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Licensing is probably the most dreaded component of any environment’s implementation. To help you with this, Ron Oglesby and I put together this 22-page guide that fully explains everything you need to know about licensing in Terminal Server environments running on Windows Server 2003....

There seems to be a lot of confusion in the industry about what's commonly called the Windows "4GB memory limit." When talking about performance tuning and server sizing, people are quick to mention the fact that an application on a 32-bit Windows system can only access 4GB of memory. But what exactly does this mean? [Note: This article has been updated since it was first published.]...

VMware announced this morning that they've created an open source version of the VMware View client software called the VMware View Open Client. This new client will be compatible not only with VMware View, but also VMware VDM 2.0 and 2.1. This client...

Yesterday Gabe and I talked to a university who needs to design an application delivery solution for lab workstations, server-based computing desktops, published applications, and offline users. After going around and around, we finally settled on a solution that does not involve Terminal Server or Citrix Presentation Server. In fact it's mostly VDI-based with some Provision Networks stuff for app publishing and connection control. Are we crazy?...

A few weeks ago, VMware acquired UK-based ISV Propero, who makes a desktop broker package called "workSpace for VMware." It was only a matter of time, but is it a good thing?...

Three Microsoft executives participated in an online chat to discuss Terminal Server September 21, 2005. The transcript is now available....

This paper is excerpted from the book Terminal Services for Microsoft Windows Server 2003: Advanced Technical Design Guide , written by Brian Madden and Ron Oglesby. It covers all aspects of Terminal Server printing, including background information, design, configuration, driver management, and third party tools. While it's written for Terminal Services running on Windows Server 2003, it's applicable to previous versions of Terminal Services as well....

Tim Mangan is at the Citrix Summit this week. Citrix runs the Summit is yearly to update their partners on upcoming product changes. While this is an NDA event, preventing reporting on much of the details, there still is much to talk about this week....

Today @ Citrix Summit08 Florida US, Mark Templeton announced that the name Citrix Presentation Server (CPS) will be changed to Citrix XenApp. After a few years using Citrix Presentation Server this new name joins XENdesktop (Citrix Provisioning Server and Citrix Desktop Server) and XENserver (XENSource). So it's all about XEN... that's for sure!...

Now that the May 20 release date of Citrix XenDesktop is getting close, it's worth having a conversation about some strange pricing that works out to a $175 per concurrent user (CCU) tax on application publishing.

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(Be sure to check out Ron Oglesby's rebuttal to this: Brian's wrong...about VDI and local storage ) When discussing storage in the context of VDI, people often talk about things like SAN sizing and IOPS and linked clones and thin provisioning and disk...

Microsoft's acquisition of Softricity is now complete and there are some major changes to the licensing for SoftGrid. In a LiveMeeting Monday, Microsoft identified some key changes--some that are already in place and others that are coming. In this article, Michael Burke looks at the changes what they mean to the industry....

A lot of people have emailed me questions about different things, so I figured that I'd start answering them via the web instead of one-by-one via email....

There's been a lot of talk over the past year or so about someone buying Citrix, with rumors ranging from Cisco to IBM to HP to Oracle. And then of course there's the [now] decades old rumor that Microsoft might buy Citrix. Douglas Brown and Jeff Pitsch have both written about this recently, with their consensus being that while there's no real reason for Microsoft to buy Citrix, if another competitor tried to buy Citrix, Microsoft might step in to buy them defensively....

This question is as old as Terminal Server itself. This editorial looks at the real factors that you should base your decision on. Surprise! It's not ICA vs. RDP or the number of users you have....