Our product management team just added a new Work from Home (WFH) SpotCheck in Stratusphere UX. Now it’s easier than ever to quickly check the health of your WFH desktops, no matter where they are.

Stratusphere’s distributed architecture allows you to install the “Connector ID” agent on any Windows, Linux, Mac OS based machine and quickly start gather User Experience metrics via your network, or in this case, the Internet. If you’ve recently started or expanded a WFH program in the wake of social distancing, and you are responsible for supporting those users, you really need to check this out.

Stratusphere can monitor the end user device (usually a PC) and/or a virtual desktop session, such as those from Citrix or Amazon.

The new SpotCheck report enables you to see at a glance the health of your users’ session with metrics that matter most to Work from Home sessions.

The report focuses on key apps or any other app that’s resources are above a certain known good threshold. You’ll know how your key apps are performing or if something else is consuming resources. Of course, Stratusphere’s recent Optimizer feature for Windows can also be used to automatically tune these resources per app, given which app is in the foreground of the user session. Optimizer can also be set to run select apps with a lower resource priority. The new SpotCheck report also focuses in on Network Latency for key apps, Remote Display Packet Loss, Traceroute Network Hops – typical metrics that are key choke points for WFH users.

To get the new SpotCheck report you can download it from the Liquidware Community forum then import it to your Stratusphere console. If you are not yet a Stratusphere customer and need to assistance diagnosing your users’ WFH desktop/workspace environments with a SpotCheck in Stratusphere, reach out to info@Liquidware.com and your regional contact will be in touch.

In the face of disruptions from Coronavirus (COVID-19), many organizations are asking their employees to work from home or be prepared to do so if there is a local outbreak. Continue reading →

We just returned from Citrix Summit 2020 in Orlando. Although this show is for Citrix community channel partners, it is the first event of the season. As such, it seems to serve as a jump start for the community each year. 2020 was no exception!

Citrix began its first events at the Swan and Dolphin in Orlando and many Synergy (Thinergy/iForum etc.) and Summits have been held there. This was the first Citrix show in many years to be held at this same venue – so it was a bit nostalgic for many of us longtime community members. I was at the first Citrix “Thinergy” in 1998 and it was a bit of a walk down memory lane to have the Citrix Summit exhibit space in the same hall this year. For a while it seemed that the community outgrew this venue but now it seems perfectly sized for Citrix Summit again. It’s not that the community is necessarily shrinking, the Swan and Dolphin have also added meeting space over the years so it is a bigger venue now. Continue reading →

I personally took this picture while on the edge of Horseshoe Bend in Page, Arizona in 2018. The drop, just three feet from me, was 1,000 feet straight down. You can’t tell it but I was crouching so I would not dare fall…because I did not have a safety net. With a wife and three kids looking on, I had too much to risk! Many others have not been so cautious and have fallen to their death at the exact same spot. But I had a strategy to play it safe.

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Cloud-hosted Windows desktops are here to stay, it’s only the speed of their adoption and early pertinent use cases that will be debated/decided on a case-by-case basis. Just like on-prem virtual desktops, not every desktop and user will immediately be a good candidate for a cloud-hosted desktop. To best take advantage of maturing cloud technologies, organizations need to assess what desktops are best for certain users. Continue reading →

Lately we’ve had more and more customers that are discovering that Citrix App Layering and Liquidware FlexApp attached application delivery make a great combination.

Citrix App Layering can be used to manage base images in a Citrix environment. The solution also offers a way to layer applications into the OS. The benefits of layering the OS are great for patching and maintaining base images. However, some customers are finding that they’d like their applications to be delivered on a more dynamic basis, simply attached from a VHD, with fast packaging options, and multi-cloud storage features. Some Citrix customers switch entirely over to FlexApp, Continue reading →

To keep desktops performing their best and with the lowest cost, Microsoft WVD desktops are best managed with a non-persistent (stateless) design. With the GA of WVD, Microsoft has introduced an ephemeral OS disk as an option to deploy VMs on Azure. Continue reading →

What you may have missed…

Microsoft Ignite was in Orlando last week as many have occurred before. This Ignite was different though mainly because there was no way to ignore the major spotlight that Microsoft was shining on Windows desktop delivery. More specifically, Microsoft had many sessions and announcements around Microsoft WVD (Windows Virtual Desktop). More on that later below.
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Microsoft WVD (Windows Virtual Desktop) is now generally available and a robust public preview is well underway. Customers familiar with virtual desktops, such as those running Citrix or VMware, may be early adopters.

Many organizations are asking how they can automatically harvest their existing user environments from Citrix or VMware and automatically hydrate FSLogix profile containers on a Native WVD environment. Still others may be looking at using some of their WVD entitlements, such as Windows 10 Multi-Session OS, in a Citrix or VMware environment hosted on Azure. With Liquidware ProfileUnity, it is easy automatically migrate users from any Windows desktop to Microsoft WVD.
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Updated: 10/01/2019 – Microsoft WVD (Windows Virtual Desktop) has set the Microsoft Windows world on its ear! Everyone is interested to learn more about Microsoft’s forthcoming Azure-hosted virtual desktop that promises to be more turnkey then any solution we’ve seen to date.

Microsoft WVD is now available so you can get started with one of the most anticipated desktop delivery platforms Microsoft has ever launched. Liquidware is a chosen inaugural partner of the Microsoft WVD partner ecosystem. As a Microsoft partner of WVD we’ve been aware of the development and the solution for the past two years.
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