The debate still rages on, Hosted Shared or Hosted Virtual desktops. This is probably one of the most common question I hear. So which is it? Hosted Shared or Hosted Virtual? Guess what? The answer, for once, isn’t “It Depends”. The answer is “Yes”, you will mostly likely need them both. For those of you who aren’t sure what the difference is,... (more...)
In another blog, I discussed Windows 7 services that you might wish to disable when going down the path of desktop virtualization. In this article, I’m now focusing on registry modification you will want to make to optimize Windows 7 for virtual desktops. I’ve broken it down into Recommended configurations, Standard Mode configurations (for Provisioning services), and Optional configurations. As... (more...)
Speed. More speed. And to get more speed with desktop virtualization, we hear more and more about how important IOPS are to being able to support the virtual desktop. Not enough IOPS means slowness. No speed. I’ve had a few blogs about it and plan to have a few more. What I wanted to talk about was an interesting discussion I recently had with 3 Senior Architects within Citrix Consulting(Doug... (more...)
It almost sounds like I’m talking about personal finances. You better plan your cache appropriately or you will run out. I’m not talking about money; I’m talking about system memory (although if you plan poorly we will quickly be talking about money). It comes down to this… system cache is a powerful feature allowing a server to service requests extremely fast because instead... (more...)
For those of you who missed the June 18th TechTalk on the design for a 20,000 user environment, missed out. Well, not really. Luckily, we recorded the presentation so you can watch it whenever you desire. As you know, the webinar was based on a reference design for a 70,000 user school district. Links to the materials are as follows: TechTalk Webinar for 20,000 User Design Reference... (more...)
Building a virtual desktop is simply a matter of installing the Windows operating system. Right? Slow down… although this will work, it won’t give you the best performance and scalability. One of the items that many people mistakenly forget to accomplish is to optimize the base operating system. This is the 7th mistake out of the top 10 mistakes made with virtual... (more...)
All I want is a list of documents that will help me design my XenDesktop environment. Who else wants the same thing? I bet many of you are saying “Yes, Me too!!” That’s great and everything but how do you know when a new white paper is released that relates to XenDesktop design? Do you keep your own personal library of white papers for XenDesktop... (more...)
Someone save me from antivirus. Did you read that correctly? I said save me from antivirus. Odd isn’t it? Anti-virus is there to protect us, but we also need to be protected from antivirus. Antivirus solutions are critical, even in a virtual desktop environment. Many people believe that because a hosted VM-based virtual desktop image is created from a real-only image... (more...)
For those of you who didn’t know, last week was BriForum and I was able to attend as a speaker and as an attendee. I think it was a great event, and I believe it was the largest one ever, so congratulations to Brian, Gabe and the TechTarget team. What did I learn last week? I learned 10 things, which ironically fits nicely into this blog. Without wasting more of your time, here... (more...)
What would you say if I were to tell you that migrating to a virtual desktop was no different than if you were going to migrate to Windows 7? I’m being serious. Migrating a user to a virtual desktop has many similarities to migrating a user to Windows 7 on a traditional desktop. With a Windows 7 migration, we are concerned with hardware, operating system, applications, personalization,... (more...)
