Rick Mack and Michel Roth join Provision Networks / Quest

Hi Rick and Michel,

I can imagine that this new step isn't that easy to make. Best wishes. have a great time!

Ruben

I hope you keep spending time on your site Michel! Good luck!

Brian,

 Help us understand this statement. That Provision allows you to run SBC and VDI in same product. My understanding is the Xendesktop allows you to have a single interface to SBC, VDI and PC Blades.

Thanks, 

I don't think Michel Roth was a CTP, he's a Microsoft MVP, but not a CTP.

hummm... that's not true. Citrix has plans that data back to 2004 to start a CVP (Citrix Valuable Professional) program, that ultimately became Citrix Technology Professional in early 2006, after the community "pressured" Citrix to start one.
 

i guess the point here is that Michel Roth is/was not a CTP

Anybody have a guess as to what will happen to thincomputing.net?

Michel, if you are out there, let us know your plans!

Seems like everybody is going to Provision... when you going Brian? Maybe this is why Citrix was dragging their feet on starting the CTP program. Seems to be a good place for their competition to look to hire employees. :)

I for one am happy for Rick and wish him well!  He definitely is genius extraordinaire number!  In some strange way,  this may be good for Citrix.  If they have a bonofide competitor, Citrix may be motivated to fix some of the issues Rick pointed and maybe, just maybe they will listen and add some of the simple feature enhancements that many of us have been ask for years.

As far as Michel goes,  I wish him the same success as Rick, Jeff and Patrick.   I haven't had a chance to meet him in person (hopefully at BriForum), but he has a stellar reputation in the community and has done an awesome job with the website.

Joe 

I know that decision wasn't the easiest to make, but you never get anywhere in life without taking risks. In the immortal words of Andre Gide, "Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore."

I wish you both, along with Jeff and Patrick, all the best.  See you in Chicago

Cheers
Michael

Good to hear Quest is putting their money down to bring in talent to improve and develop the Provision solution. With the silent and uneventful acquisition I was starting to worry that the flame for Provision Networks was going to be left to die out.

Nice things to see in Provision
1) Multimedia and user experience performance enhancements. Perhaps a Net2Display compatible solution. http://www.ncl.cs.columbia.edu/publications/adeac2006_fordist.pdf

2) Better logging and reporting. Who logged on when, what errors have occurred in the environment, etc.

3) Terminal Server session migration, like VMotion for user sessions. Would make server maintenance so much easier, no more draining servers before you can work on them.

4) Support for Linux desktop remoting. By supporting Linux compatible protocols (VNC, Xwindows, etc) or adding RDP to Linux. I know of a company that offers a solution for this. Would be nice to extend the Provision Connection Broker functionality to Linux desktop/server environments.

5) Please add support for TS Tokens in the RDP proxy to allow reconnects to disconnected sessions when you have more than one terminal server. The feature is there and used by load balancers to reconnect users back to a disconnected sessions.

6) Improve the reliability of the Print-IT solution or take it out back and bury it. I am constantly switching from the EMF format to the PDF format on the universal printers to correct formatting issues. I have seen pages print out mirrored, upside down, characters replaced with funky characters, and some elements of the printout are missing entirely. Switch to PDF and those problems all go away. Other times the Print-IT components on the server enter into fits of high CPU utilization that last for 30 minutes or so, and this happens during periods of very light print traffic.

7)

  A) Add more management to the profile management solution. Would be nice to be able to view the contents of a users saved profile settings and edit them or clear them from within the Provision Console.

  B) Also, being able to prepopulate the profile file on the profile server would be seriously helpful. Imagine being able to deploy Outlook profile settings to a group of users with a few clicks of a button and not having to go to the Office toolkit.

  C) Make the profile management solution more like SepagoProfiles, in that SepagoProfile supports multiple windows environments for the same user and settings. They can go from a Windows 2003 terminal server to a Windows XP desktop and the same profile settings are carried across. Not sure that the Provision profile management is robust enough to support this type of scenario.

  D) Support saving settings of virtualized applications. If a small executable could be inserted into the virtual package that ran at startup and shutdown, and at these times it would import and/or export settings from the virtualized applications file system or registry.

  E) More granular and optimized handling of profile settings by only copying changes. This would allow you to save the entire registry and/or profile between sessions without having to transfer the entire things back and forth for each logon/logoff.

8) Extend what Provision does on the terminal server to desktop environments. Today you can lockdown the terminal server desktop, publish icons, hide things, prevent access to things, manage profile settings, etc. But that is not true of the XP desktop. Not much in the form of management and control is added to hosted XP desktops by the provision framework.

9) When/if more is added to desktop management, let it work in disbursed and semi-connected environments by opening it up to the web. Allowing the components to communicate over web services or https would let me extend my management to home workers, remote branches, and mobile users more easily. Being able to manage a remote workers desktop, whether physical or virtual, over the web would be a nice feature. These should all be easily added to the Provision client.

10) Add support for TWAIN scanners.

11) Better and more managable file sharing between local and remote machines. Policies to allow or prevent this, and settings in the Provision client to connect a folder(s) to drive letters in the remote (terminal server or desktop) session.

We're sure Provision Networks has major plans to do all of the above and a lot more.  As a high-profile customer under NDA, we've had exposure to their roadmap.  I can tell you that it looks scarily impressive.  They've also quadrupled their development team in the last 2 months and thus are firing on all cylinders. 

Those are all great suggestions, but as of today, no other company comes close to offering the breadth of features they do.

BTW, their Print-IT EMF driver yields perfect results compared to all other EMF-based solutions.  Make sure to upgrade to one of their latest versions in which they've made some important enhancements. 

Hi Everyone,

I written a small article about my decision to join Provision Networks. I've posted it to my own website because of space restrictions of these comment fields.

Read it here: http://www.thincomputing.net/articles/about-my-decision-to-join-provision-networks.html

Michel Roth
Thincomputing.net

But 64-bit support would be so green-wise. Has to take less energy to run 1 big box than it would take to run 3-4 smaller boxes, saving money on power, cooling, space, and hardware.

I am guessing that Print-IT took little effort to port to 64-bit and everything else represents a sizable challenge to port and support on 64-bit. The official reponse I heard 2 1/2 years ago was that Provision wanted to support 64-bit, but they wanted to do it right. 5% of the terminal server market has to be larger than 5% of the current VDI market. And you know who the 5% on 64-bit are using, Citrix.

When will Quest/Provision update/release their public roadmap? Provision has done a couple roadmap announcements over the last couple years highlighting the improvements they expected to release. These are very helpful in keeping the userbase faithful.

Citrix would like to publicly thank Rick Mack , Patrick Rouse, and Jeff Pitsch ( plus Michel Roth who was in que for CTP ) for their contributions to Citrix, the CTP ( Citrix Technology Professional ) Program and the Citrix community at large. You have each made significant contributions to the industry which was why you were selected to join the CTP program in the first place. As part of the CTP process we listen and value the insightful ( and blunt ) feedback and ideas that we get to help shape our roadmap and priorities.

Perhaps it’s not too surprising that others in the industry are looking at Citrix and our community to find great talent and follow a success in the marketplace. As many of you have noted, Citrix has been at the center of multiple industry leading changes from Multi user Windows, to Thin Clients, to Server Based Computing, to Application Virtualization and Application Delivery. And we are not done, our new efforts around Web App delivery plus Desktop and Server Virtualization will continue to shape the IT industry going forward.

So let’s keep shaping the industry by proving, implementing, and evangelizing to the “rest” of the IT industry that there is a better way to deliver applications and manage IT than the traditional methods of installing, securing, and maintaining, applications and desktops.

Chris Fleck     

Go do some useful work instead of dishing out an empty speech you under-achiever!  Evangelizing to the "rest" of the community? Didn't you and the miopic idiots, just over a year ago, think VDI was a fad when in fact your main competitor was already out with a product?  You have nothing to evangelize.  You simply steal ideas and claim them your own.

You're the black sheep of this community! 

For the record, Chris Fleck was one of the very first evangelists of "virtual desktops" inside of Citrix--going back to 2004 if not earlier.

-Bill Carovano 

You win.  Trolls always do.

 -Bill Carovano

That's why your a winner, Bill.  Should you refer you back to a fairly recent post in which you professed that Presentation Server is VDI?  You thought leader you!!!

Fantastic, you read my work...I love having a fan club!!

Here's yet another data point for you.  Two weeks ago at VMworld Europe, I had a great conversation with a large European bank that was an existing XenApp (CPS) customer.  They had typical needs to deliver a "virtual desktop" (their words) including a bunch of line of business apps to users all over the world.  They wanted to talk about VDI and XenDesktop.

After about 15 minutes of me listening to their needs and challenges, I asked them if they had considered the "published desktop" feature of XenApp.  It turns out they had only been publishing apps, and weren't that familiar with the published dsktop nor had they considered it.  I guess I'm a bad sales person, because instead of selling them something new (i.e. XenDesktop) I told them they may have already purchased what they needed.  About 45 minutes later they left the meeting with a plan to use this existing investment to deliver their "virtual desktop" needs.  I also mentioned to them where a virtual desktop via hosted XP/Vista might make sense too, but they seemed to like the simplicity of using what they already had (who wouldn't?).

I've had this same type of conversation literally hundreds of times in the past 12-18 months.

Is XenApp/CPS VDI?  In this customer's eyes, it was!  Personally, I don't care to debate that nor does it really matter; in the end no matter what you call it, it solves customers' problems.

-Bill Carovano

Oh yes, I'm a fan of your stupidity and shortsightedness. I even have an autographed photo of you posing next to your favorite NutriSystem meal: pot roast.  

If VDI for you is simply a matter of publishing a TS desktop, then I must say your competition is in great shape (i.e., they won't need NutriSystem).

Like I said, you win.

-Bill Carovano

Brain, We try to us Provision Networks VDI solution to provide a desktop to our mobile werkers, unfortunately we came a few seroius security issues that unable us to continue withe the product, the main issue is:  In 5.10 the PIT file got encrypted. It is however still possible to save the PIT file to any location copy it,  and use it time and time again. Using this PIT brings up a RDP connection to the machine. The broker is totally out of the picture when this happens. After 30 seconds the password in the PIT file expires but the PIT file can still be used after that to get a direct connection to that machine. do you have an idee how to solve or work around this problem? or what means the integration with Juniper ssl vpn solution? 

I believe this issue is solved in version 6.0, as we no longer put connection information into the PIT file (similar to RDP or ICA file), except how to connect to the broker or secure gateway.  I'll write a blog post about this in a few weeks when 6.0 ships.

It should be noted that even the current encrypted PIT file is more secure than RDP files, as they are encrypted using a proprietary cipher and timeout after 30 seconds.  Like I said, in vWorkspace 6.0 this is completely resolved.

Patrick Rouse

Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server

Systems Consultant

Quest Software, Provision Networks Division

(619) 994-5507

blogs.inside.quest.com/provision