Archive
How to pick virtualization (HW, NW, Storage) solution for your #VDI environment? – #Nutanix, @StevenPoitras
Here we are again… a lot of companies and Solution Architects are scratching their heads thinking about how we’re going to do it “this time”.
Most of you out there have something today, probably running XenApp on your VMware or XenServer hypervisor with a FC SAN or something, perhaps provisioned using PVS or just managed individually. There is also most likely a “problem” with talking to the Storage team that manage the storage service for the IaaS service that isn’t built for the type of workloads that XenApp and XenDesktop (VDI) requires.
So how are you going to do it this time? Are you going to challenge the Storage and Server/IaaS service and be innovative and review the new cooler products and capabilities that now exists out there? They are totally changing the way that we build Virtual Cloud Computing solutions where; business agility, simplicity, cost savings, performance and simple scale out is important!
There is no one solution for everything… but I’m getting more and more impressed by some of the “new” players on the market when it comes to providing simple and yet so powerful and performing Virtual Cloud Computing products. One in particular is Nutanix that EnvokeIT has partnered with and they have a truly stunning product.
But as many have written in many great blog posts about choosing your storage solution for your VDI solution you truly need to understand what your service will require from the underlying dependency services. And is it really worth to do it the old way? You have your team that manages the IaaS service, and most of the times it just provides a way for ordering/provisioning VM’s, then the “VDI” team leverages that one using PVS or MCS. Some companies are not even where they can order that VM as a service or provision it from the Image Provisioning (PVS/MCS) service, everything is manual and they call it a IaaS service… is it then a real IaaS service? My answer would be now… but let’s get back to the point I was trying to make!
This HW, Hypervisor, Network, Storage (and sometimes orchestrator) components are often managed by different teams. Each team are also most of the times not really up to date in terms of understanding what a Virtualization/VDI service will require from them and their components. They are very competent in understanding the traditional workload of running a web server VM or similar, but not really dealing with boot storms from hundreds to thousands of VDI’s booting up, people logging in at the same time and the whole pattern of IOPS that is generated in these VM’s “life-cycle”.
This is where I’d suggest everyone to challenge their traditional view on building Virtualization and Storage services for running Hosted Shared Desktop (XenApp/RDS) and Hosted Virtual Desktop (VDI/XenDesktop) on!
You can reduce the complexity, reduce your operational costs and integrate Nutanix as a real power compute part of your internal/private cloud service!
One thing that also is kind of cool is the integration possibilities of the Nutanix product with OpenStack and other cloud management products through its REST API’s. And it supports running both Hyper-V, VMware ESXi and KVM as hypervisors in this lovely bundled product.
If you want the nitty gritty details about this product I highly recommend that you read the Nutanix Bible post by Steven Poitras here.
How To: #XenMobile #MDM 8.5 Deployment Part 3: Policies – #Citrix
And here U have part 3 of Adams great blog post series!
In this 3rd part of my 7 part series on XenMobile MDM 8.5 we will focus on policies. Policies within MDM allow you to control a multitude of features on your end users mobile devices, including: WiFi, Email, VPN, Location Services, most all functionality of the device (camera, FaceTime, etc), AppStore access, etc. Most configuration variations you do to control and limit/restrict/configure your end users devices will be done from this tab. This tab is also the location where we can create some automated actions that include notifying your users when they have fallen out of compliance.
If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:
- How To: XenMobile MDM 8.5 Deployment Part 1: Installation
- How To: XenMobile MDM 8.5 Deployment Part 2: Basic Configuration
In this article I was to cover a “base” set of policy configurations that will give you a feel of how the policies work in general. By no means does this cover the breadth of what you can do with MDM, but it at least gives you a glimpse.
I want to accomplish the following in this article:
- Set a passcode policy on the device
- Block iCloud from syncing documents
- Preconfigure a WiFi network on my device (so that your users could come into the office with WiFi already configured and never have been given the password)
- Blacklist Dropbox, Box, and SkyDrive applications
- Notify the user their device as Out of Compliance (OoC) if those apps are installed
- Mark the device as OoC in the dashboard
.Configure a Passcode Policy
Configuring #ShareFile and #SAML Walkthrough – via @andyjmorgan
Another great blog post by Andrew! Great job!
While working with a customer recently on a sharefile implementation, I set about creating a SAML / Active Directory single sign on deployment. Configuring ADFS and SAML were complete unknowns to me so I set about documenting the process end to end for future reference.
The end result of this activity will allow you to login to sharefile using a native account (think Guest) or an active directory account (think internal user).
What you will need in order to follow this guide:
- An enterprise Sharefile account.
- A local domain.
- An active directory service account. (standard user rights are fine)
- A windows 2012 server to host ADFS (windows 2008 r2 is fine, but you’ll need to install ADFS 2.0 manually).
- This windows server must be accessible via https (443) from the internet. (Netscaler SSL works fine).
- An external trusted certificate for the web server hosting saml (e.g. adfs.yourdomain.com). For this walk through, I’ll assume you have already done this. *
- A copy of the Sharefile User Management Tool.
- About 2-3 hours spare.
* for this, generate a server certificate and import it into the local machines personal certificates.
Steps:
- Installing Active Directory Federated Services.
- Configuring Federated Services.
- Configuring Sharefile for SAML.
- Syncing Active Directory users with Sharefile.
- Testing the saml login….
Continue reading here!
//Richard
How To: #XenMobile #MDM 8.5 Deployment Part 1 and 2: Installation – via @AdamInTheCloud
Wow, it’s like Adam read my mind, I’m doing the same kind of blog post series but for a XenMobile MAM deployment! Will post part 2 of the MAM series later tonight (once it’s done, waiting on some StoreFront issues to solve and I’m getting there!)
But in the meantime have a look at this great series by Adam! Great job Adam!!!
How To: XenMobile MDM 8.5 Deployment Part 1: Installation
n late 2012 Citrix announced they had purchased a 7-year-old startup company called Zenprise that was a hot player in the mobile device security market. Up until that time, Citrix was positioning for that sector with its CloudGateway Enterprise product and focusing mostly on apps and data management..not really the device. Zenprise helped them flesh out their offering, which is now known as “XenMobile”. Although it’s gone through a few iterations it has finally reached a final “form” if you will of three editions: MDM, App, and Enterprise.
The purpose of this article series will be to walk through the installation and basic setup of the MDM (Mobile Device Management) Edition which focuses almost exclusively on managing the device, and not necessarily so much the data or apps. Although it is capable of application pushes and the like… a feature comparison can be found on Citrix’ website HERE. I encourage you to view that. One major difference to note is MDM does not sandbox apps/data, but App Edition does, and Enterprise Edition can.
In researching this product for some internal training we are currently going through it became pretty apparent there is very little information out there on it, and if there is its unfortunately outdated because the product has been rapidly evolving over the first half of the year. In this series of blog articles I will go over how to deploy a single instance of XenMobile 8.5 MDM on an internal network, configure basic policies and rules, and apply them to your devices.
If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:
This, unfortunately is the most boring part of MDM which is the install…but I would be remiss by not going over it for some of you that “have to see” it. So lets get to it so we can get on to the more exciting stuff!
First: Pre-req’s. All of this is straight from eDocs, I’m not reinventing the wheel here.
- MDM 8.5 needs to go on a 2008 R2 or 2012 server.
- Setup an active directory service account and make it a local admin on the MDM server
- Disable IPv6 (not via registry, just uncheck the box)
- UAC disabled
- Firewall disabled (this is my preference..I disable server firewalls but you’re welcome to do as you wish)
- Your service account needs permissions creator/owner/read/write on your SQL server. I will not be using PostgreSQL.
- SQL 2005/2008/R2/2012 in your environment (Reference Architecture recommends SQL for production deployments, not PostgreSQL. See HERE)
- Java SE 7 Update 11 (dk-7u4-windows-x64.exe) installed on the server
- Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) USJP 7 on the serverExternal DNS record such as mobile.mydomain.com
- To install the Java Cryptography Extension
- Install Java SE 7u11
- Open the JCE zip file and copy local_policy.jar and US_export_policy.jar to your computer desktop.
- Navigate to the folder /java/jdk1.7.0_x/jre/lib/security and copy the files from Step 2 to this folder.
- To install the Java Cryptography Extension
- Obtain an Apple….
Continue reading part 1 here and part 2 here!
//Richard
#Ericsson to build three Global #ICT Centers
This is really cool!
- High-tech, sustainable global ICT Centers to support R&D and Services organizations to bring innovation faster to the market
- Two centers located in Europe; one in North America
- Another step in providing industry leading cloud-enabled technology
- Also establishing a new R&D hardware design building in Stockholm
Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) is planning to invest approximately SEK 7 billion in the coming five years to build three global ICT Centers. Two will be located in Sweden, in Stockholm and Linköping, while the third one, in North America, will be located in Canada, in Montreal, Quebec.
The centers will be located close to Ericsson’s main R&D hubs and will be the new platform for more than 24,000 Ericsson R&D engineers around the world, supporting their lean and agile ways of working. Team of experts will be able to collaborate beyond borders more easily and efficiently.
Ericsson’s customers will also be able to connect remotely for interoperability testing, trials and will have early access to innovation on new business services in real-time from the comfort of their locations.
The three ICT Centers combined will be up to 120,000 square meters, approximately the size of 14 football fields. The new centers will house the company’s complete portfolio, enabling the R&D organization to develop and verify solutions, creating the foundation for the next generation technology and cloud-based services.
Hans Vestberg, President and CEO, Ericsson, says: “The new ICT Centers are examples of Ericsson’s passion for driving the development of the industry. Great ideas come from collaboration, and at these centers we will push the boundaries of possibility on next generation technology and services. Flexibility enabled by new ways of working will realize innovation faster to the market and to our customers.”
The centers will have a leading-edge design, built in a modular and scalable way, securing an efficient use of resources and space adaptable to the business needs. Ericsson estimates that the combination of architecture, design and locations will reduce energy consumption up to 40 percent. This significant reduction in carbon footprint is instrumental in Ericsson’s vision of a more sustainable future.
The two ICT Centers in Sweden will begin initial operations from end of 2013 and from end of 2014 respectively and the North American ICT Center from early 2015.
The new hardware design building in Stockholm, Sweden, will provide similar benefits as the global ICT Centers in use of equipment and energy savings. It will enable R&D hardware design activities in Stockholm to consolidate into one modern creative environment…..
Continue reading here!
#Microsoft to acquire #Nokia’s devices & services business
This is interesting, but I must admin that I’m not that surprised…
Microsoft to acquire Nokia’s devices & services business, license Nokia’s patents and mapping services
REDMOND, Washington and ESPOO, Finland – Sept. 3, 2013 – Microsoft Corporation and Nokia Corporation today announced that the Boards of Directors for both companies have decided to enter into a transaction whereby Microsoft will purchase substantially all of Nokia’s Devices & Services business, license Nokia’s patents, and license and use Nokia’s mapping services.
Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will pay EUR 3.79 billion to purchase substantially all of Nokia’s Devices & Services business, and EUR 1.65 billion to license Nokia’s patents, for a total transaction price of EUR 5.44 billion in cash. Microsoft will draw upon its overseas cash resources to fund the transaction. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2014, subject to approval by Nokia’s shareholders, regulatory approvals and other closing conditions.
Building on the partnership with Nokia announced in February 2011 and the increasing success of Nokia’s Lumia smartphones, Microsoft aims to accelerate the growth of its share and profit in mobile devices through faster innovation, increased synergies, and unified branding and marketing. For Nokia, this transaction is expected to be significantly accretive to earnings, strengthen its financial position, and provide a solid basis for future investment in its continuing businesses. Read more…
Are #Microsoft Losing Friends and Alienating IT Pros? – via @andyjmorgan, @stevegoodman
This is a great blog post by Steve Goodman!
Regular readers of my blog will know I’m a big fan of Microsoft products. As well as being an Exchange MVP, I’m very much a cloud fan – you’ll find me at Exchange Connections in a few weeks time talking about migrating to Exchange Online amongst other subjects. What I’m about to write doesn’t change any of that, and I hope the right people will read this and have a serious re-think.
Microsoft’s “Devices and Services” strategy is leaving many in the industry very confused at the moment.
If you’ve been living under a rock – I’ll give you an overview. They’ve dropped MCSM, the leading certification for their Server products. They’ve dropped TechNet subscriptions, the benchmark for how a vendor lets its IT pros evaluate and learn about their range of products. And they’ve been very lax with the quality of updates for their on-premises range of products, Exchange included, whilst at the same time releasing features only in their cloud products.
A range of MCMs and MCSMs – Microsoft employees included – have been expressing their opinions here, here, here, hereand in numerous other places. We’ve discussed the TechNet Subscriptions on The UC Architects’ podcast.
One thing is key – this kind of behaviour absolutely destroys trust in Microsoft. After the last round of anti-trust issues, it took a long time for Microsoft to gain a position of trust along with many years of incrementally releasing better and better products. A few years ago Microsoft was just about “good enough” to let into your datacentre; now it’s beginning to lead the way, especially with Hyper-V, Exchange and Lync.
Before I get started on Microsoft’s cloud strategy, let’s take a jovial look at what (from my experience) is Google’s strategy:
- Tell the customer their internal IT sucks (tactfully), ideally without IT present so they can talk about the brilliance of being “all in” the cloud without a dose of reality getting in the way.
- Class all line of business apps as irrelevant – the sales person was probably still in nursery when they were deployed. Because those apps are old, they must be shit.
- Show a picture of something old and irrelevant – like a mill generating it’s own energy. Tell them that’s what their IT is! You, the customer, don’t run a power station, so why would you run your own IT? If you do run your own IT you are irrelevant and getting left behind.
- Make out the customer’s own IT is actually less reliable than it is. Don’t mention that recent on-premises products cost less, are easy for the right people to implement and from a user perspective are often more reliable than an overseas cloud service.
- Only provide your products in the cloud so once you’re in… you’re in.
- Don’t let anyone from the outside be a real expert on the technology. You don’t need a Google “MVP”, because 99% of Google server products can only be provided by one company.
- Once you’ve signed up a customer remember, you don’t need to give them good support. They can’t go anyway without spending money on a third party solution to get their data out.
From a Microsoft MVP point of view, Google’s strategy is brilliant. It means that although we like a lot of their products, it drives away customers in their droves. Microsoft’s traditional approach to the cloud – and partner ecosystem would be a breath of fresh air to someone who’s been though the Google machine.
Unfortunately, based on recent experiences by myself and others – the above is actually looking pretty similar to Microsoft’s new strategy….
Continue reading here!
//Richard
#Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service – #IaaS
Market Definition/Description
Cloud computing is a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service using Internet technologies. Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a type of cloud computing service; it parallels the infrastructure and data center initiatives of IT. Cloud compute IaaS constitutes the largest segment of this market (the broader IaaS market also includes cloud storage and cloud printing). Only cloud compute IaaS is evaluated in this Magic Quadrant; it does not cover cloud storage providers, platform as a service (PaaS) providers, software as a service (SaaS) providers, cloud services brokerages or any other type of cloud service provider, nor does it cover the hardware and software vendors that may be used to build cloud infrastructure. Furthermore, this Magic Quadrant is not an evaluation of the broad, generalized cloud computing strategies of the companies profiled.
In the context of this Magic Quadrant, cloud compute IaaS (hereafter referred to simply as “cloud IaaS” or “IaaS”) is defined as a standardized, highly automated offering, where compute resources, complemented by storage and networking capabilities, are owned by a service provider and offered to the customer on demand. The resources are scalable and elastic in near-real-time, and metered by use. Self-service interfaces are exposed directly to the customer, including a Web-based UI and, optionally, an API. The resources may be single-tenant or multitenant, and hosted by the service provider or on-premises in the customer’s data center.
We draw a distinction between cloud infrastructure as a service, and cloud infrastructure as atechnology platform; we call the latter cloud-enabled system infrastructure (CESI). In cloud IaaS, the capabilities of a CESI are directly exposed to the customer through self-service. However, other services, including noncloud services, may be delivered on top of a CESI; these cloud-enabled services may include forms of managed hosting, data center outsourcing and other IT outsourcing services. In this Magic Quadrant, we evaluate only cloud IaaS offerings; we do not evaluate cloud-enabled services. (See “Technology Overview for Cloud-Enabled System Infrastructure” and “Don’t Be Fooled by Offerings Falsely Masquerading as Cloud Infrastructure as a Service” for more on this distinction.)
This Magic Quadrant covers all the common use cases for cloud IaaS, including development and testing, production environments (including those supporting mission-critical workloads) for both internal and customer-facing applications, batch computing (including high-performance computing [HPC]) and disaster recovery. It encompasses both single-application workloads and “virtual data centers” (VDCs) hosting many diverse workloads. It includes suitability for a wide range of application design patterns, including both “cloud-native”….
Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service
Source: Gartner (August 2013)
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Today is the RTM for #Windows Server 2012 R2! – #Microsoft
Microsoft blog post about the RTM release of Windows Server 2012 R2:
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As noted in my earlier post about the availability dates for the 2012 R2 wave, we are counting the days until our partners and customers can start using these products. Today I am proud to announce a big milestone: Windows Server 2012 R2 has been released to manufacturing!
This means that we are handing the software over to our hardware partners for them to complete their final system validations; this is the final step before putting the next generation of Windows Server in your hands.
While every release milestone provides ample reason to celebrate (and trust me, there’s going to be a party here in Redmond), we are all particularly excited this time around because we’ve delivered so much in such a short amount of time. The amazing new features in this release cover virtualization, storage, networking, management, access, information protection, and much more.
By any measure, this is a lot more than just one year’s worth of innovation since the release of Windows Server 2012!
As many readers have noticed, this release is being handled a bit differently than in years past. With previous releases, shortly after the RTM Microsoft provided access to software through our MSDN and TechNet subscriptions. Because this release was built and delivered at a much faster pace than past products, and because we want to ensure that you get the very highest quality product, we made the decision to complete the final validation phases prior to distributing the release. It is enormously important to all of us here that you have the best possible experience using R2 to build your private and hybrid cloud infrastructure.
We are all incredibly proud of this release and, on behalf of the Windows Server engineering team, we are honored to share this release with you. The opportunity to deliver such a wide range of powerful, interoperable R2 products is a powerful example of the Common Engineering Criteria that I’ve written about before.
Also of note: The next update to Windows Intune will be available at the time of GA, and we are also on track to deliver System Center 2012 R2.
Thank you to everyone who provided feedback during….
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Microsoft is progressing quickly! – SkyDrive Pro updated to 25GB and improved sharing – via @BasvanKaam
I must say this once again, Microsoft looks to be on the right track when it comes to getting back as one strong supplier of services in the future/present “BYOD” world. As I wrote in my post #Microsoft – On the right track! – #Windows, #BYOD, #Citrix now Microsoft is actually targeting to solve many of the gaps that we see with today services for BYOx scenarios. For instance how to manage what you want on top of the device (Azure, Intune, SkyDrive, Work Folders etc…) in a controllable fashion and not a full managed device that costs you a fortune to manage… and ShareFile, Box and others are great solutions that have many features that SkyDrive doesn’t have. But there is one thing that they all lack (or please enlighten me!!):
Encryption at rest on Windows, OS X and Linux OS’s/distributions, here all providers are leaning on that you already have hard drive encryption like BitLocker etc. But who manages that then? Can you then say that your service is “BYOD-compliant”? I wouldn’t say so… It’s not only SmartPhones and Tablet devices that we loose… but here Microsoft and SkyDrive may be the first to come with encryption on at least Windows 8.1 devices and somewhat manageable…
But again back to the announcement from Microsoft and SkyDrive:
Microsoft announced today that it is giving business users more storage space and a better way to share files across multiple devices. As first reported by TechCrunch, through its SkyDrive Pro accounts, employees will now receive 25GB of storage to start out with, a sharp increase from 7GB — and even this capacity can be increased to 50GB or even 100GB. Additionally, using SkyDrive’s Shared with Me view, users can share files with their friends and co-workers securely and in real-time.
According to Microsoft Senior Product Managers Mark Kashman and Tejas Mehta, the new storage space limits will be available for both new and existing customers.
This certainly makes the service standout among its competitors, namely Dropbox and Box. It was only about a week or so ago when the latter heralded in the launch of a new pricing plan aiming to increase the number of small businesses using its service. For personal users, Box also wound up doubling the amount of free storage they received.
Here’s how you can figure out the overall storage for each user:
With Office 365, you get 25 GB of SkyDrive Pro storage + 25 GB of email storage + 5 GB for each site mailbox you create + your total available tenant storage, which for every Office 365 business customer starts at 10 GB + (500 MB x # of user(s)1).
While Dropbox, Box, and Hightail certainly are some of the popular services out there today, SkyDrive isn’t something to be trifled with either. Through its integration with the Surface, Windows Phone, and other Microsoft products, along with iOS and Android devices, it has the potential to be a very powerful service.
As for the new sharing feature, just like you would perhaps see in Google Drive or any other cloud storage service, SkyDrive Pro is now offering a Shared with Me view that lets you take a shared document and view, edit, re-share, download, and more — all as if it were in your own storage bin.
But Microsoft isn’t stopping there, as it is adding several minor, but interesting enhancements to SkyDrive. The company has also increased the overall file upload limit to its SharePoint Online service to 2GB per file. Files placed into the recycle bin will now remain…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
The IT Melting Pot! 