One of the things I love about the full vSphere Client is the ability to use shortcuts. I find them to be very handy and time-saving especially, when I am switching from one area to another and multitasking. Now that VMware is clearly pushing the Web Client, I thought it would be helpful if I wrote about some of the useful ones.
Apparently VMware must have missed documenting these shortcuts, but thanks to William Lam of VirtuallyGhetto I was able to find them and decided to blog them here -- very little comes up otherwise when I do a Web search for these types of shortcuts.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 08/05/20131 comments
Colleagues and customers have been asking me about the future of Citrix Provisioning Services and whether they should be deploying Machine Creation Services (MCS) instead of it. Ironically, in some limited cases some overzealous Citrix sales reps and sales engineers have been propagating the idea of MCS over PVS. So let's set the record straight once and for all: Citrix PVS is not being retired and there are no plans in the foreseeable future to retire it.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 07/29/20130 comments
It's hard to imagine Microsoft holding on to its current Windows desktop licensing model for much longer. As the company doubles down on cloud and as Azure builds momentum, Microsoft will look to build more services to improve Azure in the enterprise.
In a recent survey that my company conducted internally with customers (mind you, company sizes ranged from 1,000 employees to about 25K employs), about half said DRaaS was their top priority. A surprising 25 percent said they were going for DaaS and the rest were were looking at IaaS and some other services. Now I am not claiming that our survey is an indicator for what is going on in the market as whole, but considering the markets I service, I would consider it to be fairly accurate.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 07/22/20138 comments
I recently had a conversation with a friend who is a VMware architect for one of the largest snack companies in the world. And that company has a very large VMware infrastructure footprint. He called me up with a dilemma and wanted my opinion on how to address it. He is planning and designing an upgrade to VMware vSphere 5.1, specifically to take advantage of single sign-on high availability (SSO HA) capabilities. He has several vCenter servers in the environment, so he is using Linked Mode -- except he wants to use it in multisite mode. Now my friend is well aware of the limitations and requirements of this implementation, but I will list the caveats here in case you are not familiar with them.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 07/10/20130 comments
One of the more exciting features of Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V is Storage Quality of Service. QoS enables IT admins to control the minimum and maximum number of IOPS a virtual machine can consume. This is an important feature in the cloud era for many reasons.
For starters and to tackle the obvious, we want to be able to control the "noisy neighbor" VMs. This is a situation when a particular VM for a number of reasons is consuming most of the IOPS and limiting the available IOPS for the rest of the VMs, thereby degrading performance.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 07/01/20131 comments
It was the summer of 1997 and I was a computer enthusiast trying to find my place in the technology world. I had just landed my second consulting job as a Windows NT specialist deploying servers for a real estate investment trust in Chicago.
About a week into the job I started to notice these cool-looking minicomputers that I later understood were thin clients. I was intrigued by this little device and very curious as to how it worked, I started to do some digging and since I was in the same work area as the admins supporting the system I started to listen in on challenges, help desk complaints and more and was just fascinated by the whole concept of multiple, isolated users on the same server.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 06/24/20131 comments
One of the new features of XenDesktop 7 and XenApp 6.5 Feature Pack is Local App Access, a technology you might be familiar with under the name "reverse seamless" that RES Software has had in its software for some time now. My understanding is that Citrix and RES have to come to some kind of arrangement that satisfies the legal issues. That being said, it is worth mentioning that Citrix Local App Access is an application that was created from the ground up by Citrix developers -- no code was leveraged from the RES Software implementation.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 06/19/20132 comments
Citrix continues to present enterprises options for dealing with new challenges and scenarios that they are having to deal with on a daily basis. And while we are reminded every day of the increasingly retracting PC sales, Apple's notebook seems to be disassociating itself from this trend as Mac sales seem to be going up. Hence, consumerization. Enterprises today are finding themselves having to deal with Mac BYO, and while there are many different ways of addressing Windows resources on Macs, they generally all require online access.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 06/12/20133 comments
There are so many conferences and so many announcements happening that it is hard to prioritize what to cover. We just came out of the best Citrix Synergy ever and I have so much content to cover still, and we're already deep into Microsoft TechEd and I am just surprised at the amount of new technologies and features that I will have to cover there. Well done, Microsoft. All the while Dell has some interesting announcements that I want to cover and we will soon be heading to VMworld. What I need is to stretch the calendar year for more days and start writing more frequently.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 06/05/20132 comments
Microsoft has been on a roll since the announcement of System Center 2012. Since then, product after product Microsoft has proven that it is really on a roll. At TechEd this week, I am very pleased with the innovation, the thought leadership and the announcements that Microsoft showed. With that, let's talk a bit about Windows 8.1 and Windows Azure, as they are the highlights of day 1. These are not the only cool announcements today, but for this column I am going to limit it. I'll cover more announcements in the weeks to come.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 06/03/20136 comments
This year's Synergy was the most impressive and exciting one I have attended to date. Citrix CEO Mark Templeton delivered an epic keynote assisted by technology's most impressive "illusionist," Citrix Demo Officer Brad Peterson. I really like Mark and I really respect all his efforts to transform Citrix from a single-product, extremely Microsoft-reliant company, to a company that can stand on its own with several impressive products in mobility, cloud and networking.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 05/29/20132 comments
Time has been our greatest teacher and has taught us some valuable lessons as far as what works in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).
A question I am repeatedly asked is, "Which vendor should we go with for VDI?" My answer is that they all work and they all have pros and cons. Citrix is most definitely a front-runner, but that doesn't mean you should immediately disqualify solutions from VMware, Microsoft or Dell. Time has taught us that VDI is not an all-or-nothing proposition, it's not for everyone, nor is it right for all of your workloads. Even then, here are some guidelines you can follow when implementing a VDI project.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 05/20/20137 comments