VMware SocialCast and Citrix Podio are The New Desktop

What constitutes a desktop? It is a framework, a workspace for aggregating resources in the form of data and applications and the ability to use applications to manipulate data and produce a desired result. In the move to cloud computing we expect this new workspace or desktop to be accessible and available from anywhere on any device for all applications and data. What better place to do all that other than from an enterprise social collaboration platform like SocialCast or Podio?

Think about it: If in the future we expect all applications to be SaaS or Web or mobile, then social platforms like these are perfect places to aggregate those applications. Of course we will not forget about legacy Windows applications but we can also aggregate those in these platforms as well. Citrix is at a bit of an advantage today in that it can easily integrate Podio with Citrix Receiver and -- voila -- Windows apps. Take that a step further and integrate with ShareFile and now you can launch files using any application you want with file extensions and maybe in the future with "Open With".

So you have your data in ShareFile or Octopus, you have your Windows, SaaS, Web and mobile apps aggregated, you have enterprise collaboration and workflow capabilities; so, you lessen your reliance on e-mail, you have integration with some of your online meeting tools like GoToMeeting and WebEx and it is all in the cloud ... what else do you need? More apps, you ask? That is a great question and that is where enterprise application stores come into play -- download any application you need from the enterprise app store and on you go.

I know someone will ask about SharePoint and its likes. Well both SocialCast and Podio layer on top of SharePoint and extend workflow and collaboration capabilities, so don't look at these platforms as a replacement (not yet at least) for SharePoint. Rather, they're enhancements to it.

These two solutions offer powerful propositions and whether we notice this or not we are already doing what they solve today; it's just that we're using solutions that aren't as integrated or obvious. Still, without a doubt I believe that the way forward is through enterprise social collaboration platforms as the new desktop.

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 05/16/2012 at 2:21 PM0 comments

6 High Notes from Citrix Synergy 2012: A Conference Recap

If I was to summarize last week's Citrix Synergy I would put it like this: the energy was high and the show was great!. It's really great, at least for me personally, to see Citrix evolve so much, to think that at one point this company was a single-product company. It feels like it was that so long ago. Citrix has truly diversified its portfolio and solidified its message and value proposition. Here are some of the highlights of the show.

Project Avalon is the codename for a project that Citrix is working on to automate and orchestrate XenApp and XenDesktop in the cloud from a single pane of glass. In essence, Avalon will allow you to burst into a cloud provider and provision desktops or applications automatically. The cool thing here is that you will do all of this from the same management console. So, no new management console needed -- the same console you are using to provision XenApp locally will be the console to provision XenApp in the cloud and so on. The technology will leverage Citrix CloudBridge to establish a secure tunnel between your datacenter and the cloud provider and then provision in the cloud.

Podio is probably the acquisition I'm most excited about. Citrix acquired them in early April. Podio is essentially a competing offering to VMware SocialCast and Cisco Quad. With tight integration into the GoTo product sets, Podio is going to be an excellent collaboration and workflow engine. Citrix showed how Podio will integrate with ShareFile, GoTo Meeting and other products at one session.

Virtual Computer is a great acquisition that significantly enhances the XenClient product with superior management capabilities and I was very happy to see Citrix acquire them. I think this will boost the adoptability of XenClient in the enterprise. It seems like a natural path for Citrix to take.

GoTo Assist is now free for iPad and Android. You can now use it to support customer, friends and family with their technical needs on these devices. So, it's not a huge announcement but I think it is a smart move, as more and more devices are mobile. Being able to use GoTo Assist for free to support these devices will lead to better adoption of the full GoTo suite.

HP had probably the coolest announcement at the show. The company showcased the All-in-One thin client LCD monitor with HDX System on Chip technology. The cool thing was the price point of about $400 and the fact that the entire device is powered by Power over Ethernet, or PoE, needing only 13 watts to power. Now, that's really cool.

Wyse Xenith 2 also made a cool announcement with a SoC architecture, improved performance and a very good price point for XenDesktop implementations. Xenith in my opinion is a phenomenal value add.

[Editor's note: This article was updated with corrections regarding a) GoToAssist customers being able to move up to the full Goto suite; b) HP's HDX chip pricing at $400, a $200 difference from what was previously posted. Sorry for the inconvenience.]

Attendance at Synergy was about 6,500 this year but it felt bigger -- I definitely sensed the excitement and energy of the attendees. I enjoyed it thoroughly and will be blogging in more details about many of the announcemens in detail in the weeks to come. Of course, I have to report that my SYN110 session on running XenDesktop on vSphere was packed. I also attended an extensive Citrix Technology Professional certification track with some amazing and very bright folks.

Were you at the show or did you follow the keynote? If so, share with us what you liked here.

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 05/14/2012 at 2:34 PM5 comments

Microsoft in Innovation Mode: Hello, App-V 5!

It's been six years since Microsoft acquired Softricity, the company that developed the App-V product which was at the time called Softgrid. Since that acquisition and with the exception of renaming the product, Microsoft had done very little with the software aside from some minor upgrades, patches and hotfixes. That's all about to change. Microsoft has finally announced App-V 5, which, while still in beta, has been completely revamped and updated and has some really cool features and functionality.

Versions of App-V prior to 5 were focused on not only virtualizing applications, but also on what I call "extreme isolation." This isolation presented integration challenges with other applications and also with the underlying operating system. Here's an example: Traditionally, when you installed applications like WinRar or Winzip, you can simply right-click and get quick access to application functionality like "Extract Here" because they were integrated into the Windows shell. Virtualized, WinRar or Winzip would no longer work that way.

App-V 5 will resolve that problem and allow virtualized applications to be that much more integrated with the underlying operating system, thereby allowing virtualized applications to work more like traditional applications.

Another major milestone in App-V 5 is the fact that the size limitation on virtualizing application has been lifted. Traditionally, there used to be a 4GB maximum package limit. In addition, the reliance on a drive-letter has also been removed, thereby making App-V applications even more seamlessly integrated.

Managing and troubleshooting App-V is also improved. The new version now has a Web-based administration console, making it easy for IT to manage the environment. On the troubleshooting front, the new version now integrated with Windows Event Log, as opposed to logging independently to separate files, thereby being more tightly integrating with the operating system.

As you can see, App-V 5 is a major version upgrade. It only took Microsoft six years, but I am not complaining -- better late than never, actually. Honestly, I am excited about the new Microsoft. There seems to be innovation in almost every product category. Look at what they have done with SQL 2012, Hyper-V 3 and other products. I truly hope this trend continues.

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/25/2012 at 4:00 PM0 comments

2 Handy XenServer Command-Line Utilities

Many of you posted good comments on the XenServer blog I wrote a few weeks ago and so many others e-mailed me about XenServer that I have decided to follow it up with another article. I almost think it is a good idea to post side by side typical commands that are used in VMware vSphere and how they translate in XenServer and Hyper-V. Maybe I will start a series on VMware admin's guide to XenServer and Hyper-V.

Today, however, I want to introduce you to handy command-line tools: xentop and xsconsole.

For those of you that have been ESX admins for a while now, I am sure you will agree that one of the most important tools in ESX and ESXi for that matter was and still is ESXTOP. It's the de-facto tool when issues arise or when troubleshooting or monitoring the environment. Well, XenServer offers a very similar tool, called xentop, which you can access from the command line of any XenServer host. When initiated, xentop will display what you see in Fig. 1:

Figure 1. The xentop utility displaying in its austere, command-line glory. (Click image to view larger version.)

and will give you access to the columns shown in the following table:

A note on the last one: AFAIK, VBD OO refers to the number of times that VBD has encountered an "out of requests" error, which has resulted in IO requests for that VBD being delayed.

You can also gather information on the state of a virtual machine. In Fig. 1, you'll notice that some of the virtual machines running on the host have the state of "b." This means it is in a blocked domain state. This table show the other code definitions:

Xentop has many other uses, but I just wanted to give you a bried introduction and make sure you were aware of it.

The other cool utility -- or maybe this is classified as just a tool or command -- is xsconsole. I particularly like this command because of its practical usefulness.

When you have the Xenserver host selected on the top left of the XenCenter display, click on the console tab and you will be connected to XenServer via SSH and you'll be given a command-line interface. It's great on its own because I don't have to use a separate tool like putty to connect, but what if I want access to the server's GUI? That usually means I have three options: connect via some kind of IP KVM, walk up to the server, or use something like an HP iLo. All these methods are feasible and easy to use, but they're also time-consuming, because then you need to find the tool or IP address, connect, authenticate, etc. At this point, you're just thinking, "Can I just get access, please?"

Well, from XenCenter select the XenServer host, click on the Console tab and type xsconsole. That will automatically display the text-mode GUI, per se, that you would see when walking up to the server. I love xsconsole -- it is not a huge deal, but the ability to get this type of access easily makes my day (I know, I know, I am lazy). Exiting out of this tool is also easy -- just scroll down to Quit.

Let me know if you're interested in more Xen-type insights.

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/23/2012 at 4:21 PM0 comments

Shared-Nothing Live Migration: Cool, But Not a Game-Changer

Microsoft this week announced a new feature that will be available for Hyper-V version 3 and System Center Configuration Manager 2012: shared-nothing live migration. In so many words, it's the ability to move a virtual machine while it is powered on from one host to another without requiring shared storage.

While I am very excited to see this welcome feature for Hyper-V, which reinforces a much-needed notion of creativity at Microsoft, the feature is not a game changer by any stretch of the imagination. Let's take a look at how it works:

1. Move the VM virtual disks, snapshots, vm configuration metadata over a standard Ethernet connection
2. Move the VM state and memory
3. Delete VM state on original host and complete live migrate to destination host

You can't deny that it is cool and might be appealing to a small subset of customer that are leveraging VMs with small virtual disks, but entertain this scenario for me: a VM with 1 TB virtual disk ... wait, Eli, you are not realistic, you might be thinking ... fair enough -- what about a VM with 500GB virtual disks? Moving that amount of data over a 1 GB Ethernet or even a 10 GB Ethernet is not quick or feasible in most environments, but assuming it was acceptable this would only be used as a maintenance technique which is what it was slated for anyway. To think that you will constantly be copying large virtual disks between hosts is not practical and is not scalable. How many VMs can you move at the same time? What is the impact on the network?

To top it all, you cannot use high availability with this feature, and that makes sense since you need a point of reference for HA to work. How can you recover a VM when its files are on the host that failed? Now maybe in the future they build in replication, but even then, constantly replicating is not easy, scalable or guaranteed. So, for those of you that were dismantling the SAN, not yet folks.

I do want to reiterate, however, that the feature is most certainly innovative and cool and adds value to Hyper-V 3, but I definitely expect VMware, Citrix and Red Hat to respond relatively quickly to such a feature. I am happy, though, that Microsoft is again leading in innovation and others are having to copy features, as opposed to Microsoft playing catch up all the time.

Your thoughts?

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/18/2012 at 2:56 PM15 comments

Mergers, Acquisitions Happen Naturally in the Cloud

The acquisitions season for virtualization giants Citrix and VMware is approaching. Traditionally, we have seen Citrix and VMware announce new acquisitions right around the same time of their conferences taking place.

And since we are on the heels of Citrix Synergy in San Francisco next month, I am betting that Citrix will announce an acquisition of a mobile device management company to augment CloudGateway's capabilities. Many players in this space are prime candidates for an acquisition with a great product and great mind share in the industry, namely Zenprise, MobileIron, AirWatch, MaaS 360 and others.

Zenprise would be cool just because the name would require a single letter change and it would quickly become a member of the Citrix marketing brand of "Xen." Zenprise also packs an impressive set of features for both an on-premise or cloud-based deployment of MDM. Zenprise, on the other hand could also be a target acquisition for F5. In a recent announcement we saw Zenprise extend support for the F5 product for an on-premise, high availability deployment.

That being said, I think Ft. Lauderdale, Florida-based Open Peak is a hidden gem that could be the highlight of the Citrix announcement, located not too far from Citrix headquarters. Open Peak is one of the most impressive MDM solutions out there that has been relatively enterprise-shy. It seems to cater to OEMs and large service providers, and it has not really made a splash in the enterprise. It is worth mentioning that Open Peak is the company that designed the Cius for Cisco. Citrix, or VMware, for that matter, can probably pick up Open Peak for much less than what they would have to dish out for any of the other players. The advantage for Citrix or VMware is that the product can very quickly be integrated with each company's desktop virtualization solutions, the "dropbox" like solutions that both companies have (that is, Citrix's ShareFile and VMware's Project Octopus).

The way I see it is that Citrix and VMware don't really care as much about the install base, since they have a large presence in the enterprise already. But buying Open Peak augments the technology at the right price. I think it is a win, but who will pick them up? Regardless of the vendor you can't go wrong with any of the solutions mentioned here and this space is prime for a consolidation effort. Dell's acquisition of Wyse gives them Trellia. Who will Cisco, Citrix, VMware and possibly Quest pick up?

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/16/2012 at 6:10 PM0 comments

System Center 2012: In a Word -- Cool

Microsoft System Center 2012 is packed with new capabilities aimed at addressing today's technology challenges. If I had to summarize what System Center 2012 was about, I would simply say it's about private clouds and mobile device management, two of the hottest topics in the IT world today.

Microsoft is betting the company's future on cloud, and one of the manifestations of that bet is the strong emphasis on private cloud in System Center 2012, with capabilities ranging from self-service to automation and orchestration. Furthermore, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 can now build private clouds and manage different types of hypervisors such as Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX/ESXi, in addition to Microsoft's own Hyper-V.

But the cool thing about the upcoming release is the way it aggregates physical resources. You now have the ability to find bare-metal servers, communicate with their management port and deploy an image on them. Sure, that's cool, but nothing special; we've seen this before, right? Yet, what's really cool is how you can add it to a resource pool and extend capacity on the fly. It won't be long before we can build clouds that are powered by heterogeneous hypervisors, a cluster made of vSphere, Hyper-V and XenServer, among others.

App Controller is a new feature of the suite and it lets you empower business owners to build, manage and operate services based on service catalogs. Rather than deploy just a single standalone server for a single application, you can deploy a service. To complement App Controller, System Center now introduces Service Manager, a self-service portal where users can customize and request the services they need.

All of this is great, but remember the essence of cloud is automation and orchestration, and that is where System Center Orchestrator comes into play, allowing you to automate processes using run books. What else do you need for a cloud deployment? Operations Manager gives you the ability to diagnose applications and monitor infrastructure. Even though you're in the cloud, you still need to protect your data, and Data Protection Manager is the answer there.

Even Microsoft is acknowledging the effects of consumerization in the enterprise -- so much so that System Center Configuration Manager 2012 will now be able to manage mobile devices with different OSes on them, from Google Android, Apple iOS and Windows Phone to Symbian. I wasn't able to find information on whether BlackBerry would be added to the list. Configuration Manager 2012, however, will find stiff competition in the Software as a Service (SaaS) world from enterprises like MobileIron, OpenPeak and others, which offer powerful solutions that don't require capital investment and offer a better operating expense story. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft offers this solution in a SaaS model as well.

Of course, I wouldn't be this excited if System Center 2012 didn't touch in some way on desktop virtualization. Thankfully, this announcement had a lot to say on this subject, such as IT will be able to optimize application delivery to users based on the device they're using. System Center detects when someone is using an iPad, enforces the iPad policy and delivers applications and desktops that run optimally in iPad mode, such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, for example. However, if the user's on a laptop, it would deliver applications using App-V and allow offline access as well. All this is seamless, policy-driven and automated -- very cool indeed.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that Forefront Endpoint Protection was renamed System Center Endpoint Protection and has been armed with several new features and capabilities.

As you can see, System Center 2012 is a major release, packed with new features. Needless to say, it's one giant beast, and I really think Microsoft should chop off the private cloud components into a new brand just so the product is a bit more easy to digest.

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/11/2012 at 2:51 PM0 comments

Microsoft Enters User Environment Virtualization with UE-V

MDOP, or Microsoft Optimization Pack, is welcoming this Wednesday a new star member dubbed User Experience Virtualization. Microsoft went against the flow and used the term "experience" as opposed to the well-established and popular "environment," which is used industry wide. UE-V will be released in beta first and will be positioned to enhance a desktop virtualization rollouts.

The idea behind UE-V is to establish a centralized location where user preferences and settings are saved and applied on demand to user sessions, whether physical or virtual. This feature is necessary as the ripples of consumerization continue to be felt in the enterprise. As the influx of devices increases, an easy way of applying personal preferences and customized applications settings serves a seamless, consistent user experience.

Microsoft is not without competition in this space. UE-V will find stiff competition with well-established solutions from AppSense, RES Software, Liquidware Labs and others. It will be interesting to learn more about UE-V and see if there will be integration with Microsoft Skydrive, as that will be an interesting proposition considering both AppSense and RES Software now offer Dropbox-like services that are integrated with their user environment virtualization solutions.

I am interested to find out if UE-V will support swapping base operating systems. Will I be able to swap Windows XP for Windows 7 and vice-versa, and maybe tomorrow Windows 8? Or will this solution only address the same operating system? It will truly shine if we can interchange operating systems, as it will also make migration so much easier and painless.

Your thoughts?

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/09/2012 at 5:04 PM0 comments

How To Enable Open vSwitch in XenServer 6

A topic that is way under-covered in the blogosphere is definitely Citrix XenServer so I figured I would add XenServer to the list of topics I cover from time to time. This week I want to cover Open vSwitch, a virtual switch that can be enabled inside XenServer 6. Now for those of you that don't know, Open vSwitch were introduced with XenServer 5.6 FP1 and as a result all XenServer versions after that support it, except it has to be enabled.

A little bit of background: By default XenServer's backend networking uses Linux bridge, an Ethernet networking bridging code used to connect two segments. It is the standard networking code you find in Linux distributions, it has many advantages but it also has a very basic feature set.

The Open vSwitch, on the other hand, has a very rich feature set that includes:

• ACLs and QoS policies
• NetFlow
• Traffic mirroring
• Port bonding
• Per VM traffic policy

Open vSwitch has features are very desirable by any network administrator, but if that was not a good enough reason to use it, well add to it the fact that in order to use Citrix XenServer’ Distributed virtual switching technology, you must enable the Open vSwitch on every XenServer that will participate.

To enable Open vSwitch, connect to the console of each XenServer and run the following command:

xe-switch-network-backend openvswitch

You must restart the XenServer host after initiating this command in order for the changes to take effect. Now, if you want to switch back to Linux bridge, you issue this command:

xe-switch-network-backend bridge

You should use caution as you switch back to Linux bridge, especially if High Availability is enabled in your environment. If that is the case, follow these steps to switch back to Linux bridge:

1. Disable High Availability
2. MIGRATE VMs to a different XenServer host
3. Enable Linux bridge mode by using the command above
4. Reboot the XenServer host
5. Migrate VMs back
6. Enable High Availability

Since this is my first blog on XenServer, I would really appreciate your feedback either in the comments section or via e-mail at elias@eliaskhnaser.com or Twitter at http://twitter.com/#ekhnaser. I am interested to know if you found this particular blog to be useful and if you want to see more XenServer coverage here.

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/03/2012 at 5:11 PM9 comments

Dell Buys Wyse: Brilliant!

Dell announced today the acquisition of Wyse and while there is no denying the move was a brilliant business move I cannot help but feel sad, I am almost as sad as when HP bought Compaq back in the day. I guess I am sad because I have been using Wyse devices for a very long time and I am always fearful when larger companies buy smaller companies that are market leaders, and the reason for that is that I fear the new thin client division of Dell will be limited in its agility and innovation. That being said, I hope I am wrong because it would be a pity.

On the other hand Dell just became the #1 thin/zero-clients manufacturer overnight, but it does not end there, Wyse had recently acquired Trellia, a mobile device management solution, so essentially Dell hit two birds with one stone. If I was a betting man, I would say that Dell will expand the MDM offering to manage laptops as well, thereby delivering a comprehensive end-to-end consumerization solution for enterprises.

If HP (Help, Please!) was having trouble competing with Wyse, well now they have a bigger problem considering Wyse has just grown big muscles and now has penetration inside of all of Dell's accounts. Hopefully, competition will trigger more innovation on both sides of the spectrum, which means that we end up the benefactors of that.

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/02/2012 at 4:52 PM5 comments

VMware vSphere 5 Update 1 is Here: Upgrade Now!

I know a lot of you have been pushing back on the upgrade to vSphere 5 until update 1 was released. Today, I am happy to tell you the wait is over -- go ahead and start planning that upgrade. Many of the customers I spoke to said they would rather wait for an update 1 release before going through an upgrade to vSphere 5 because it was a major release. While I can understand the logic behind it and their prudence in waiting, VMware has historically done a pretty good job from a quality assurance perspective with its releases. But some of us are old school, and I don’t blame you. So what’s new and improved with update 1? Take a look.

vCenter 5 Server U1 -- vCenter received a number of bug fixes as you can imagine is the case with any update release. Yellow-bricks.com has an article listing the different fixes, take a look here. vCenter now supports new guest operating systems like Windows 8, Ubuntu and SLES 11 SP2.

ESXi 5 U1-- ESXi also received its share of bug fixes and updates, including new support for Mac OS X Server Lion, and updated chipset drivers to support AMD and Intel's new processors. Also new is Technical Support Mode (TSM) session timeout. This is a welcome security enhancement measure which allows you to set a timeout value against TSM so that if you are not using it or are idle for a specific amount of time, it will automatically log you out thereby preventing anyone else from using that session. To accomplish this, follow these instructions courtesy of yellow-bricks.com:

1. Log in to Tech Support Mode (Mode) as root user
2. Edit /etc/profile file to add TMOUT=<timeout value in seconds>
3. Exit Tech Support Mode (Mode)

In addition to vCenter and ESXi, vShield, View and Site Recovery Manager were all updated to U1, while vCloud Director is still on a different revision number and was updated to 1.5.1. Hopefully this update release will ease the worries of some that were still holding out on upgrading to vSphere 5.

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 03/26/2012 at 6:13 PM0 comments

9 Cool New Features in Citrix XenDesktop 5.6

On March 9, Citrix released a minor upgrade for XenDesktop. The new version puts the software at revision 5.6. While this is not a major version, it packs some really cool features that make it worth an upgrade. Here's a look at nine of them:

Citrix Personal vDisk Technology
The star feature without a doubt is the integration of technology from the RingCube acquisition, which Citrix completed last year. XenDesktop 5.6 now fully integrates Personal vDisk into all the appropriate consoles: Desktop Studio, Desktop Director, and Provisioning Services Console.

I am personally very excited about this integration because it expands XenDesktop's capabilities even further. You can now address those "exception" or demanding users without deviating from the standards that you have built into the environment. You can now use non-persistent desktops for everyone and break out the users that need persistence using the Personal vDisk technology.

Microsoft System Center 2012-Ready
This is definitely a welcome announcement, not because it is ground-breaking technology, but rather because it shows that Citrix is thinking about desktop management end to end, not just desktop virtualization. System Center is, for the most part, a de facto standard in managing physical desktops. Integration with XenDesktop completes the desktop strategy. The integration also extends features to XenDesktop, like reporting and policy enhancements, that would otherwise be lacking.

Mobile Application Access
XenDesktop on-demand applications based on XenApp automatically adapts the user interface of the application depending on the device being used. For example, smartphone or tablet users interact through a different user interfacce that users at a computer with a keyboard and mouse and large monitor. XenDesktop adds a feature in conjunction with Citrix Receiver to leverage the capabilities of the end user device and to adapt the user interface to take advantage of it. For example, the technology will attempt to display the application more efficiently on smaller screens, will pop up a virtual keyboard when clicking on a text field, and so on.

CloudGateway Express
CloudGateway Express is the successor to the wonderfully pleasant Web Interface; it is Citrix's unified storefront for aggregating virtual applications and desktops. I personally recommend Web Interface as CloudGateway Express still lacks the full feature set of Web Interface. Even then, Citrix has definitely taken a step in the right direction with CloudGateway Express. Another reason to use CloudGateway Express is that it makes it easy to upgrade to CloudGateway Enterprise, a universal broker for mobile applications and SaaS, and it can be used as a Mobile Device Manager.

XenClient 2.1
XenClient 2.1 has some impressive features as well. I can clearly see the positive effect that the RingCube acquisition has had on several Citrix products, but most especially on XenClient with the introduction of layering as a means to manage Windows images.

Dynamic Image Assembly
And with that, XenClient 2.1 now supports layering, a technology that allows IT to maintain its supported, ocked down image but extends flexibility to end users that install their own applications. These applications or customizations go on a different layer. These multiple layers are then dynamically assembled and presented as a single instance to the user. This significantly lowers helpdesk break/fix calls and allows for flexible management.

Delta Image Updates
The Citrix XenClient Synchronizer can update the IT layer with ease. If you make changes to master image, you can use the Synchronizer to update the changes on the image. But instead of deploying the entire image again, it simply updates the delta changes, thereby making the update simpler, easier and faster.

Fast System Updates
This is a really cool feature: Imagine you want to update the image with a new service pack or a new version of Office. While the user is connected to the network, the changes that IT wants to make are downloaded in the background. When the user reboots, the user is automatically presented with the most up to date image.

Automatic Image Lockdown
If you did not want to allow users to install applications or make changes beyond those that affect their data and user profile, you can leverage this technology to enforce IT-deployed applications and settings. Any changes the user makes beyond user data and profile are automatically disregarded; as a result, the IT image is always pristine.

Windows Image Rollback
Did you just roll out an update that is not stable? With Windows Image Rollback you can now undo these changes and go back to the previous version. Simply restart the Windows machine.

Self-Service Install
Users can install IT-approved applications that are available to them via Citrix Receiver.

Citrix is really improving and continually enhancing the XenDesktop platform with some really cool features. I am definitely looking forward to XenDesktop 6; I wonder if we will hear about that at Synergy San Francisco or Synergy Europe?

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 03/19/2012 at 1:39 PM1 comments