10 Can't Miss Citrix Synergy 2014 Sessions
Citrix Synergy 2014 is in Los Angeles in a few weeks, and Citrix has released the session catalog online. I took a good look inside and here are my recommended sessions, hand-picked to help you navigate the sea of information that typically are presented at these conferences.
A session that needs no introduction and is year after year one of the best, most interactive sessions of the show is "Geek Speak Live." You can’t attend Synergy and not participate in it. The panel is top notch, the topic are often timely and the setting is a casual one. For those who want to track me down, don't miss that session, because I'll be there. There are several Geek Speak Live sessions so be sure to check the catalog.
Next up is SYN251 – Direct from the performance labs: Best practices for VDI, a virtual reality check presented by my friend and fellow CTP, MVP and vExpert Ruben Spruijit and Jeroen van de Kamp. Do you think you know VDI best practices? You will find that the research that Ruben and Jeroen do is pretty deep and extensive and you are bound to learn a lot from their session. If you are working on a VDI deployment, attend this session. Remember, VDI in a POC or a limited deployment of up to 500 is not a big deal, but VDI at scale is a different beast!
Speaking of VDI at scale, are you working for an enterprise with a VDI project in the tens of thousands? Then I recommend SYN119 – How Atlanta Public Schools delivers virtual desktops to 50,000 students, presented by Thomas Gamull. If you are in healthcare, check out SYN250 – Deploying XenDesktop with Cisco UCS for 10,000 healthcare workers, presented by my good friend Jarian Gibson. This will be a technical session, so bring your coloring books and crayons.
Are you looking at the cloud for possible deployment of your VDI environment? We all love showdowns and comparative analyses that can save us a ton of research and heartache, right? I have a session for you: SYN254 – Showdown: AWS vs Azure for desktop delivery, presented by another one of my fellow CTPs, Henrik Johansson. Henrik does an excellent job and is very thorough. I am personally very interested in this session.
Do I need to stress the importance of monitoring and proactive identification of issues or user experience degradation? We have all experienced that. Heck, it is the dreadful demise of our day when we get these types of calls. Check out SYN326 – HDX Insight to identify XenDesktop Bottlenecks, also presented by Henrik.
You can’t attend Synergy and not get a taste for GPU computing in virtual desktops and to get an unbiased, unfiltered, honest-to-God opinion, I can’t think of anyone better than my fellow Chicagoan and friend Shawn Bass and his evil German mad scientist and fellow CTP Benny Tritsch. Think you are technical and can handle this session? Show up and prove me wrong by attending SYN324 - Comparing GPU-accelerated high-end graphics performance of virtual desktop platforms.
If you say you don’t have a Dropbox problem in your environment, you are either not aware of them or you're ignoring it in the hopes that it will go away. Likely, you are wrong on both counts. Come to SYN216 – ShareFile: What’s New and What’s Next. ShareFile is quickly competing with XenApp as my favorite Citrix product.
I have always maintained that enterprises should look at End User Computing holistically and not in a silo -- not just XenApp and XenDesktop, not just ShareFile and XenMobile, but all of them together and how they integrate. SYN308 - How XenMobile integrates with NetScaler, XenDesktop and XenApp for complete enterprise mobility should cover a big chunk of that strategy.
Finally, you can’t go to Synergy and not attend a cloud session that is tied to business. For that, I recommend SYN233 - Achieving business agility with cloud computing in data-intensive, media-rich, web-scale environments. I have high hopes for this session.
As you can see from the session catalog, the show is packed with excellent content and you can’t go wrong with session choices. I just figured I would give you my perspective and some of the sessions that I will be attending. If you have other sessions that you think should be highlighted, add them in the comments section. I hope to see you there!
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 03/12/2014 at 5:13 PM