Monthly Archives: January 2016

Citrix, End-User Computing, XenApp, XenDesktop

Citrix Summit 2016: What’s New With XenApp and XenDesktop 7.7

I recently attended the 2016 Citrix Partner Summit event in Las Vegas. I gathered what I felt were some of the most important notes provided by Citrix around what’s new with its core enterprise products. In this first post, I will review what’s new with XenApp and XenDesktop 7.7. In my next post, I’ll share what’s new with XenMobile 10.3. If you have questions around these announcements, please reach out. 

Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.7

  • Zones
    • Deployments that span widely-dispersed locations connected by a WAN can face challenges due to network latency and reliability. Configuring zones can help users in remote regions connect to local resources without forcing connections to traverse large segments of the WAN. Using zones allows effective Site management from a single Citrix Studio console, Citrix Director, and the Site database. This saves the costs of deploying, staffing, licensing, and maintaining additional Sites containing separate databases in remote locations. Zones can be helpful in deployments of all sizes. You can use zones to keep applications and desktops closer to end users, which improves performance. For more information, see the Zones article.
  • Improved database flow and configuration
    • When you configure the databases during Site creation, you can now specify separate locations for the Site, Logging, and Monitoring databases. Later, you can specify different locations for all three databases. In previous releases, all three databases were created at the same address, and you could not specify a different address for the Site database later. You can now add more Delivery Controllers when you create a Site, as well as later. In previous releases, you could add more Controllers only after you created the Site. For more information, see the Databases and Controllers articles.
  • Application limits
    • Configure application limits to help manage application use. For example, you can use application limits to manage the number of users accessing an application simultaneously. Similarly, application limits can be used to manage the number of simultaneous instances of resource-intensive applications, this can help maintain server performance and prevent deterioration in service. For more information, see the Manage applications article.
  • Multiple notifications before machine updates or scheduled restarts
    • You can now choose to repeat a notification message that is sent to affected machines before the following types of actions begin:
      • Updating machines in a Machine Catalog using a new master image
      • Restarting machines in a Delivery Group according to a configured schedule
    •  If you indicate that the first message should be sent to each affected machine 15 minutes before the update or restart begins, you can also specify that the message be repeated every five minutes until the update/restart begins. For more information, see the Manage Machine Catalogs and Manage machines in Delivery Groups articles.
  • API support for managing session roaming
    • By default, sessions roam between client devices with the user. When the user launches a session and then moves to another device, the same session is used and applications are available on both devices. The applications follow, regardless of the device or whether current sessions exist. Similarly, printers and other resources assigned to the application follow. You can now use the PowerShell SDK to tailor session roaming. This was an experimental feature in the previous release. For more information, see the Sessions article.
  • API support for provisioning VMs from hypervisor templates
    • When using the PowerShell SDK to create or update a Machine Catalog, you can now select a template from other hypervisor connections. This is in addition to the currently-available choices of VM images and snapshots.
  • Support for new and additional platforms
    • See the System requirements article for full support information. Information about support for third-party product versions is updated periodically. By default, SQL Server 2012 Express SP2 is installed when you install the Delivery Controller. SP1 is no longer installed. The component installers now automatically deploy newer Microsoft Visual C++ runtime versions: 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Visual C++ 2013, 2010 SP1, and 2008 SP1. Visual C++ 2005 is no longer deployed. You can install Studio or VDAs for Windows Desktop OS on machines running Windows 10. You can create connections to Microsoft Azure virtualization resources.

Citrix Director – The Director version provided with this release contains the following new and enhanced features

  • Proactive monitoring and alerting
    • You can now configure proactive alerting and notifications when thresholds are reached. This enables quicker responses even when you are not viewing the monitoring console. For more information, see Alerts and notifications.
  • SCOM integration
    • Deployments that use Microsoft System Center 2012 – Operations Manager to monitor deployments can now view alerts provided by the Operations Manager on the Dashboard and in other high level views in Director. For example, if connections to supported hypervisors fail, the administrator can check Director for Operations Manager alerts. After reviewing alert details in Director, the administrator can then switch to the Operations Manager console for additional troubleshooting, if needed. For more information, see SCOM alerts.
  • Windows Authentication
    • Director now supports Integrated Windows Authentication. For single sign-on, a user’s Windows credentials are automatically used to access Director. This support allows users to log on to their machines using any credential provider and supporting hardware, and use that logged-on identity to access Director. For more information, see Use Director with Integrated Windows Authentication.
  • Desktop and Server OS usage
    • The Trends view now shows the usage of Desktop OS by Site and by Delivery group, and it shows the usage of Server OS by site, by Delivery group, and by Machine. This gives you a real-time view of your OS usage, enabling you to quickly assess your site’s capacity needs. For more information, see Monitor historical trends across a Site.
  • Application limits in Director
    • Application limits configured in Studio are shown in existing views and counts in Director. For example, the User Connection Failures on the Dashboard will indicate when a connection attempt fails because it would exceed an application limit. Citrix has also announced that they are going to release version 7.8 in the first quarter and is intended to enhanced application delivery and management.

Again, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out!

 

By Peter Crepeau, Solutions Architect

 

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Dropbox, Box, Egnyte beef up Microsoft Office partnerships

(c)iStock.com/RonBailey

Cloud storage providers Dropbox, Box, Egnyte, and Citrix ShareFile have announced updates which allow the ability to co-author documents in real time on Microsoft Office products.

The update comes as further validation of Microsoft’s policy for collaboration on Office as opposed to competition, having initially launched the Cloud Storage Partner Program in February 2015. The Redmond giant courted controversy after ditching unlimited offerings of its own storage product OneDrive back in November, over fears a small section of users were taking more of their fair share.

Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft Office corporate vice president, wrote in a blog post: “We announced the Cloud Storage Partner Program and enabled cloud storage providers to connect their services to Office Online and Office for iOS. Today’s interoperability announcements are another step in our journey to make Office more open for customers and partners.”

Alongside real-time co-authoring, Dropbox and Box customers will also be able to further integrate with Office on iOS and seamlessly attach content to emails in Outlook. Microsoft says it is looking to add other mobile platforms later this year, with Citrix ShareFile, Edmodo, and Egnyte integration also coming soon.

The additional move comes days after Dropbox announced the availability of an app for Windows 10. A blog post from the company reads: “With this deeper integration, you get the power of Dropbox right from the Office tools you rely on to get work done.”

Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, said: “Box and Microsoft are delivering an unparalleled collaboration experience where customers have seamless access to their business content regardless of device or platform.” Isabelle Guis, chief strategy officer at Egnyte, said: “By executing successfully at the highest level with folks like Microsoft and Google, we are confident that we can replicate success with a wide variety of new partners.”

Application Virtualization, Parallels RAS, Parallels Remote Application Server, RAS, Remote Application Server, The Cloud, virtual applications, Virtual desktop

Why are Virtual Applications Still a Hot Topic?

The massive computers of yesteryear became smaller and more powerful, and then they became portable; mobile phones became smart, packing more power and more opportunities for networking—and it’s clear that the direction of the technological revolution is more portability, more mobility, and more power to the user, connecting users to who they are and to […]

The post Why are Virtual Applications Still a Hot Topic? appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Accounting Software, Customer Story, Parallels Desktop, Parallels Desktop 11, Parallels Desktop for Mac, QuickBooks, Quickbooks on Mac, Quicken, Windows on mac

Customer Story: QuickBooks on Mac is a Trend

The following post includes two customer stories submitted to our Advocacy program. We are incredibly thankful to Sabra and Joyce for sharing their stories with us and allowing us to share them with you! Read on for their experiences choosing and using Parallels Desktop. We’re so appreciative of the folks that take the time to write us and tell us […]

The post Customer Story: QuickBooks on Mac is a Trend appeared first on Parallels Blog.

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From artisans to autonomics: How the automation polar shift will happen

(c)iStock.com/micheldenijs

Since the end of the 19th century, humans have been fascinated with the idea of artificial intelligence and self-governing machines – from the early novels by HG Wells to the Hollywood blockbusters 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator and Ex-Machina.  And while this fascination will probably never subside, one thing is certain: In the not so distant future, machines will become increasingly useful to us.

One area ripe for this advancement is IT infrastructure management. Machine intelligence will allow infrastructure to regulate, protect and heal itself from external attacks or threats.

Evolution of IT services: From the artisans to autonomics

In the coming years, there will be a polar shift as autonomics begins to play an increasing role in the delivery of services. The polar shift (or, more accurately, the geomagnetic reversal) happens when magnetic north and magnetic south swap places (about once every 500,000 years). The IT equivalent means humans and machines swapping places. In today’s workplace, humans use systems and processes to fix problems when infrastructure goes wrong. With true autonomics, the machines self-regulate and only occasionally escalate decision making to humans.

Over time autonomics will display ever-more sophisticated cognitive characteristics where machines will interact more effectively with customers, clients and operators. The upside of this transformation is not only economic – it’s about delivering a higher quality of service. With autonomics, it’s about eliminating mistakes – which humans are prone to – and enabling machines to do things faster and more thoroughly. This is my vision of the future.

Cloud’s key role in autonomics

At its heart, autonomics is partly about the automation of key processes and tasks but it is also about machines being able to make decisions as the environment in which they operate changes.

The on-ramp for these advanced autonomics is cloud computing. The beauty of having a cloud platform that is compatible with the traditional ITIL world, and the highly automated cloud environment, is that this multimodal way of working can become streamlined. The marriage of cloud computing and autonomics means that machine intelligence is no longer restricted to an on-premise architecture, but can be spread across various cloud-based services that run simultaneous instances of autonomics. In other words, businesses running machine learning on the cloud will be able to scale their services to meet demand across a variety of platforms, anywhere in the world.

Because machine learning improves with continued use, widespread use of machine intelligence through the cloud will lead to autonomics, a natural evolution of automation. At that point, autonomic computing can evolve almost naturally, much like human intelligence has over the millennia. There’s one stark difference, though: with cloud computing, the advances will happen at a much faster pace.

Read more: A trillion tiny robots in the cloud: The future of AI in an algorithm world

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Join @AppNeta at @DevOpsSummit New York | #DevOps #APM

SYS-CON Events announced today that AppNeta, the leader in performance insight for business-critical web applications, will exhibit and present at SYS-CON’s @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo New York, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
AppNeta is the only application performance monitoring (APM) company to provide solutions for all applications – applications you develop internally, business-critical SaaS applications you use and the networks that deliver them.

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Join @IBMcloudant at @CloudExpo New York | #Cloud #BigData

SYS-CON Events announced today that IBM Cloud Data Services has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 18th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
IBM Cloud Data Services offers a portfolio of integrated, best-of-breed cloud data services for developers focused on mobile computing and analytics use cases.

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Procurement in 2016 – The Supply Chain Goes Digital By @Dana_Gardner | @CloudExpo #Cloud

A BriefingsDirect business innovation thought leadership discussion focuses on the heightened role and impact of procurement as a strategic business force.
We’ll explore how intelligent procurement is rapidly transforming from an emphasis on cost savings to creating new business value and enabling supplier innovations.
As the so-called digital enterprise adapts to a world of increased collaboration, data access, and business networks, procurement leaders can have a much bigger impact, both inside and outside of their companies.

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Cognizant, Opinion, vertical cloud

Harnessing the vertical cloud: why regulatory burdens don’t have to feel like an uphill struggle

cloud storm rainAs cloud adoption continues to grow, business innovation, scalability and agility are not only becoming realistic goals for the modern business, but mandatory requirements in order to facilitate growth and keep up with the competition. As many companies already have highly virtualised infrastructure in place, their IT strategy is increasingly focused on cloud adoption as a means of not just driving cost efficiencies but also innovation. Increasingly, businesses are looking at ways to ease the burden of meeting regulatory compliance and security requirements by implementing the relevant cloud adoption strategies.

As cloud computing is maturing at a rapid pace with many “as-a-service” type offerings such as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), desktop-as-a-service (DaaS), disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS), such developments have paved the way for the anything-as-a-service (XaaS) model. This can be seen as the founding pedestal for next version of the cloud development: the “vertical cloud”. The vertical cloud is designed to deliver core applications, tools and the corresponding biota of a specific vertical that allow organisations to customise cloud services themselves to their specific needs and tastes.

The vertical cloud allows enterprises to pick and choose what to operate in the cloud and on customer’s premises, based on security and compliance requirements that govern their businesses. In industries such as banking and finance or insurance, for example, regulatory compliance is the prime driver while choosing the relevant architecture for their IT Infrastructure. With major regulations on banking and finance in progress, including Basel III and EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), regulatory compliance will remain a major area of investment throughout 2016.

However, using the vertical cloud shifts the onus of compliance to the cloud provider on account of their proven and re-usable governance and security frameworks. Vertical cloud offerings can come pre-packaged with the required regulatory obligations and thus offer organisations a relief from the encumbrance of ensuring compliance themselves.

Continued growth in cloud and IT infrastructure spending
Analysts foresee that a significant acceleration in global cloud-related spending will continue. During 2016, global spending on IT services is forecast to reach $3.54 trillion, as companies continue to adopt cloud services, according to Gartner. This trend is no different in the United Kingdom, where adoption continues to grow. For example, the banking and finance sector is predicted to increase spending on IT in 2016, a big part of which is dedicated to cloud services. Recent guidance issued by the Financial Conduct Authority is likely to perpetuate this trend, by advocating the implementation of the cloud by financial services organisations, paving the way for firms in this sector to take advantage of cloud services and the innovation that it can foster.

The main factors driving cloud adoption are industry competition and pace of change brought on by digitisation. However, businesses need to be more nimble and use the cloud to absorb planned and unscheduled changes swiftly and seamlessly. In order to enable companies to deal with market trends and deviations, the cloud value chain takes a holistic approach to the current business in the context of a changing market. Here is a snapshot of a few such phases which, in rapid evolutionary terms, lead to the adoption of the vertical cloud, a concept that encompasses them all.

The cloud service economy is here. The current trend in cloud adoption is to look beyond asset management and traditional methods used to accomplish business outcome (e.g. developing, testing and repairing). Instead, various flexible ‘as-a-Service’ models offered by cloud firms allow businesses to employ technology solutions themselves, freeing IT teams to focus instead on architectural and advisory services. From the perspective of an IT Infrastructure, the expectation in the cloud service economy is to have ‘value’ delivered directly by the investment made instead of traditional and laborious ways of realising it.

Anything-as-a-Service as a prelude to vertical cloud. Cloud thinking is spurring some organisations to explore running their entire IT operations on the Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS) model with cost vs service consumption variability. Ultimately, however, it is the digital disruption across industries that added to the increasing complexity of continuing traditional in-house handling. As such, businesses are faced with the need to handle next generation requirements such as big data analytics, cognitive computing, mobility and smart solutions, Internet of Things (IoT) and other examples of digitisation.

Security and regulatory compliance are complex and exhaustive, requiring IT infrastructure and applications to be constantly ready for ever-evolving demands. Hence, pursuing the vertical cloud strategy can help business not only to advance and accelerate business growth and gain competitive advantage, but also to mitigate security and regulatory compliance.

 

Written by Nachiket Deshpande, Vice President of Infrastructure Services, Cognizant.

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Join @AlertLogic at @CloudExpo New York | #Cloud

SYS-CON Events announced today that Alert Logic, Inc., the leading provider of Security-as-a-Service solutions for the cloud, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Alert Logic, Inc., provides Security-as-a-Service for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures, delivering deep security insight and continuous protection for customers at a lower cost than traditional security solutions. Fully managed by a team of experts, the Alert Logic Security-as-a-Service solution provides network, system and web application protection immediately, wherever your IT infrastructure resides.

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