For those that don’t know me, I’ve been in the EUC space for 20+ years. I cut my teeth on WinFrame in what feels like a lifetime ago (in technology time it actually was). In that time, I was a founding member of the CTP program and a Microsoft MVP for a number of years in Terminal Services/RDSH. I’ve worked with small companies and Multi-national corporations on their Citrix environments but six and a half years ago I took a job at a company called Unidesk. They had this technology called layering and it offered a way of delivering applications that was unique. Over those years layering companies have come and gone (including Unidesk) but layering has grown in popularity and has, in my opinion, really started to take off in enterprise application deployments. Why has it taken so long? Simple answer is every technology takes time to grow and when it reaches a certain point it either stays and grows or dies on the vine. Basically, smaller companies work out the “new technology” kinks and enterprises pick it up from there.
Category Archives: General Topics
VMworld 2018 Wrap-up from Liquidware
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.
Real-Time Visibility: Necessary or Cover Up?
I’m often asked if Stratusphere UX offers real-time metrics and information about the user experience. It’s a good question, for sure. Who doesn’t need the ability to visualize end user workspace issues and get to the root cause quickly. That said, I would ask that you not associate immediacy as an important variable in the ability to determine root cause.
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.
Stratusphere UX Profile Score: User Experience Quantified
User Experience is the hot buzz-phrase du jour. Vendors in the end user computing space want to associate their product with it. Often you’ll hear and see claims like, “we enhance user experience” or “we make desktop user experience better.” And while I agree with these sentiments, I can’t help but think the issue isn’t about flowery marketing language, but about taking the subjective and making it actionable for the benefit of IT operations.
Meeting user expectations and delivering user experience is hard. Translating what is inside your users head and defining IT process and operations around meeting these subjective desires can be an almost impossible goal without the right visibility detail. About a year ago I wrote about Baselining the User Experience and Defining a Measure of Success with Stratusphere UX. I wrote about the shift towards using user experience as a definition of success and the opportunity to define SLA and KPIs that can quantify your approach.
E2EVC Epic Amsterdam – Trip Report
This was my first time attending an E2EVC (Experts to Experts virtualization conference). Liquidware has attended and presented at prior events, however this was my first E2EVC and I’m glad I attended.
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
Performing a SpotCheck Inspection with Stratusphere UX
The ability to meet expectations and deliver the appropriate user-experience on shared infrastructure platforms such as VMware View and Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop can be a complex and a challenging endeavor. One of the ways you can stay ahead of the curve is through a point-in-time analysis called the SpotCheck. Liquidware engineers and our partner community have been using Stratusphere UX and this technique—leveraging known levels of acceptable performance and baselines—to identify infrastructure and platform constraints that can contribute to a poor user-experience.
The SpotCheck inspection takes a broad look at overall infrastructure and platform health as a means to provide a picture of resource usage and performance of the virtual or cloud environment. The objectives of the SpotCheck are as follows:
- Provide a 360° view of virtual desktop resource use and performance
- Gain visibility of critical issues, both known and unknown
- Identify and provide analysis of performance issues
- Establish real-world baselines to gauge normal/abnormal operations
- Document and report on findings
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.