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This wasn't an article I intended to write right now. But after Alex Barrett blogged about a conversation I had with her last week on this very topic, my inbox has been flooded with emails asking "Did Alex really quote you properly?" and "Are you crazy?" The answers to those two questions are "yes" and "quite possibly."...

Gabe and I are in Sunnyvale, Calif., this week working with Qumranet. Last week we wrote a blog post about our project describing our plans and asking the community for input as to how we should conduct our testing. (The short version is that we are evaluating Qumranet, Citrix, and VMware in the VDI space, and we had some questions about the best way to conduct our tests. Please read that original article before you read this article.)...

Last week I wrote about the four technical capabilities that needed to evolve in order for VDI to become mainstream. For today's article, I put together a quick chart showing which vendors have (or will soon have) which capabilities....

Today Citrix announced that they were working on Desktop Application Streaming technology. This technology will allow applications to be streamed to desktop computers and executed locally (even when offline). This is exactly what Softricity does. In this article, I'll dig into Citrix's new technology and what it means for the company and Softricity....

In this new series called "War Stories," administrators from the field share their tales of lessons they learned the hard way with the hope that you'll have an easier time than them. In this first story, Shawn Bass talks about the importance of a Microsoft spooler hotfix....

Citrix Synergy is going on now in Houston. We're barely two hours into the conference, and there have already been some major news items. I can't possibly do justice to write about each of these things today, so I'm going to use this article to aggregate and provide quick overviews of all these stories, and then I'll go in-depth into each of them more over the next few days or so....

Ever wanted to give your seamlessly published applications that cool Windows XP curvy blue window frame instead of the boring square old-school one? You can do it with a Windows 2003 Terminal Server and the Themes service....

Citrix announced today that they were buying virtualization vendor XenSource for $500M. I wrote a detailed analysis of what this means when I first reported this news last Thursday. In this article, I'll share a few more thoughts that have emerged since then....

Microsoft Hyper-V and the open source Xen hypervisor are so similar that Citrix might switch to using Hyper-V for its XenServer products. Meanwhile, the hot new way to virtualize servers in the open source world is KVM. Where does this all leave Xen?...

Citrix's Program Neighborhood Agent is a great way to access MetaFrame farms. Unfortunately it can only communicate with a single environment at a time--a problem for people who travel among locations or customers. Gus Pinto has written a free PN Agent Profile Manager that streamlines this process....

A lot of people have recently asked me how to configure load-balancing in pure Terminal Server environments. This is a topic that Ron and I covered in our Terminal Server book, so I've pulled out that section for this article....

Something has changed at Citrix over the past few years. They've gone from a company with a laser focus on the cutting edge of peoples' thinking to a huge company with a muddy message, a severe case of corporate schizophrenia, and a dash paranoia. What does this mean for us, and is there any chance of Citrix changing?...

Citrix's Web Interface is a popular way for users to connect to their ICA applications running on Citrix Presentation Servers. Unfortunately, if a Web Interface server fails then users lose access to their applications. The good news is that you have several options when it comes to load-balancing these two servers, and some of your options are free and easy to set up!...

I've been getting lots of crap from the commenters on BrianMadden.com accusing me of ignoring Sun's desktop virtualization offerings. And these people have a point. I have been ignoring Sun. I just don't "get" why anyone would use...

In our latest master level training class on Microsoft App-V 4.5 in Boston last week, Christopher Cawvey asked a question that lead us down an unexpected path; through it we may have discovered a new way to deploy virtual applications to terminal servers...