XenDesktop – dready's Blog

Nutanix InstantON For Citrix Cloud

Nutanix and Citrix have partnered to create a tightly integrated hybrid cloud solution that simplifies and accelerates VDI deployments for companies of any size. With Nutanix InstantON for Citrix Cloud, the entire Citrix software stack is delivered as a 1-click service from the Citrix Cloud, attaching with zero effort to the on-prem Nutanix clusters powered by Citrix XenServer or AHV, the Nutanix native hypervisor.

The latest release of Nutanix AOS 5.5 supports out-of-the-box integration with Citrix Cloud and allows businesses to spin up a fully functional hybrid Citrix Cloud solution for XenApp and XenDesktop service environment within a couple of hours.

With Citrix Cloud XenApp and XenDesktop service, businesses no longer have to manage the desktop images, applications and security. All the desktop management services are part of the subscription. On the other hand the VDI and RDSH workloads, including all the sensitive data remain safe and close to the end users in the corporate data center. This hybrid solution approach takes out a lot of complexity of todays implementation of a traditional VDI infrastructure and internal IT can focus on stuff that really matters for the endusers. Continue reading “Nutanix InstantON For Citrix Cloud”

Multi-factor Authentication for Citrix XenDesktop / NetScaler against Azure AD

In my last post about secure access to XenDesktop virtual workspaces I tried to give an overview of the different ways to implement multi-factor authentication with Citrix NetScaler and XenDesktop. I came to the conclusion that integrating the remote access with Azure AD and using the Microsoft MFA feature is a very end user friendly way to accomplish this goal, especially when you already have Azure AD in your setup. In this post I will outline a walkthrough to the setup and configuration steps needed.

NVIDA Tesla M10 – vGPU Power for the XenDesktop VDI

Last year NVIDIA added the Tesla M10 GPU to their existing lineup of NVIDIA GRID accelerators. The Tesla M10 board is designed specifically for data centers that are looking for graphics acceleration for high density virtual desktop environments. It’s a dual-slot PCI Express form factor for rack and tower servers capable of supporting 64 concurrent users. I did a small single server setup / Poc based on XenServer 7.1 and XenDesktop 7.13 to see how vGPU helps to improve user experience, in particular for the delivery of multimedia content on a Windows 10 VDI.

Graphics-accelerated virtual desktops in education – a boost for the user’s virtual workspace

In education there is more than just the basic task worker workloads such as Office. Students and faculty users have an increasing demand for multimedia content and heavier graphic applications in their daily digital learning requirements – this is where our VDI setup has to keep pace and deliver the best user experience possible. Our goal is that the user will see no difference between his virtual and physical workspace.

With the release of Windows 10 and Server 2016 we are planning to upgrade our existing Citrix XenDekstop based VDI environment. At the same time we are testing how GPU would improve the user experience since more and more applications and the new operating systems itself can benefit from GPU acceleration. Continue reading “Graphics-accelerated virtual desktops in education – a boost for the user’s virtual workspace”