Citrix User Group Norway

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XenZone 2012 avlyst

Kjære XenZone-deltaker

Styret i Citrix User Group Norge beklager å måtte meddele at årets utgave av XenZone må flyttes til en senere anledning grunnet økonomiske årsaker. Vi håper at dette ikke vil skape unødvendige problemer for deg eller din virksomhet.

Det koster mye penger å arrangere XenZone, og det er mulig at styret ved denne anledningen rett og slett var for sent ute med en god agenda, eller at det er for mange andre arrangementer i samme tidsrom. Som resultat har vi pr idag ikke det nødvendige antall påmeldinger som kreves for at vi kan gjennomføre på en forsvarlig måte.

Flere av de planlagte sesjonene vil bli flyttet til neste CUG-arrangement som vil gå av stabelen som planlagt på Colorline til Kiel i september (vi kommer tilbake med tidspunkt ASAP).

Dersom du er påmeldt og allerede har betalt deltageravgiften, vil vi tilby dere å overføre påmeldingen til arrangementet i september. Prisen for høstkonferansen blir da det samme beløpet som dere allerede har betalt. Dersom du/dere heller ønsker å bli kreditert påmeldingen, vennligst ta kontakt med oss på xenzone@cug.no .

Høstkonferansen på Colorline vil  bli kjørt med to parallelle spor. Basert på tilbakemeldinger fra våre medlemmer vil det gjennom hele den to dager lange agendaen være en sesjon med fokus på XenApp-relaterte tema til enhver tid.

Har du synspunkter på emner eller fagområder du ønsker inn i agendaen, ikke nøl med å sende noen ord om dette til oss på agenda@cug.no Agendakomitéen vil også avholde et online-møte, der man for åpen mikrofon kan komme med innspill.

Generalforsamlingen vil, som vanlig, bli avholdt i mai. Mer informasjon om dette kommer i nær fremtid.

Styret planlegger en serie med webinarer, og ønsker i den forbindelse også innspill til tema. Har du ønske om emner, å holde et eget foredrag eller dele erfaringer fra dine prosjekter, send dette til bjornr@cug.no eller siv@cug.no så setter vi det på kjøreplanen.

Styret med gullsponsorer og utstillere vil igjen beklage at vårens versjon av XenZone må utgå, men vi lover på tro og ære og komme enda sterkere tilbake!

 

Med vennlig hilsen

Styret i Citrix User Group Norway

Ukentlig Twitteroppdatering for 2012-05-13

Release: Citrix XenClient XT 1.0

Besides announcing a technical preview of the next version of XenClient, Citrix today also announced the release of XenClient XT, a new type supporting advanced levels of security, isolation and performance with extreme client computing requirements. XenClient XT will be available for download in June this year.

Citrix XenClient XT features:

 

  • XenClient XT augments the XenClient hypervisor with hardened components and a unique new network isolation architecture that allows users to run multiple securely isolated local virtual desktops in separate security domains and completely isolated networks, all on a single physical system.
  • Makes use of hardware-assisted security that leverages security capabilities in the Intel Core vPro platform, including a trusted boot capability using Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) ensuring that XenClient XT is checked against a known good configuration on every boot, ensuring no unauthorized modifications to the system.
  • Customers can run a large number of securely isolated desktop computing environments on a single physical system.

Paper: Advanced XenServer Networking Guide

The XenServer Engineering team has just released a new guide that provides advanced design and best practice information about networking.

The 89 pages of this new guide complete and extend informations contained in the Introduction on XenServer NetWorking  guide, released on December 2010.

The Advanced XenServer Networking guide covers, among others, the following topics:

  • Bonding
  • Storage networks
  • Jumbo frames
  • The Distributed Virtual Switch (“vSwitch”)
  • How to define networking requirements and select networking hardware

A separate guide has been made available about configuring iSCSI multipathing.

Illustration from the Advanced XenServer Networking guide: hosts connected to an external network, a VLAN network, and a single-server private network

Quoting the guide author Sarah Vallieres, senior technical writer in the XenServer team:

The goal of Designing XenServer Network Configurations isn’t to tell you everything you need to know about networking but rather focus on the best practices. The idea is that good design prevents issues later on

 

Microsoft set to release Windows Thin PC in June

Back in February, Microsoft announced a new version of Windows 7 tailored for VDI access, named Windows Thin PC. A preview is available since March, as reported by virtualization.info.

Karri Alexion-Tiernan, Director of Product Management for Microsoft Desktop Virtualization, announced on the Windows for your Business Blog that Microsoft plans to release Windows Thin PC in June.

Windows Thin PC (WinTPC) aims to help small organizations benefit of virtualization, offering a solution which should be light on memory, disk and networking resources. At the time of writing, 12.000 customers and channel partners have signed up for a preview through the WinTPC Technology Preview programme.

WinTPC offers customers who use Software Assurance the opportunity to repurpose existing PCs as thin clients by providing a locked down version of Windows 7, and is supposed to include a system for securing devices by preventing users from saving data or installing application locally.

 

Paper: Deployment Guide for Citrix XenDesktop 5 on VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer on NetApp Storage

NetApp has released a whitepaper titled: Deployment Guide for Citrix XenDesktop 5 on VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer on NetApp Storage. The paper which contains 62 pages, provides guidance on how to install Citrix’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solution XenDesktop 5 on top of either the VMware vSphere 4.1.0 or Citrix XenServer 5.6.0. virtualization solutions using NetApp Storage.

The document focuses on hosted VDI desktops providing a step-by-step guide and best practices for leveraging Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS) and the NetApp Virtual Storage Console (VSC) 2.0.1P1. Focus is at achieving multiple levels of storage effiency and performance acceleration and not on maximizing the number of virtual desktops that can be placed on a storage controller.

 

The paper contains the following items:

  • Citrix XenDesktop introduction, providing use cases, provisioning methods and catalogs.
  • Solution Architecture, detailing the purpose and scope, the needed licenses and scalability considerations.
  • Network Setup and Configuration of Cisco Nexus Network Series, Storage VLANs for NFS, Virtual Machine Network, Setup of NetApp Storage Controller and configuration of NFS VIF.
  • NetApp Storage Controller Setup, including intelligent read caching, flash cache and flexscale, volume creation, and configuring optimal performance for NFS.
  • Install and Configure XenDesktop 5 by configuring Active Directory, the Master Virtual Machine and installation of XenDesktop 5.0
  • Deploy Assigned Desktops using the Virtual Storage Console (VSC)

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Release: Citrix XenConvert 2.3.1

Citrix has released version 2.3.1. of its physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) conversion tool: XenConvert. XenConvert is capable of converting a physical server or desktop running Windows to a XenServer VM or provisioning services vDisk. It can also convert an offline VM or disk in the VHD, OVF, VMDK and XVA format, to a XenServer VM.

Version 2.3.1. is the follow up of version 2.3 which was released in January this year and resolves an issue in environments where DHCP is unavailable on the management network.