If you missed VMworld 2018 this year, you missed some great End User Computing momentum! This was Liquidware’s 10th VMworld but it was personally my 12th show. The week before leaving I came across my VMworld backpack from the second VMworld in 2005 and decided it was time to put it to use, more on that below.
Author Archives: Jason E. Smith
FlexApp Gets Bragging Rights vs. VMware App Volumes and Citrix App Layering in WhatMatrix Smackdown
The experts at WhatMatrix recently awarded Liquidware FlexApp first place when compared to standard/included Application Layering from VMware and Citrix. Many criteria were considered and you can see the full report here.
Going to Microsoft Inspire? Join our Speaking Session with Microsoft – RDS/RDmi Applications & User Profiles from Azure
Microsoft Inspire is their worldwide partner conference and it will be held at the Mandalay Bay Conference Center next week in Las Vegas – July 15-19, 2018.
We’re proud to have been asked and to be participating in a speaking session on Remote Desktop Services (RDS): Partner business opportunities for hosting Windows desktops and applications on Microsoft Azure.
The panel will be chaired by Microsoft’s Principal Program Manager Lead, Remote Desktop Services, Clark Nicholson.
We’ve Rolled out Liquidware’s Red Carpet for former RES and AppSense Customers!
If you are a former AppSense or RES customer and are uneasy about changes from your longstanding UEM solution in the wake of acquisitions by Ivanti, consider Liquidware ProfileUnity.
We’ve made it Easy to Switch
We’ve recently on-boarded several large customers with 5,000, 10,000 and 20,000+ user desktops. We’ve even developed a best practice methodology to get your users switched for minimum or zero downtime. We even have trained AppSense and RES staff to help you with the transition! Furthermore, we now have an additional European office in the Netherlands to service this area. Continue reading
Microsoft Office 365 and One Drive – One User, Two Desktops, Windows 7 and 10
Many Citrix, VMware, and Microsoft RDSH customers leverage ProfileDisk and Profile Containers to handle large profiles for non-persistent VDI and RDSH environments. ProfileUnity accomplishes this by containerizing all or part a users profile to virtual disk. One of the use many ProfileDisk use cases that has been proven over the years is Office 365 Cached Mode & Indexing. ProfileUnity also has the ability to “containerize” parts of the profile onto VHDs that the solution automatically manages.
Office 365 cached mode is especially useful for Outlook by placing a local copy of your mailbox(es) on your desktop. This local copy performs more seamlessly than relying on a network/cloud copy of the same mailbox(es). The problem with this on with non-persistent VDI comes because mailboxes are rather large, often gigabytes in size. Folder redirection, roaming profiles, profile tools from Citrix & VMware, and Microsoft UE-V can’t handle this use case for many reasons.
Citrix Synergy 2018 in the Rear View Mirror…
Last week Citrix Synergy 2018 happened in Anaheim, California. This was the 21st Citrix Synergy by my calculation. I was at the first Citrix “Thinergy” in 1998 at the Swan Hotel in Orlando. The conference remains one of the most Windows desktop focused conferences in the industry.
Industry First! – User Profiles from Object-based Cloud Services. Getting your Users to the Cloud & Ready for DaaS with ProfileUnity. Available Now.
Summary: Today we’ve announced the availability of options to have your user profiles hosted as a service on Object-based Cloud storage (Amazon S3, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure Blob). This industry first innovation is not BETA, it’s available now and only from Liquidware.
DaaS is now inevitable for most enterprises. The value proposition is maturing to the degree that DaaS is now viable for most organizations. Not all desktops will be the right fit for DaaS at first but the early mover desktops that Liquidware is seeing move to DaaS are call centers and task workers. Knowledge workers and power users will follow quickly as the world feels comfortable and DaaS offerings more fully mature. You’ll likely end up a hybrid approach – with some on-prem desktops and some DaaS desktops.
What if you don’t persist Office 365/Outlook Indexing in RDS and Virtual Desktop Environments?
One of the many feature benefits in ProfileUnity is its ability to persist Office 365 Outlook Search Indexing from non-persistent desktop, DaaS, RDS, and Citrix XenApp sessions. This is very helpful to end users because in a non-persistent environment you would not want to keep indexing or OST files in the users roamed or streamed profile because the files would be quite large and cause a slow logon. If you turned on local indexing for each non-persistent Outlook session, the indexing process would need to start over again, causing many resources to be used each desktop session.
Windows 10 to Windows 10 Migrations are Starting, Say What?
Yes, Windows 10 to Windows 10 migrations are now officially a “thing.” Confused? Don’t be, read on…
By several indications, Windows 10 adoption rates are not even at 50% for enterprise sized businesses, and plenty are still running Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8.1 in pockets. However, even as Windows 7 still dominates the market, Windows 10 is still coming on strong.
What you Need to Know Before using a Windows Profile Disk/Profile Container
Profile Containers/Disks for Windows desktops enable Administrators to offload the entire user profile to a profile disk (VHD or VMDK). This approach allows for an otherwise large profile to be read at a block-level (very efficient) over the network. Liquidware ProfileUnity features the option to use a ProfileDisk™ and containers in ProfileUnity. They can be great – except when they are not. Here are the Pros and Cons that you should know before you rely solely on a profile container/disk to provide an excellent user experience.
Pros
- Great for offloading Office 365/Outlook caches
- Ideal to solve Outlook indexing conundrums for virtual desktops like XenDesktop, XenApp, and VMware Horizon.
- Really great at keeping cloud storage (Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, Amazon Drive, Google Drive, etc) on a virtual network drive.
Cons
- Run in the user context only and therefore can’t pick-up or virtualize other areas of the user profile outside of shell folders.
- Profiles are exactly like a local profile except it is on the network so they are susceptible to profile corruption.
- They are locked to a Windows OS version so you must have a disjointed profile disk/container for every OS the user logs onto, the user cannot migrate their profile or co-exist it with another Windows version.
- Network only – there is no method to go offline. Laptops that even occasionally leave the office are not a candidate for a profile disk/container.