BrianMadden.com

Details about Microsoft Calista start to emerge, but much is still unknown

Brian Madden — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:34:00 GMT

It's been almost a year since Microsoft bought Calista Technologies , a non-shipping set of technologies that leverages host and client-based GPUs for 3D and multimedia remoting. Since the acquisition, Microsoft has been mum about the technology. Nevertheless, we've still learned a few things about it over the past year. So of the Microsoft folks at BriForum talked a bit about it, Tad Brockway posted a blog entry about it earlier this week, Microsoft demoed a Calista preview at WinHEC...

BrianMadden.com is now part of TechTarget

Brian Madden — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:07:00 GMT

I'm happy to announce that we have been acquired by TechTarget . This is really cool because it means that Gabe and I can focus 100% on writing and interacting with the community, and we don't have to be weighed down by all the operational minutia of running a business. For those of you unfamiliar with TechTarget, they're an IT Media Company. They have something like 60 IT-related websites, including IT Knowledge Exchange , NotebookReview.com , LabMice.net , and all those...

Viewpoint on GM and IT

Michael Keen — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 06:57:00 GMT

We've all been hearing about how the big 3 automakers are coming with "hat in hand" to Washington to get their hands on $25 billion to help them survive. There are many opinions out there about this and I'm not going to share everything I think about this, but I will share my thoughts around innovation as it pertains to GM. Here is a company that hasn't really been in innovation-mode for over 30+ years from a product perspective, but they are innovative on the IT...

Virtual Desktops and N=1

Michael Keen — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:00:00 GMT

This will probably shock a lot of you, but this will probably be my shortest post ever. It's been the buzz for quite some time. We spent a great deal of time talking about it at the last BriForum, I hear about it from customers in almost every meeting. What is it? Virtual Destkops. Besides the technical reasoning of where and why it does and does not work, of which I'm pretty confident some of those issues/challenges will be solved sooner rather than later,...

Geek Speak Road Trip #2 Registration Info

Michael Keen — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:20:00 GMT

hey all, well now that we have a few things solidified (nothing like cutting it short on time huh?), I wanted to share with you all here in the Midwest the registration link for the event. I hope that if you are around you will plan to make it to the live event. I am also working with James Rabey at Citrix to tie into the virtual event on that same day, so hopefully you can catch all the fun and excitement here in Des Moines. I'll have the virtual information very very...

XenApp 5 Feature Profile: Special Folder Redirection

Gabe Knuth — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 03:03:00 GMT

Now that the early adopters have had their fun with XenApp 5, the path has been cleared for the wait-and-see crowd to get their hands a little dirty in the sandbox. Citrix has announced over 50 new features and enhancements, and we're going to take a look at a few of the bigger changes one at a time. Today we're going to explore a feature called Special Folder Redirection. In Microsoft parlance, Special Folders are the ones that are presented to users in such as way as to hide...

Enterprise Architecture: another component to an agile and flexible enterprise

Michael Keen — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:52:00 GMT

In the last post I spoke about the importance of IT governance. Although IT governance is critical to the success of having a flexible and agile enterprise, having an overarching enterprise architecture to show how all the components of the enterprise are related and to guide the decisions that affect IT is just as important. Now I'm sure that most of you out there have an enterprise architecture in place, but for those of you who don't, I'll give you my two cents. The...

What does Microsoft Azure have to do with us? Hint: not much today.

Brian Madden — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

By now you're surely aware of the [relatively] huge announcements Microsoft made last month about their new Azure platform . Basically Microsoft is buying hundreds of thousands of Dell servers that they will run themselves. They also wrote their own hypervisor ( not Hyper-V ... rumor is it's Xen-based) and modified Windows Server 2008 to run in a redundant grid-like way. Now that they've got (or perhaps I should say, now that they're building) this platform, they're going to...

In the culture of innovation, leadership is key

Michael Keen — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:00:00 GMT

I've often blogged about innovation here as it related to using the technology we work in to innovate. Now I want to take a different tack and look at the culture of innovation in a broad scope and share some of my thoughts and experiences. In all of the reading I've done and my work inside some of the biggest companies in the world, I've learned a lot on the subject of making innovation work and the one thing that it comes down to is the culture and leadership of the...

IT Governance; the foundation for an agile and flexible enterprise

Michael Keen — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:08:00 GMT

I did a post week or so ago on Simplification, Standardization, and Integration and the Citrix Delivery Center. Now I want to lay the foundation for how those design principles are put to work. The foundation for any agile and flexible enterprise is IT governance. So what is "governance"? it is about establishing a framework to ensure that all decisions are made by the right person or persons, to put it simply. Now most of you reading this have an IT governance...

Windows Server 2008 R2 will be 64-bit only. Think about what this means for terminal services!

Brian Madden — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:54:00 GMT

One of the announcements that come from PDC was that Windows Server 2008 R2 would be 64-bit only . At first I just thought, "It's about time!" and it really didn't sink in. But a few days ago it hit me like a ton of bricks. "Holy crap! This means terminal servers (soon to be remote desktop services ) is going to be 64-bit only as well! This means that all of our apps, all of our profiles, printers, virtualization, management--everything--has to be 64-bit. I guess now we...

Sun Rays get a firmware upgrade for better video performance. Wait... what?

Brian Madden — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

InternetWeek reported a few weeks ago that new firmware for Sun Ray clients is available , and that one of the key new features is multimedia redirection. This is funny because I thought the whole point of Sun Rays was they were so thin? Check out this quote: The Sun Ray line is a truly "thin" client that relies primarily on the server for processing, where competitors such as HP (NYSE: HPQ) and Wyse offer beefed up "chubby" clients that include PC and graphics chips to...

Want to know if your app runs on Citrix? Check the "Citrix Ready" website

Brian Madden — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 06:43:00 GMT

This is actually pretty cool. Citrix recently launched the new " Citrix Ready Community Verified " portion of the Citrix Community site. Unlike a lot of vendor "ready" programs that are just a shakedown for payments from ISVs to be certified, this portion of the Citrix Ready site is powered by the community. The idea is that you add the applications that you've been able to get running on Citrix into the database. If someone else has already added your app, you can...

How to Deploy the XenApp Web Plugin (ICA Web Client) v11 via Web Interface 4.6 and Web Interface 5.0

Katie Koepke — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:20:00 GMT

For those who would like a quick “Google-able” article on how to deploy the new XenApp Web Plugin (formerly known as the web client) this is the article for you. To do this, you basically follow the instructions from CTX114097, “Deploying the Web Client 10.1 for Windows through Web Interface 4.6” but with a few modifications. First, download the XenApp Web Plugin from Citrix. For Web Interface 4.6 Rename XenAppWeb.msi to Ica32Web.msi. Copy Ica32Web.msi to \Program...

VMware gets into the mobile phone virtualization business

Brian Madden — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 07:00:00 GMT

Apparently VMware bought some technology from a company called Trango Virtual Machines last month which they're launching today as the "VMware Mobile Virtual Platform" (VMware MVP). The point of this is not so a user can run multiple VMs on a mobile device at the same time, but instead so that different types of phones can run the same OS image. (In this case, the Trango hypervisor or whatever you call it would "scrub" and hide the details of the hardware from the mobile...

Geek Speak Road Trip #2 coming to Des Moines

Michael Keen — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 11:48:00 GMT

Yes, it's true. The hit event of last year's Synergy and the latest Partner Summit conference is coming back to Des Moines on December 4th, 2008. Last June we (Citrix and Alliance Technologies) brought Geek Speak out on the road for the first time and had a great turnout. We had Jason Conger, Barry Flanagan, Doug Brown, and me. I'm still working on this event's speakers, but suffice it to say, they will be just as awesome as the last event. This year we...

Change = Opportunity for Innovation in IT

Michael Keen — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:53:00 GMT

If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times, change presents opportunities. The ability to adapt to change is a key advantage in business. To survive, compete, and win, enterprises must adapt. However, because change is often disruptive and expensive, few organizations are prepared to take advantage consistently of the opportunities that change presents. The IT organization, in particular, is sometimes often seen as a roadblock to business agility. This...

Citrix Delivery Center: Simplification, Standardization, and Integration

Michael Keen — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 04:47:00 GMT

I have always followed some guiding principles when engaged in designing or reviewing customer environments. I've highlighted these before in past posts, but with last week's Citrix Summit, Mark T mentioned some of these guiding principles in his keynote and I wanted to share how they apply to the Citrix Delivery Center. Mark's keynote highlighted the some of the issues and challenges that customers have today. For instance, today's environments are still, for the...

It's official: Microsoft will extend the TS connection broker to also handle VDI (updated)

Brian Madden — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:35:00 GMT

SearchWinIT is reporting from Microsoft TechEd in Barcelona this week. In an article publised today, Margie Semilof wrote that Microsoft is extending Terminal Services Remote Desktop Services for Windows Server 2008 R2, due out in 2010. Quote from the article: Terminal Services now has a single broker to connect users to sessions, or virtual machines, or virtual desktop scenarios with Hyper-V, said Ward Ralston, group product manager in Microsoft's Windows Server group. This move was widely...

The name "Terminal Services" is dead. Get ready for "Remote Deskop Services."

Brian Madden — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:30:00 GMT

SearchWinIT is reporting from Microsoft Tech Ed 2008 in Barcelona that Microsoft announced that the new version of Terminal Server will not be called Terminal Server. Instead, it will be called "Remote Desktop Services." This is probably a good move for several reasons: The name Terminal Server doesn't really describe what this feature does. Remote Desktop services can apply remote desktops for workstations (VDI) as well as TS servers. Ok, so now we have server-based remote...

Dell's new thin client: jack of all trades, master of none?

Brian Madden — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 07:00:00 GMT

Behold the Dell Optiplex FX160 : Yesterday Dell announced their "flex client" series of desktop devices. This is basically a super-small Optiplex-branded client based on Intel's Atom processor . So what is it? A thin client? A desktop PC? A locked-down PC? A desktop appliance? Yes. This single client device model can be used in many ways, such as: Running Windows XP Embedded or embedded Linux, like a traditional thin client device. Receiving a streamed OS (like from Citrix...

Citrix Summit Day 2+

Tim Mangan — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 12:24:00 GMT

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 he reports on Day 2. This is the second Citrix Summit event of the year. Because Citrix chose to move Synergy (the conference formerly known as iForum) from the fall into the spring this year (presumably to get...

Save the date: BriForum 2009 Chicago will be July 22-24

Brian Madden — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:28:00 GMT

We've decided definitively that next year's BriForum will be from July 22-24, 2009. We're going to use the same venue as last year, which was the Chicago Navy Pier. 2009 will be our seventh (!) BriForum, and we're very excited about it. We'll launch the website and the early-early bird registration soon. In the meantime, circle the dates on your calendar. BriForum will be on a Tues-Wed-Thurs Wed-Thurs-Fri this year. That's not due to any kind of scientific analysis of...

Citrix Summit 2008 - Day 2

Tim Mangan — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:36:00 GMT

Hey! We have a new website

Brian Madden — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 08:00:00 GMT

We launched a new version of BrianMadden.com last night. Hopefully the only changes you notice are that it's faster and more available. A few notes: The forums are pretty cool now. We have the Community News section, which has the RSS feeds of various sites around the web. We don't post the whole articles.. just the first 500 characters or so. Here's an example . We list those on the homepage in that little gray box. We realized after being live for about fifteen minutes that we...