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman shares how enterprise IT can learn from the architectural models of hyperscale companies. He walks through Wikibon’s definition of software-led infrastructure and how converged infrastructure solutions meet the market’s requirements.
Continue reading or watch the whole channel here!
//Richard
Citrix Project Accelerator updated – #XenDesktop
“Customize My Design”, the Design release of Project Accelerator is here! We listened to your feedback and have delivered the ability to change FlexCast, application delivery, profiles and over 30 other decisions for your XenDesktop architecture. Across these decisions you will now be able to:
- Tailor your design to fit organizational and end user needs
- Visualize how your design “tweaks” affect hardware sizing and architecture
- On-the-fly comparison of Citrix Recommendations to your design decisions
- Review “Architect Comments”, guidance from the Citrix experts for each Decision
“Customize my Design” is the next step for Project Accelerator; the application that simplifies getting your XenDesktop, XenApp, or XenClient deployment done successfully the first time. It’s the Citrix environment where customers, partners, and Citrites can design a desktop virtualization project that more closely suits their business priorities, end user needs, and organizational preferences. And it is back-stopped by the real-world experience of Citrix Consulting, so you can use the results in your project.
Check it out right now or read more about what Project Accelerator can do for you here. Then tell us what you like, and let us…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
#Microsoft Desktop Hosting Reference Architecture Guides
Wow, these are some compelling guides that Microsoft delivered!! Have a look at them! But of course there’s always something more U want! Let Service Providers provide DaaS services based on client OS’s as well!!!
 |
Microsoft has released two papers related to Desktop Hosting. The first is called: “Desktop Hosting Reference Architecture Guide” and the second is called: “Windows Azure Desktop Hosting Reference Architecture Guide“. Both documents provide a blueprint for creating secure, scalable, multi-tenant desktop hosting solutions using Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager or using Windows Azure Infrastructure Services.
The documents are targeted to hosting providers which deliver desktop hosting via the Microsoft Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA). Desktop hosting in this case is based on Windows Server with the Windows Desktop Experience feature enabled, and not Microsoft’s client Operating Systems like Windows 7 or Windows 8.
For some reason, Microsoft still doesn’t want service providers to provide Desktops as a Service (DaaS) running on top of a Microsoft Client OS, as outlined in the “Decoding Microsoft’s VDI Licensing Arcanum” paper which virtualization.info covered in September this year.
The Desktop Hosting Reference Architecture Guide provides the following sections:
- Desktop Hosting Service Logical Architecture
- Service Layer
- Tenant Environment
- Provider Management and Perimeter Environments
- Virtualization Layer
- Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager
- Scale-Out File Server
- Physical Layer
- Servers
- Network
- Tenant On-Premises Components
- Clients
- Active Directory Domain Services
The Windows Azure Desktop Hosting Reference Architecture covers the following topics:
The IT Melting Pot! 