Gabe Knuth

Join us for our post-keynote podcast LIVE from Citrix Synergy 2013 with guests Shawn Bass and Jeroen van de Kamp at 1:00 Pacific, 4:00 Eastern

Gabe Knuth — Wed, 22 May 2013 05:14:00 GMT

Are you missing Synergy this year? Is there just too much information coming out of twitter to make sense of what's happening? We're here to help! Join Jack Madden and myself (with Brian chiming in somehow, despite the fact that he's playing hooky this year) as we break down the announcements made during the Citrix Synergy 2013 keynote with the help of Shawn Bass and Jeroen van de Kamp. There's going to be a lot to talk about, like ***** and ******, and we'll explain just what the hell is going on with ***. We'll talk about where Citrix hit, where they missed, and on top of everything, take your questions and comments (quemments) in the live chat. We'll do this from the show floor, so maybe we get some interesting passers by to weigh in as well.

To listen, come back to this very page at 1:00 PM Pacific, 4:00 Eastern, or whatever time is appropriate for you. We'll flip the site into show mode about 10 minutes before we start, so if you're here early and hear nothing, don't panic until a minute or two past the start time. These are usually pretty lively, so don't miss out! If you can't attend live, you can still download it after the fact.

The return of the Start menu? Word is spreading that Microsoft is set to give in on Windows 8 and stop shoving tablet features down the throat of desktops

Gabe Knuth — Thu, 09 May 2013 04:03:00 GMT

Word that Windows 8 isn't selling well is probably only surprising to the people that have bought Windows 8 devices so far, because in enterprises around the world the OS has barely gotten any attention other than by the same tortured souls that tried to run Vista. Many sources this week have made mention of the fact that, due to especially lackluster sales, Microsoft may dial back the radical "features" of Windows 8 to make it more broadly acceptable and boost sales. This is, in large part, to boost consumer sales in the PC and laptop sectors that are losing market share to tablets, but it should also bolster enterprise adoption.

According to The Guardian, PC sales have dropped 14% this quarter, despite Microsoft touting how they've sold 100 million copies of the OS. Of course, the majority of those licenses have no doubt gone to unassuming consumers or to enterprises that are immediately downgrading them to Windows 7. Microsoft and, more specifically, former Windows head Steven Sinofsky are catching the blame for the decline of PC sales, and that may not be too far out of line.

What can we expect if Windows 8 executes what Financial Times is calling a "U-Turn?" (or what others have likened to New Coke)? I've written before that Windows 8 is, at its core, still Windows. It's managed the same way as past versions, and it can run all the same applications. Frankly, without Metro and other visual changes, it's probably not much more than a huge service pack for Windows 7. There has been some evidence, however, that Microsoft has re-worked the file system performance such that using Windows 8 in VDI environments allows for better performance and/or higher density. The bottom line: If Microsoft "fixes" Windows 8 and makes it more like the old days, enterprises would probably deploy it by the pallet (or VDI host).

All of this talk, by the way, is coming from a separate vector than the talk of Windows "Blue," which is the codename for the forthcoming update to Windows 8. They could be related, but most of the talk of Blue was centered on killing off the desktop mode entirely. Based on this information, the opposite might be true. It seems like conflicting reports on what Microsoft is up to is the only thing we can ever really count anymore.

So what's likely to change if these latest rumblings prove correct? First and foremost, I wouldn't expect much, if anything to change on tablet-only devices. If Windows 8 was designed with anything in mind, it was for that specific use case (touch-based, with some legacy Windows apps). In fact, Windows 8 in that situation is rather pleasant to use. The problem, as Dan Shappir put so well on twitter, is that it wasn't made for a 24" monitor on your desk.

@gabeknuth also, I actually really like Metro on Surface (WinRT). The mistake IMO is forcing the same interface on desktop with 24" monitor
— Dan Shappir (@DanShappir) May 8, 2013

To accommodate those 24" monitors on desktops (and regular laptops, for that matter), expect to see the Start menu come back. It's the least Microsoft could do to soften the blow. It should be a configurable option, though–perhaps even automatically set based on device type. Tablets would get Metro, Desktops would get the traditional interface, and laptops/convertibles could have an easily accesible option to toggle between the two.

The Start menu isn't the only frustrating aspect of Windows 8, though. The way Metro (or TileWorld, or the Windows 8 interface) integrates with the desktop side of the OS is atrocious. Microsoft can do a lot to either wall one off from the other or to integrate them together in a more intuitive way. IE favorites could persist between modes, for instance, and opening a PDF in the desktop should open a viewer on the desktop instead of in Metro. If something does cross modes to execute, there should be a trail of breadcrumbs to return the user to where they started rather than leaving them stranded in unfamiliar territory.

The search functionality in Metro is actually pretty cool once you realize that it's context-aware. When you're in an application and start searching for something that should be in the control panel, it takes a moment to realize what is going on. I'm an IT guy, and this still frustrates me. Imagine an end user trying to navigate that minefield.

While we're at it, it would be nice to see some education on the gestures, or the ability to use them as a shortcut while giving people something to actually click on to do the same task. Closing applications, switching between them, and docking them in areas of the Metro screen could also use some attention. Solutions could be placing an X back in the corner, and some sort of layout/dashboard feature that let's you see all the apps and arrange them however you'd like.

I'm sure there are many more solutions that people can come up with (even more sweeping things like a different OS for tablets altogether). The important thing is that it appears Microsoft is ready to atone for the problems they've created. Of course, our bellyaching isn't what caused it so much as the aftershocks that continue to rattle throughout the PC industry, but we'll take it any way we can get it. They may have a way to go to win back consumers, especially those that have tried to get to Windows 8 and have a bad taste in their mouth. If I were Microsoft, I might even consider calling it Windows 9 to get away from the bad connotations surrounding 8. For enterprises, though, this could be just the thing to keep Microsoft and Windows in the discussion for a longer period of time.

Despite rumors to the contrary, Dell vWorkspace is alive and well with version 8. Here's a look at some of the new features.

Gabe Knuth — Fri, 03 May 2013 04:03:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, vWorkspace 8 was released, and while we used to be notified of such releases, things have apparently changed since Dell acquired Quest. I'm sure some of this has to do with Jon Roll's departure from the company to fill the CTO position at AppSense, especially since we had a good relationship with him (Jon even wrote the chapter for the sponsored version of The VDI Delusion). What I worry about, though, is that the once-approachable Quest is now part of a bigger, quieter Dell.

To be fair, there was a lot of talk about vWorkspace 8 on the Quest blogs, so it's not like there's something sinister happening, it's just that the flow of information is different these days. We've always counted vWorkspace among the top tier of desktop virtualization solutions, so to have the radio silence is frustrating (just ask the vWorkspace customers). We want the companies that are doing big things and creating new products based on new technology to come forward and share information. I want to help spread that word, too. This stuff is cool, so here's hoping the lines of communication both with us and the community continue to regrow.

That aside, let's take a look at the new features included in vWorkspace according to their documentation. With any luck, we'll get our tech buddies from the vWorkspace group to weigh in, too. Michel Roth, Patrick Rouse, and Rick Mack are all still closely associated with the product. Michel in particular put out out a series of blog posts highlighting new features that I encourage you to check out for more information.

One of the most important aspects of vWorkspace 8 is its support for Server 2012 and Windows 8. The Windows 8 support is probably just there because it should be, despite the fact that most shops are still using Windows 7. However, if the rumors that Windows 8 performs better than Windows 7 in an apples to apples comparison hold true, it could prove to be useful sooner than expected. Support for Server 2012 RDSH is significant because vWorkspace is the first top-tier solution to support the new platform. At this time, even XenApp doesn't on Server 2012. That means that if you want to use Server 2012 RDSH, you'll have to use Microsoft, Dell, 2X, or DesktopSites. I'm sure all that will change soon (we have Synergy coming up, after all, and many of us are hopeful that Citrix will announce something), but as of today that's how the landscape looks.

While we're on the topic of remote desktops, vWorkspace also includes changes to their EOP protocol enhancements for RemoteFX. We already know that Microsoft has all but reinvented RemoteFX for Server 2012/Windows 8, going so far as to effectively rename RDP 8 to RemoteFX. These enhancements alone are enough to give a performance boost in the protocol, but EOP still gives you the opportunity to streamline things using EOP Flash Acceleration, EOP Print, or EOP Xtream, among others. Dell says that there is an 80% improvement in bandwidth consumption with RDP 8. I'm curious to learn how much of that comes from RemoteFX's improvements vs. EOP's. My guess is that EOP is doing much less than it used to because RemoteFX is more capable of shouldering the load, which isn't necessarily a bad thing since it means Dell can focus on other things (or on improving RemoteFX even more).

Remote desktops aside, the support for Server 2012 also means that there is support for Hyper-V 3. vWorkspace's Catalyst features, dubbed HyperCache and HyperDeploy have been updated to work with the new version of Hyper-V. HyperCache is a tool used for decreasing IOPS on VDI environments by caching frequently used bits in memory, specifically creation and boot information. vWorkspace 8 now gives you the ability to use HyperCache for RDS workloads by essentially broadening the scope of what is actually cached. Now it simply watches what's being used and caches things that the system sees as being of a high priority. If something isn't accessed for a short period of time, it's purged from the cache to make room for something else.

HyperDeploy also has seen it's share of enhancements with this release. To refresh your memory, HyperDeploy is used as a way to provision VDI desktops by eliminating the need to store golden images on all your hosts (using local storage, of course) while speeding up provisioning time. This is done by starting the machine creation boot process before the golden image bits are finished copying. It sort of sounds like disk streaming, but I've never heard it called that.

vWorkspace 8 adds a feature to HyperDeploy that "allocates disk space for saving the memory state of each virtual machine. By optimizing the storage of these files, vWorkspace HyperDeploy can significantly reduce the amount of disk space required," according to the configuration screenshot in Michel's blog. Since I've yet to have a briefing, I'm not entirely sure how this works, but it appears to be somehow optimizing the way Hyper-V manages virtual machine memory on the disk.

Something brand new in vWorkspace 8 is called User Experience Monitoring. There appears to be enough here to merit an article all by itself, but the general overview of it is that it gives realtime analytics on the users' experience to help troubleshoot issues. This is based on the Foglight integration that has been steadily progressing over the last few versions, and the functionality that brings is starting to mature nicely. With the Foglight technology, admins are able to watch sessions in realtime and see available bandwidth, latency, and other metrics that affect performance, including information about the endpoint. User Experience Monitoring can also give you insight into the protocol, showing you which aspects of EOP are being used.

At first glance this release appeared to me as a relatively simple modernization of the platform for use with Server 2012. While it has certainly been modernized, the user experience monitoring aspect looks like it is a pretty cool feature, and the updates to Catalyst are nothing to laugh at. As I mentioned before, I'm curious to see what impact the changes Microsoft made with RemoteFX had on the protocol when compared to the EOP enhancements, but that information should come out in due time. I suspect I can get some good information that at BriForum London in a few weeks.

At the very least, this update should serve to calm the fears of vWorkspace shops that were beginning to pilot competing solutions due to the relative silence from what used to be a very talkative group. Late last year, then-VP Jon Rolls wrote a blog post talking about how Dell was committed to vWorkspace and the User Workspace Management group of products. This was warmly received to the relief of vWorkspace customers, but his departure combined with nothing more than a minor update didn't do much to relieve the concerns or stop the backup planning. vWorkspace 8 should be the confirmation their customers have been looking for. What remains to be seen, though, is how VMware and Citrix will react, or how Dell will position vWorkspace in relation to them. Both VMware and Citrix are key partners for Dell, so they still have a lot to figure out.

Microsoft is creating a Windows remote desktop-as-a-service offering based on Azure? How disruptive will 'Mohoro' be?

Gabe Knuth — Thu, 02 May 2013 04:03:00 GMT

Yesterday, Mary Jo Foley broke the news that Microsoft is developing a service based on Azure that will offer pay-per-use Windows desktops dubbed "Mohoro". According to her, this is in the very early development stages and is not expected to be released this year. She even went so far as to investigate the owner of Mohoro.com and Mohoro.net, which are both owned by…wait for it…Microsoft! (Who apparently never heard of MarkMonitor to hide that sort of thing?)

Mary Jo went on to compare Mohoro to Windows InTune, specifically about how InTune is Microsoft's cloud-based extension of System Center, and how Mohoro appears to be the cloud-based extension of RDS. One of her sources called it "RemoteApp as a hosted service," which would seemingly limit it to a terminal server-like role, but why stop at apps?

We've written about these scenarios in the past. A few years ago, Microsoft announced the ability to run Windows Server instances in Azure by uploading VHD files that you then access via RDP. Brian wrote more recently about the implications of Microsoft running desktops from Azure and if they had to respect their own EULA. As it stands today, that EULA does not allow for running Windows desktop operating systems in a fully multi-tenant architecture. That's a mouthful, but essentially it means that each company must have dedicated hardware at a hosting provider for their Windows 7/8 desktops. There are many interpretations of that stipulation, with some believing that only refers to the compute (so each customer would only require their own VDI hosts) while others believe that it means compute and storage need to be completely separate.

If Microsoft makes their own solution, can they call their own shots with regards to the EULA? They can't sue themselves, but the cloud providers that have to adhere to that asinine policy sure can!

Perhaps that quote about "RemoteApp as a hosted service" represents the entirety of the solution. If Microsoft were to use RDSH in a multi-tenant fashion, they would be operating within the confines of their own EULA, avoiding any unwanted attention from customers or the US Department of Justice.

We asked several of our friends about what they thought of the announcement, and here are a few of things they had to say:

Ruben Spruijt (@rspruijt) says: "My assumption is that it will be only the RDSH (TS) role and not the RDVH role. To compete with Amazon, they need to do this. Running ProjectVRC on the high performance Azure VM will be a nice Reality Check."

So at the very least that's another indication that this is for RDSH only. Nonetheless, perhaps a EULA change is in the future, since it appears our suggestion that the future of Windows is middleware is beginning to materialize.

Claudio Rodrigues (@CRod) speculated that this would be incredibly useful for varying workloads because you'd have a cloud-based solution that can dynamically adjust to needs at any given time. Imagine encoding a video and scaling your VDI desktop resources up to something massive, like 32 vCPUs and 512GB of RAM. Or for futuristic datacenters that "follow the sun" around the globe, providing access at peak times around the clock, and even moving VMs between datacenters based on cheaper power, more resources, and so on.

Finally, another person who would rather remain anonymous quoted a Microsoft licensing mobility document that says, "Our analysis and market research indicates that although there is a demand for better management of desktops from end user customers, we have not yet seen a quantifiable demand from the end user or market that demonstrates a need for Windows hosted desktops in the Public Cloud at this point of time."

He went on to say that he fears Microsoft "...will offer this new service to applications delivered via their Windows App Store. It would be easier to offer apps for either download or Azure hosting on a subscription basis. That would be a sticky way to get new apps into their distribution channel where they can make 30% but it won’t solve our legacy business apps problem."

While that would seem to also indicate that Microsoft is leaning more towards and RDSH-based solution, I certainly hope the last part about only delivering App Store apps doesn't come true. Whatever is happening, it's likely to shake things up a bit. How much (and who is affected) remains to be seen.

Could VMCS Shadowing (a.k.a. nested VMs) from Intel's new Haswell processors be what Bromium needs to work in VMs?

Gabe Knuth — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 04:03:00 GMT

Over the last few months, details have been trickling out about Intel's latest processor family, Haswell. Just this week, pricing information was leaked for desktop and mobile processors, and we've also seen feature charts and some benchmarks on pre-release hardware. I'm no processor wonk, so don't expect me to start spouting off about the die size or the innards of the memory addressing scheme or whatever bloody things are new, but I did hear that Haswell will include something we've been after for a long time: direct VT support for nested VMs.

The idea of running virtual machines inside virtual machines isn't new. We've been able to do that in unsupported, emulated ways for many years, but the performance has always until recently bordered on terrible. At the very best, you could say it wasn't production-worthy. The reason for this is that any virtualization done from within an already-virtualized machine had to be 100% emulated by virtual hardware that wasn't designed (or even able) to support virtualization in the first place. The fact that it worked at all was almost accidental (or a testament to the resiliency of the hypervisor).

Because of that, certain solutions are limited to working on physical hardware, like Bromium vSentry. (Tal is the person that got me thinking about this.) vSentry requires ownership of VT, which is just fine on a physical machine. In a virtualized environment, though, the hypervisor owns VT, and cannot relinquish control of it to a VM. It appears that's about to change with the Haswell processors that Intel is due to release soon, which will include a feature called VMCS Shadowing.

VMCS Shadowing, at least as I understand it, allows multiple VMMs (or hypervisors) to have access to the VT extensions on the processor, either by direct access or via what I'll call a passthrough (although I'm not sure if that's the appropriate description). There is also Extended Page Table Shadowing, which does something similar but in memory. Essentially, this all means that VMMs (or hypervisors, or microvisors in the case of Bromium) can have the access they need to VT to make the requests directly, rather than emulating them.

(source)

This could be huge for Bromium because the fact that vSentry only works on physical hardware right now is a limiting factor in its adoption. I've written before about vSentry, but the short description is that it uses micro-VMs to isolate browser threads from the OS, which means that even if a user browses to a malicious website, the machine itself is protected. Bromium can do much more than isolation with this approach, too, like allowing exploits to play out while monitoring them in order to discover how they work, all without allowing the exploit to actually see or do anything harmful to the desktop or data.

Currently, the only way to deploy vSentry into a VDI desktop is to publish Internet Explorer from an RDSH server, but even then the RDSH server must be a physical box (VT ownership doesn't discriminate between servers and desktop OSes). For the organizations that just use the locally-installed browser in VDI environments this seems to be a show-stopper, while for others pushing out browsers via RDSH to desktops (physical or VDI) seems to be standard practice. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the industry-wide best practice is in this scenario, but I can understand both approaches. Still, my guess is that using vSentry on RDSH servers is a tough sell as well because most RDSH servers are virtualized.

This is all the more reason that I think Haswell will be the lift Bromium needs to see widespread adoption, but will Bromium head down that path? It sounds like Haswell PC-oriented chips have already started shipping to OEMs, so we might not have to wait long to find out. In the meantime, is publishing browsers from vSentry-enabled physical RDSH servers a good enough solution for your organization?

XP Paid Support: US$1 Million for 5,000 desktops for first year. Seems astronomically high, but if you need it, is it really?

Gabe Knuth — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 04:01:00 GMT

We're now under one year to go until the end of life date for Windows XP, which Brian wrote about a few weeks ago. The relatively short article opened up a flood of comments talking about whether or not there are elevated security risks for running XP beyond that date, and while nobody can argue that the risks are higher, some, like Jim Moyle and myself, believe that the risks rise significantly, while others (I'm looking at you, Andy Wood!) aren't ready to push the panic button yet.

I wanted to spend a minute or two getting down on paper what I know about Microsoft's paid support for Windows XP. I have two unofficial sources for this information, and it's unlikely we'll get a model that any company can use to create their own estimate. Microsoft is handling this on a per-customer basis, and it depends on the number of machines, your EA and SA status, and so on. Your mileage will more than likely vary.

There are two aspects to paid support for XP. First, organizations must buy into the program. The cost for this, from what I can tell, is around USD $200/desktop for the first year. This jives with information I've received from two sources, one with 5,000 desktops who will have to pay $1 million and another with 8,000 desktops that will have to pay $1.6 million. The second aspect is with regards to hotfixes. Each hotfix created for a company will be done at a cost of $50,000. Let's look at what these costs mean.

With the buy-in program, you're entitled to receive security updates (which don't count as hotfixes). The buy-in fee is per year, and from the source with 5,000 desktops, I've heard that the yearly number goes up significantly each subsequent year. The numbers I've seen suggest that the second year will cost $2 million and the third will cost $5 million. Microsoft doesn't want you to get used to paying for XP support, I guess! If the same linear cost holds up for the 8,000 seat customer, they can expect to pay $3.2 million in year 2, and $8 million for year three.

One can only assume that those numbers don't remain linear. I don't know where the break points are, but suffice it to say that if you have 2,000 desktops, you're probably going to pay more than $200/desktop, and if you have 20,000 desktops, you'll likely pay a little less. Still, it seems that if you want to get an idea of what it will cost you to join Microsoft's paid support program for Windows XP, you can estimate $200 per desktop to help you get started adjusting to the sticker shock.

The hotfix fee is simply for changes to code to fix problems you have with the OS. When is the last time you had Microsoft create a hotfix for you, though? Odds are, you probably won't need to do this very much, but what's another $50k when you're spending a few million dollars a year on program membership? :) (credit Andy Wood for that information)

Is it really that expensive?

Sure, the shock of seeing the budget for software licensing shoot up by an extra million or so dollars per year is horrific, but let's take into account what's happening using our 5,000 seat deployment. We assume that each of those 5,000 seats cannot be upgraded for some reason or another, and because of that there is a relatively large risk involved in running XP unsupported. While we disagree on the amount of risk, I don't think it is debatable that running Windows XP after April 8, 2014 is going to be more risky than running any newer version of Windows.

$200 per computer to prevent some sort of catastrophic security nightmare from happening doesn't sound so bad in that situation. In fact, if that number stayed the same for smaller deployments, I could see organizations building that into their budget. Of course, Microsoft sees that, too, and that's why the raise the fee to $400 per computer for the second year and $1,000 per computer for the third. We'd prefer not to talk about Year 4.

Still, for those that need more time, $200/computer might be an acceptable price to pay for an added year of peace of mind. There are probably situations where this is actually cheaper than upgrading to Windows 7, especially when you factor in new hardware and re-developing applications for Windows 7 (or other platforms).

Bear in mind, I am in no way recommending that you pay for XP support, but I do understand that situations exist where it might make sense. Almost every time I give a presentation and ask who is planning on using Windows XP beyond 2014, the people that raise their hands are doing so because of some sort of specialized equipment or government contract. Replacing the equipment or breaking the contract can be costly, and so paying for XP support could very well be the only way to go.

There's a few other things that have been on my mind regarding the end of XP, so let's get them out of the way while we're on the subject.

Gray Market Patches

Someone once emailed me and asked if I knew of anyone that would be capable of reworking Windows Server 2003 patches for Windows XP, since support for Server 2003 R2 doesn't end until July 14, 2015. I'm not aware of anyone doing that, but it is quite possible that with a small amount of trickery you could get Server 2003 patch code running. I've rolled my own hotfixes in the past when getting the RemoteFX-enabled version of the RDC to run on Windows XP, and as long as there's no drivers involved it should be possible. With drivers, signing becomes an issue, and MS could quite possibly put their own checks into actual patch files to make sure that they only run on a supported OS.

Of course, this way would not be sanctioned by Microsoft, but you're only doing it if you're running XP without support, so what do you care? :)

Activation Servers

I still have yet to hear what Microsoft will do about the activation service for Windows XP. Sure, they could keep it running indefinitely, but MS could just as easily turn it off after it's all over. Will they release a key that works for anyone? Will they release a hotfix that turns off the activation requirement? There's enough uncertainty there that you should consider it when you consider running XP without support.

ShareFile doesn't (fully) work on XenApp? Now Citrix is making apps that "don't work on Citrix?"

Gabe Knuth — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 04:03:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I was in Phoenix having lunch with (non-tweeting) Hal Lange and Joe Shonk of Thin Client Computing, and over a meat loaf sandwich (which I assume is native Phoenix food), I listened to their stories from the trenches. One such story was about the fact that Citrix Sharefile doesn't work on Citrix XenApp, at least not in the way most of us would like to see. I asked Hal to contribute some information, and what follows is an amalgam of my thoughts, Hal's procedures, and Citrix's own documentation for getting it to work in a limited capacity.

Out of the box, ShareFile doesn't work at all with XenApp. While I can't find a reason for this, I assume it has to do with local sync and multiple simultaneous users, or perhaps the server OS itself. Whatever the case, local synchronization, among other things, is not possible. With some effort, though, ShareFile can be made to in an On-Demand Sync manner where files are shown in a folder then synchronized down to a client as needed.

According to CTX136078, you'll need to download an ADM template be able to switch on On-Demand sync. Once you've imported the ADM template, you'll see that the group policy is where you configure the ShareFile account name, whether or not you log in with ShareFile credentials or AD SSO, and whether or not users are allowed to synchronize information at all. You'll also need to specify a local path for the files to live. This file can be a variable, like %username%\ShareFile, but it cannot be a UNC path or reside on a network drive. That means that even if it had full sync capabilities, it wouldn't make much difference because the files can only be stored locally, and who stores data locally on their XenApp servers?

It's worth noting that these can also be set via editing the registry, too, but the bottom line is that they have to be done before you install ShareFile. Also of note is that the ADM template is only for Server 2008 R2, although I suspect you can create your own or edit the registry manually for other versions of Windows. If you're curious, the registry keys used are (from the Citrix post):

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Citrix\ShareFile\EnterpriseSync

Required Values

Account (REG_SZ): The ShareFile account name.

AuthenticationType (REG_DWORD):

On-demandPersonalFolder (REG_DWORD): Set this value to non-zero to setup user's Personal folder as On-demand sync.

-OR-

On-demandFolderIds (REG_MULTI_SZ): List of ShareFile Folder Ids that will be synchronized on demand. Administrators are expected to use the Main App to get the folder IDs of the shared folders.

Optional Values

LocalSyncFolder (REG_SZ or REG_EXPAND_SZ): Path to the fixed local drive. Removable media and network shares are not allowed. Environment variables are supported but must set the value type to REG_EXPAND_SZ.

SharedFolderIds (REG_MULTI_SZ): List of ShareFile Folder Ids. Administrators are expected to use the sharefile.com website to get the folder IDs of the shared folders.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Citrix\ShareFile\EnterpriseSync

Required Value

On-demandSyncDiskVolume (REG _SZ): This must match the LocalSyncFolder’s root drive letter in order to enable On-demandSyncDiskVolume (that is - "C:\")

After installing the software, you'll have to rebuild the user profiles on the machine. That's probably not that big of a deal in a XenApp environment if they're destroyed at logoff, but I mention it here so you don't expect it "just work." Frankly, we wouldn't need an article about this if it "just worked." :)

According to Hal, the last caveat is to make sure that ShareFile has the right permissions after installing the software. To do this, he offers up these steps:

From an elevated command prompt, run: “Sc qsidtype ctxSharefile”
If that command doesn't output "SERVICE_SID_TYPE: UNRESTRICTED" Run "Sc sidtype ctxSharefile unrestricted" to change the service SID type.
When that's done, restart the ShareFile Sync Service

What I find hard to believe is that as robust a solution as ShareFile is, Citrix hasn't found a way to get it working in what remains their most popular desktop virtualization platform. Remember, this is only for on-demand sync! Perhaps this could all change in the coming weeks as Citrix gears up for Synergy. It could also be that Citrix is simply nudging people towards using ShareFile Storage Zones Connector for enterprise-wide mobile data and cloud sync.

I will admit that I don't know if other data mobility solutions out there suffer from the same problem of not being able to support file sync to a network drive from XenApp sessions, mainly because I never considered that it would be an issue. If you know of other solutions that are either fully-functional or don't work at all, let us know. Also, if you're a ShareFile shop, is this a big deal? Do you simply use the Storage Zones Connector instead?

Thanks again to Hal for pointing out the problem and passing along a solution. (If you can call it a solution, that is :)

Parallels jumps into Mac management via SCCM arena, plus they add hypervisor and VM management

Gabe Knuth — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 04:03:00 GMT

Last week I had a call with Parallels, which was my first briefing with them in quite a while. I'm a Parallels Desktop user on my Mac, but besides that Parallels rarely comes up in the desktop virtualization space outside of that (other than a few "what if" scenarios from time to time). What I learned was that earlier this year they released a product called Parallels Management Suite for Microsoft System Center, the main feature of which is to allow you to manage Mac endpoints via Microsoft SCCM.

The product works by installing an agent on the Mac endpoint that is either deployed manually or via a network discovery install. In the latter scenario, SCCM is directed to discover macs on the network, establish an SSH connection to them with predefined admin credentials, and install the software. After the agent is installed, admins are able to deploy software and scripts, inventory software and hardware, and take advantage of SCCM's native reporting functionality. Many of the tasks available to Windows admins are also available to Mac admins.

The only caveat to application deployments that I was made aware of is that the application must support silent installs. I'm not sure how many applications this eliminates from consideration, but I did confirm that you can package Automator scripts that can be used to automatically install applications that require user interaction.

This sounds great, but it isn't the only product on the market that integrates Macs into SCCM. In fact, it's not even the only product from a vendor in our coverage area. When Dell acquired Quest, they also acquired QMX, which is as close to the same product as possible. There are some key advantages that QMX has at the moment, though. First, QMX can deploy OS images to the endpoints. Second, QMX also features management extensions that support iOS and Android devices. Both of these features are on the road map for Parallels Manage Suite, but are not yet part of the product.

What sets it apart from QMX, though, is the ability to manage the hypervisor component and deploy virtual machines, too. I don't mean to imply that it's not possible for QMX to do this via scripts, but Parallels has specifically added functionality to manage Parallels Desktop Enterprise from SCCM (not the cheaper Parallels Desktop). This includes both managing the hypervisor configuration itself and deploying virtual machines. Parallels Management Suite also adds remote support, which I don't believe is a feature of QMX (although I could be wrong).

Still, the only way to de-provision a virtual machine is with scripts. That, combined with the fact that the management agent must live on the host (so the entire device is managed by SCCM) means that this is probably not a comprehensive BYOC solution yet. Future updates, I hope, will bring the ability to manage the hypervisor on machines that are not domain-joined, like contractor laptops. Parallels doesn't have a Windows client hypervisor product, so it would be welcoming to see that or to some other integration with VMware, VirtualBox, or Client Hyper-V, if only for the sake of VM portability.

Still, it's interesting to see some movement in this space beyond Dell QMX, and I think that centralized management of Macs has value in many organizations, especially when you combine that with centralized management of VMs. Prior to this product, you'd have to have multiple solutions (like MokaFive Suite + QMX), but Parallels is trying to bring it all together into one solution. You can argue that QMX + MokaFive gives you more features, but that also brings added complexity. Don't forget, too, that VMware is making waves in the Mac BYOC/Client Virtualization space with VMware Fusion Pro and Horizon Mirage, so I expect to see some back and forth here.

Parallels Management Suite is available today, and retails for $30/user. It works with System Center 2007 and 2012.

BriForum London Early-Bird pricing ends this Friday (for real this time!)

Gabe Knuth — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 04:01:00 GMT

You may have seen our post last week about the final early bird discount for BriForum London ending last Thursday. Well, we kind of forgot about Spring Break (which we heard about from more than a few people). Because of that, many of you were unable to register last week due to the Easter holiday. So, we’ve decided to extend the £100 discount through this Friday, 5 April, to give everyone a chance to get Early-Bird pricing.

In case you haven’t seen the agenda yet, we encourage you to visit the BriForum.com website to see the schedule for the two-day conference, as well as the detailed session descriptions. As always, we’re proud of the speakers and sessions that are presented each year at BriForum and 2013 is no different!

Also, while we're on the subject, in case you want to attend BriForum Chicago, register by April 26 to save $300 during our super early bird discount.

I thought we weren't supposed to use Windows 7 x64 with VDI. If that's the case, why are so many doing it?

Gabe Knuth — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:03:00 GMT

Last week, Project VRC released the results of their State of the Industry Survey, and upon reading it I discovered several interesting things (which I wrote about last week). Besides the fact that significantly more people are doing non-persistent VDI than just about everybody thought, and that only about 50% of the organizations are using something beyond scripts and GPOs to manage their user environment, I was surprised to see that over 34% of people are using Windows 7 x64 as the guest OS in VDI environments! This revelation goes against just about every best practice I can recall hearing, and I can't imagine 34% of the organizations have uses cases that demand 64-bit OSes. I want to look into the implications of this a bit, in hopes of either discovering why companies are doing this or educating as to why they shouldn't.

Click to enlarge

From the survey, we can see that themajority of people are using Windows 7 x64 on their systems, followed by 29% of people running Windows 7 x86 and 25% (gasp!) on Windows XP x86. The Windows XP number surprises me because you'd think that if you were moving to VDI, you'd be upgrading your OS as well, especially with the end of Windows XP approaching in just over a year. That is an article for another day, perhaps, but suffice it to say that those 25% should be getting their migration in gear quickly, either to Windows 7 or to Windows Server 2003 R2.

Windows 7 x64 is in widespread use on physical desktops in organizations. The vast majority of people that I talk to are replacing Windows XP desktops with new hardware running Windows 7 x64. In fact, it seems most of the people that aren't deploying the 64-bit version are doing so for some application compatibility problem that requires 32-bit (for instance, the need to support 16-bit apps or installers). Of course, there are other solutions for this, but at least they got to Windows 7. On the desktop side, hardware is cheap and the enhancements are valuable, so the impact isn't noticed or cared about.

What is that impact, though, and how does it translate to VDI? It's commonly tossed about that Windows 7 x64 consumes somewhere around 200MB more memory than it's x86 equivalent, and if you multiply that by your VDI users, this can add up quickly. If you have too little memory in your machines, you're paging more often and require more storage resources, and if you address it by adding memory, there's a cost associated with that, too. VMware's own Server Storage Sizing Guide suggests that Windows 7 x64 VMs require 2GB of memory (as opposed to 1GB for x86), 2 vCPUs (as opposed to one for x86), and an additional 4GB of storage space. Those numbers effectively cut capacity in half, while increasing storage requirements.

What we don't know, based on the survey, is the amount of memory these machines are using, and if they've been deemed to require more than the 3GB of memory that a 32-bit machine can address. If that's the case, then 64-bit it is. We also don't know the breakdown of use cases, applications, or how many Windows 7 x64 VMs are used. The question was simply "Which OS is/are used for the desktop VMs?" So it could be that 34% of organizations have just a few x64 guest OSes, but if that were the case I'd expect to see far more than a 29% share for Windows 7 x86. We also don't know if the organizations are using mostly 32-bit or 64-bit apps, which would be important since there is more overhead using a 32-bit app on a 64-bit machine.

Based on the survey, it appears that most organizations do at least some sort of testing ahead of time, so I would imagine that most of the implementations of x64 Windows 7 have done so knowing the impact it has on their systems. Perhaps the real-world resource implications aren't as large or impactful as is commonly believed. It could also be that the experience or performance benefits outweigh any costs associated with added capacity. Of course, it could also be the "It's what we do on our physical desktops, so it's what we do in our VDI desktops" mindset, too. In a way, that might make some sense. Rather than having two platforms to worry about, you'd just have one, and aren't we at least somewhat willing to pay for that convenience?

This year at both BriForum London and Chicago, Ruben Spruijt and Jeroen van de Kamp are giving a best practices and performance session using results obtained by Project VRC, so hopefully that will shed some light on the situation. I've yet to see a comprehensive, multiple platform comparison between the two, so I'm looking forward to that session. In the meantime, what do you have to say? Do you use x64, or x86? What has your experience been with either?

Project VRC's State of the Industry survey results: 32% of VDI is stateless, and over 50% of companies don't use third party UEM. These results and more!

Gabe Knuth — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Last year, Project VRC invited people around the world complete an extensive survey that asked them to describe their desktop virtualization environment. 662 people took part in the survey, and since it closed, Project VRC has been busy making sense of the data. That information was made available today, and after looking at it, I want to share some of my observations. There are so many useful data points that I can't talk about it all in one article, so I invite you to visit the Project VRC website and download a copy of the results.

Before I get into the data, I thought I'd share some background on Project VRC. It was started in 2009 as a collaboration between PQR and Login Consultants to develop best practices and collect information on the desktop virtualization space. Ruben Spruijt (@RSpruijt) and Jeroen van de Kamp (@TheJeroen) (of PQR and Login, respectively) are the founders of Project VRC, and, along with a team of like-minded geeks, have compiled and shared much information over the years through white papers, presentations, and community involvement. These guys–and I mean this in the best possible way–are crazy! I don't know when they sleep, or when they stop thinking about desktop virtualization. The end result, though, is some really awesome information. (So thanks, guys!)

On with the data

I took a ridiculous amount of notes when reading the survey, but I can't possible write about them all. It's broken down into many sections, including VDI, SBC, comparing stats between the two, and explaining how Oracle stacked the deck. Well, they didn't say "stacked the deck", I did. Let's just say once Oracle learned about this survey, the number of Oracle responses skyrocketed. This information has been sanitized, and the Oracle numbers in the survey are believed to be accurate. We had the same problem (not with Oracle, though) when we polled our readers for the vendors that we should include in Geek Week, when we had a sudden influx of votes from a single IP address that belonged to Symantec :)

Let's look at some key observations:

Hypervisors

There's no surprise here that VMware makes up the vast majority of hypervisor usage, with vSphere 5, vSphere 4, ESXi, and ESX making up 63% of the responses. Surprisingly, Hyper-V 2 is in use in 9% of organizations, which beat out XenServer's 8% share. They also note that 10% of the organizations are migrating to Hyper-V, which I have to say isn't all that surprising. Microsoft has made many improvements, and has all but declared war on VMware in that arena.

While we don't know the percentage of people migrating away from Hyper-V, the key takeaway here is that while MS was bringing up the rear, they are now the third-place hypervisor, and people are actively migrating towards it.

WAN Optimization

47% of companies have no WAN optimization at all in their environments, which isn't surprising. Those that do are using Citrix, Cisco, and Riverbed, followed by F5 and Juniper. Citrix is the clear favorite there, but with almost half the respondents doing nothing at all, there's a lot of room for growth with regards to the vendors and a lot of room for improvement with regards to the user experience and WAN utilization.

VDI

It's no surprise that XenDesktop has a 44% share of the connection broker space, or that View is second with 27%. What is surprising to me is that Oracle came in at #3 with 13%, beating out Microsoft (6%) and Dell vWorkspace (just 3%). Perhaps this is due to Oracle's marketing efforts (that's the word Project VRC used), but it could also be the loyal following that Oracle VDI has. It will be interesting to see this same statistic next year, which we can use to gauge how Microsoft is doing with RDS in Server 2012 and to see what, if anything, Dell is doing with vWorkspace.

Probably the most interesting aspect of this is that 32% of respondents were using stateless VDI as the primary desktop platform, while another 36% had at least some stateless VDI in their deployments. Those numbers are way out of line with perception, and I can't wait for Project VRC to mine that information more. In the future, they'll slice up the data in other ways to try to get an idea of what's going on. I have personally seen an increase in the use of stateless VDI when I ask the question during the VDI Road Shows that I give, so I'll be curious to see the results.

SBC

Not shockingly, SBC is in widespread use in 85% of respondents organizations. 40% of respondents said that SBC was their primary method of desktop and application delivery, while another 35% said it was in use alongside traditional desktops. Around 2/3 of people said that they use XenApp 5 or 6, followed by Windows Server 2008 R2 with 13%. Oracle and Server 2003 both came in around 4%.

Just over half of the people said that they use Windows Server 2008 R2 x64, while Server 2003 R2 x86 was in second place with 23%. This isn't surprising, since Server 2008 x86 is essentially Vista Server. I don't expect to see that number drop until we get closer to the EOL date for Server 2003, which is July 14, 2015. Until then, we might even see increased use in Server 2003 as a way to extend the life of Windows XP applications past April 8, 2013.

Storage

33% of respondents are using their existing storage for desktops, which we've argued against in the past because desktop I/O is so much different than standard I/O on storage arrays (or even that of server virtualization). It could be that their storage was already optimized for desktops, though, which I imagine would work just fine for everyday use as well. 42% have a dedicated storage solution just for their desktops. The vast majority of them are using well-known vendors. Additionally, of the companies using VDI, almost 3/4 of them are using centralized storage as opposed to local. I wonder if it's possible to mine from the survey the breakdown of stateless/persistent combined with centralized/local storage?

Citrix Provisioning Services beat out VMware Linked Clones, full clones and Citrix MCS for the top method of deploying desktop images.

User Environment Management

The leading method of managing the user environment is simply GPO (35%), followed by custom scripting (18%), then Citrix UPM (14%). RES, AppSense, and VMware View Persona all came in under 10%, while Dell vWorkspace, Liquidware Labs ProfileUnity, VUEM, and Scense were each used in less than 3% of environments. While it doesn't look like there's heavy UEM adoption, there are so many vendors in the space that it can appear that way. The clear favorite among third parties is Citrix UPM, but when you combine it with the shares of all the other solutions, organizations are roughly split down the middle on whether or not they use third party UEM.

Final Thoughts

A common thread throughout the survey is that companies place a high importance on user experience. In fact, the top four "innovation areas" in the survey have to do with User Experience (WAN, mobile performance, unified communications, and rich media). Still products, technologies, or methods that improve the user experience aren't highly used. Almost half of the responses indicated that there is no WAN optimization, and over half of the responses show that companies are simply using GPOs and scripts (although you could argue that people don't see UEM as an innovation area). That can mean one of a few things:

Those are enough and all the users are happy
The users aren't happy but IT doesn't know/isn't willing to fix it
The third party solutions aren't good enough to justify the expense
Awareness of third party solutions is low, or organizations are still just getting the lay of the land

If user experience is truly king, then you would think these solutions would be in more widespread use. I guess there's room for both the vendors and the organizations to grow, and since the key innovation areas called out are more about mobility and connectivity, it appears the public perception of what is needed gels pretty nicely with what we think (hooray!).

There is so much more information in the survey results that I cannot encourage you enough to download it and read it yourself. This article has only looked a comparatively small amount of information. There is detailed stats on SBC, application virtualization, load testing, web applications, storage, networking, server hardware, antivirus, and the vendors associated with each of these aspects of desktop virtualization. You can download the white paper, and check out all the other stuff they do, on ProjectVRC's website. Thanks again to Ruben and Jeroen for all the work they put into this!

All the session videos from BriForum 2012 are now available to everyone, for free!

Gabe Knuth — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 04:03:00 GMT

BriForum is our independent Desktop Virtualization and Enterprise Mobility conference, held in both London and Chicago. Registration for London is currently open, and the price to attend the two day show is currently £795 through March 28, after which it will rise to the full price of £895. The three-day BriForum Chicago is currently accepting registrations at the Super Early Bird price of $1295 through April 26, after which the price will rise to $1495 until June 14 before ultimately going up to $1595. Hope to see you there!

It's that time of year again–the time when we release all the previous year's BriForum videos to the public. We do this because, at it's heart, BriForum is a community event, and it wouldn't be possible to put on such a great show without the support of our awesome community. It's our way of giving back, as well as raising awareness of the conference. If more people come, that just expands our collective awesomeness.

Last year we had 69 sessions from around 40 presenters on just about every topic you can imagine in the desktop virtualization and end user computing space. There was the typical VDI and server-based computing, user environment management, WAN optimization, and application virtualization sessions, but we also added a focus on enterprise mobility and the consumerization of IT. Those two aspects focuses have so much in common that it only made sense to branch out, especially since many desktop virtualization admins also have something to do with their company's mobility strategy. In the end, all we're talking about is trying to manage the applications and data that our users need.

We'll be posting a few videos to the top of the home page each week until we we run out. There are 69 sessions, so it will be a while, but you you don't have to wait to see them! You can watch all 69 BriForum 2012 videos right now! Plus, this year we've gotten rid of the funky, dual-video Flash player in favor of a single high definition video of both the presenter and the screen. That means that from here on out, you can watch them on any device, anywhere (as long as you have a connection…86 hours out footage is kind of hard to make available offline).

Happy watching, and hopefully we'll see you at BriForum this year. These videos are great, but the meetings, conversations, and people at BriForum make attending it so much better!

To make a true BYOC play, VMware needs centralized management of Fusion and Workstation

Gabe Knuth — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 05:03:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I wrote about Horizon Suite and about how Horizon Mirage comes with a license to use VMware Fusion Pro to address BYOC situations. In that article I lamented the fact that Fusion Pro was a Mac solution. Someone from VMware reached out to us and mentioned that VMware Player also comes with Fusion Pro, and because of that is licensed for commercial use, which it wasn't before. (Tell that to the companies using it!) What we didn't get out of that, though, is that it also comes with added functionality.

Fusion Pro is interesting because it adds management capabilities to Fusion that make it more enterprise-ready. There's no central management console, but it does expand the feature set to include the ability to create and run restricted VMs, limit access to USB devices, and create custom networks. Restricted VMs are ones that are pre-configured with settings that cannot be altered by end users, like drag and drop transfers between the host and guest.

VMware Player's inclusion with Fusion Pro seems somewhat insignificant at first, but it actually has the ability to run the same restricted VMs as Fusion Pro. Ultimately that means that VMware Mirage can be used to support not only Mac, but Windows and Linux BYOC scenarios. (Although, I dare you to find me a Linux BYOC scenario from a normal user...) This is the message VMware was trying to get across that we missed, and it seems like a fair solution that makes use of the products currently available.

Prior to this revelation (which most people probably already knew since it came out around VMworld), I kept thinking about the possibility of a Workstation Pro. While the additional functionality of VMware Player scratches my BYOC-for-Mirage itch, I'm still left thinking about the possibilities. Fusion Pro adds some nice features, but it really only brings it closer to the functionality that's also in Workstation (which also supports restricted VMs). What would be cool is centralized management across the board.

In a BYOC environment, IT accepts the fact that they cannot control the host. They can, however, control the VM and, to some extent, the hypervisor. Today that control is exhibited by deploying the aforementioned restricted VMs, leaving the hypervisor alone. What I'd like to see across the board is a management system that not only controls what a VM can and cannot do from a central location, but also the hypervisor itself since it is the BYOC enabler. It's like PC management, but in this case the hardware is virtual. If IT has the ability to maintain the VM settings, hypervisor configuration, and the restricted OS inside, then that makes for a better-managed BYOC situation.

Think of it a bit like MDM or MAM on mobile devices. With those technologies, IT can deploy apps and configuration settings to devices that they don't own, while ensuring certain settings are in place to strike a good balance between management and end user flexibility. I'm not suggesting that the hypervisor have any management hooks into the host OS, just that the hypervisor can keep an eye on what's happening and react according to IT policies. For instance, if a virus is detected on the host, disable access to the VM until it's fixed. Or, new network or hardware settings could be centrally created and delivered. Plus, IT would have the ability to grant access to VMs, or to revoke that access when a user leaves the company or loses the laptop.

This isn't new thinking of course. It's the client hypervisor mindset that a few companies are already on board with. Citrix has XenClient, Mokafive has, well, Mokafive, and Virtual Bridges has VERDE LEAF. At one time VMware was on that path, trying to create a Type-1 client hypervisor from the ground up (remember CVP?). Now those lines have blurred, and we don't really care so much whether a client hypervisor is Type-1 or Type-2. I'm not saying that it's something that should be used enterprise-wide, but if supporting BYOC is the goal, VMware already has the technologies in place to deliver the entire stack—they just have to be tied together. Mirage is the first step in that, and bringing it down a level to the hypervisor could be Step 2.

Announcing the 2013 BriForum London and Chicago sessions!

Gabe Knuth — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 05:03:00 GMT

After more than a week of work, spreadsheets, astonishment, and struggle, we finally have the sessions chosen for both BriForum London and Chicago. The selection process can be frustrating. This year we had 150 sessions submitted, of which we had to choose no more than 70. In reality, that number is more like 55 when you consider all the different topic areas that need covered at both locations. It's the same story every year, though…this is tough work, and while it was hard to no accept many of the sessions that we had to pass on, we believe we've come away with the best possible combination of sessions, experience levels, and speakers that we could have. If you want to read more about the process, check out the article that Kevin Goodman wrote last year after he oversaw a portion of the selection process (and double it, because we did two shows at once this year!).

Thank you to everyone that submitted, even to the public relations representative for a motivational speaker. Apparently they thought that BriForum needed to have someone who could teach us all how to "achieve greatness" through "first-hand experiences with some of the greatest sports legends in the world." Perhaps in another year we could've used that session as a prelude to "Building an Inspirational Storage Array" or "Embracing the End-User Experience by Embracing Your Inner End-User," but it just wasn't in the cards this year. (Can you come up with better titles? :)

Never mind all that anyway…on with the sessions!

BriForum London, 16-17 May (more information)

Adnan Hendricks - Smoothing the kinks! a seamless user experience with UE-V
Benny Tritsch & Nico Luedemann - An expert guide to delivering seamless remote applications through Citrix and Microsoft technologies
Vincent Branger & Pierre Jean - Building a private DaaS solution for 5000 users based on Citrix Excalibur
Carl Walker - Automated migration of a user from physical to virtual, including data, using Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager
Carl Webster - More things in Active Directory that can hurt your applications and desktop virtualization efforts…and how to fix them
Carl Webster - Show and Tell: Webster's adventures into documenting with PowerShell
Claudio Rodrigues - What still holds up as a Citrix best practice 12 years after MetaFrame tuning tips was released?
Claudio Rodrigues - From zero to RDS 2012 hero: Learn about all the new features
David Stafford - What got us here won't get us there: Today's IT needs to get with the times
Jason Conger - Mobile Enterprise Applications: FUIT or ITFTW (IT For The Win)
Jason Conger - Customize all the things! How to brand web and Windows UI
Jeff Wouters - How to manage your environment with CIM and PowerShell instead of WMI
Jeroen van de Kamp & Ruben Spruijt - An insider's guide to virtualization best practices and performance with Windows 8 and Server 2012, including VDI vs. SBC. Virtual Reality Check, 2013 Edition
Jim Moyle - How do the new storage improvements in vSphere 5.1 help your desktop virtualization project?
Jim Moyle & Aaron Parker - The future of desktop deployment, what's happening with MCS and PVS, plus an alternative
Ment van der Plas - Implementing App-V 5: Lessons learned from a production rollout
Mike Nelson - A crash course in Hyper-V for VMware administrators
Mike Nelson - Clash of the client-side hypervisors: Windows 8 Hyper-V, VMware Workstation, and Parallels Desktop
Nicki Wruck - Licensing your Pandora's Box of mobile devices
Pierre Marmignon & Shawn Bass - Best Practices in SBC/VDI Environments, Part 2: OS streaming and optimizations
Rick Dehlinger - Going Deep: RDP8 & RemoteFX Session Connectivity
Ruben Spruijt - VDI Smackdown 2013 Edition
Ruben Spruijt & Peter Sterk - The bento box bliss of enterprise mobility: An MDM/MAM Smackdown
Tim Mangan, et. al. - What's New in Microsoft App-V
Thorsten Rood - Demystifying the Citrix Mobility Stack: What's going on behind the scenes

BriForum Chicago, July 30 - August 1 (more information)

Benny Tritsch & Shawn Bass - Are RDP8 and RemoteFX finally suitable for daily use?
Vincent Branger & Pierre Jean - Building a private DaaS solution for 5000 users based on Citrix Excalibur
Brian Katz & Dan Shappir - The Mobile App Platform Debate: Native vs. HTML5 vs. Hybrid
Carl Webster - More things in Active Directory that can hurt your applications and desktop virtualization efforts…and how to fix them
Chetan Venkatesh - An objective look at In-memory Storage for VDI and Virtualization: The beginning of the very end of Storage, compute and life as we know it.
Claudio Rodrigues - From zero to RDS 2012 hero: Learn about all the new features
Dan Brinkmann - 5 ways to cut the cost of VDI (What vendors aren't telling you)
Dan Shappir - Truth, Lies and HTML5: What the present and future of HTML5 hold in store for us
David Stafford - What got us here won't get us there: Today's IT needs to get with the times
Denis Gundarev - Citrix Internals: Tracing, Debugging and Troubleshooting
Ian Parker - The new Xperf: Analyzing difficult problems with Xperf
Ian Parker - Performance analysis and monitoring of multiple servers on the cheap
Jarian Gibson & Shane Kleinert - Desktop Virtualization Monitoring Bake Off: Comparing monitoring tools for desktop virtualization
Jason Conger - Customize all the things! How to brand Web and Windows UI
Jason Conger - Mobile Enterprise Applications: FUIT or ITFTW (IT For The Win)
Jeroen van de Kamp - An insider's guide to virtualization best practices and performance with Windows 8 and Server 2012, including VDI vs. SBC. Virtual Reality Check, 2013 Edition
Jim Libersky - Real Time Intelligence for Securing a VM Environment
Jim Moyle - How do the new storage improvements in vSphere 5.1 help your desktop virtualization project?
Jim Moyle - The future of desktop deployment, what's happening with MCS and PVS, plus an alternative
Jo Harder - XenApp Printing: Still Painful After All These Years
John Whaley - Sandboxing Smackdown: Separating fact from fiction in sandboxing solutions
Kevin Kaminski - Application Packaging Smackdown
Michael Burke - Hyper-V and System Center: How good can it be? 2013 Edition
Michael Thomason - Automation 101: Learning how to automate tasks for horizontal scale
Mike Nelson - A crash course in Hyper-V for VMware administrators
Mike Nelson - Netscaler monitoring and reporting: Who, What, Where, and When?
Nick Rintalan & Dan Allen - Why IOPS suck and everything you know about them is probably wrong!
Nick Rintalan & Dan Allen - Why Folder Redirection sucks, but is a necessary evil that Shawn Bass will have to live with!
Noah Wasmer - Becoming an IT Hero: Leaping from Desktop Virtualization to Enterprise Mobility Management
Pierre Marmignon & Shawn Bass - Best Practices in SBC/VDI Environments, Part 2: OS streaming and optimizations
Rainer Enders - De-fence in Depth: How traditional network security applies in today's mobile world, how to secure mobile networks, and what strategies can we use to keep the network and our data secure?
Randy Cook - Hijacking Dropbox for fun and profit (Or maybe just for software distribution)
Rick Dehlinger - Going Deep: RDP8/RemoteFX session connectivity
Shane Kleinert & Jarian Gibson - Ingredients to a successful desktop virtualization bake-off: Results from past bake-offs and how to create your own
Shawn Bass - Passwords are dead. Two factor authentication is ready for the masses.
Simon Crosby - One ring to rule them all: Why every endpoint will be virtualized
Theresa Miller - XenApp 6 Back to Basics
Tim Mangan - Debugging in App-V 5
Yury Magalif - Tips and tricks on building agentless antivirus scanners for Virtual Desktops.
Zach Hughes - Windows tablets in the real world: Myths debunked and lessons learned

Additionally, you can look forward to these 15 minute Lightning Round sessions:

Michael Thomason - Development Smackdown - How IT people can speak Developer
Srini Gurrapu - Why Application Proxy Network Services is critical to secure and manage all Mobile Apps and BYOD
Tim Mangan - What's New in Microsoft App-V
Benny Tritsch - Using Windows 8 Hyper-V and Azure to build great demo and test environments

There are a few gaps in there, namely from Brian, Jack, and myself, so stay tuned to the BriForum website for any changes. We're super excited about these sessions, and we think these will make for an excellent BriForum. Remember, if you attend one, you have access to the videos from both, so just because you saw an awesome session in a city you couldn't attend, you'll still be able to watch it as long as you attend the other city!

Ok, I'm over Android thin clients, but Windows RT thin clients just might work!

Gabe Knuth — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 05:03:00 GMT

As noted below by Martin Sheppard, what follows is not actually feasible. The only way you get the ability to access a VDI desktop is if the Windows RT device is a companion to a device that already has SA. So yes, this would work, as long as they had a desktop sitting under their desk that had SA on it. I guess it could be off to save on management, but that doesn't help the cost model :). Thanks Martin, for the info (and for raining on my parade!). This is a nice thought exercise, though, so I still encourage you to read on.

One of the best things about twitter for me is the fact that article ideas can come from anywhere. Today's article is 100% based on ideas thrown around by myself, Gunnar Berger (@gunnarwb), David Stafford (@dstafford), Nathan Coutinho (@nathancoutinho), and others stemming from a tweet I mindlessly tossed out to the world regarding the realization that you're only entitled to use Windows RT devices (like Surface RT) to access VDI desktops without buying additional licenses if the device is corporate-owned only. Employee-owned devices still require a VDA or CDL license.

Just learned that WinRT can access VDI session for free only if it's company-owned. Otherwise, still need CDL or VDA. Thanks @nathancoutinho
— Gabe Knuth (@GabeKnuth) February 28, 2013

After griping about Microsoft screwing people in a BYOD situation (as if consumers were actually buying Windows RT devices), the conversation turned to Windows RT-based thin clients. David Stafford suggested it along the same vein as my Android thin client on-again/off-again relationship. Dismissive at first, I began to think about what a Windows RT-based thin client might look like and why a company would go that route. Let's look at some interesting points.

Licensing

While the lack of a built-in license might be troublesome for BYOD situations, few employees are buying their own thin clients. Using Windows RT as a thin client OS on a corporate-owned device would be an easy way to avoid buying VDA licenses for thin clients. Yes, there is a cost for Windows RT, but according this article from Engadget, that cost is somewhere around $85. Keep in mind, too, that it's a one-time cost, as opposed to VDA which is $99/year. So, even if the thin client costs more, it pays for itself in less than a year. We're already saving money…that's a good start! Of course, we don't know how much the hardware would cost, but it would have to be less than a tablet, right?

Interface and applications

This is, to me, a distinct advantage of other non-traditional thin client OSes. I've written lately about how I've fallen out of love with the idea of Android thin clients. The primary reason for this is that Android isn't made for a desktop form factor, and neither are the applications. Keyboard and mouse support is bolted on rather than integrated, and even if it were perfect, the applications would also have to be written not only for non-touch inputs but also for desktop screen resolutions and aspect ratios.

With WinRT, all of that dirty work is done. It's made for use with a keyboard and mouse (both buttons, even!), and while it can at times be atrocious to use without touch, in a limited use case such as a thin client it could be more than useable. Add a touch screen and it becomes even better.

The other bonus with regards to the interface is that the applications, every single one of them, are written to work on Windows RT and its many devices. That means that if Windows Apps catch on, those apps can be used, even deployed, to Windows RT thin clients to run alongside published applications or full-on VDI desktops. (Granted, for RDSH applications, you'd still need an RDS CAL.) In theory, someone could probably even work up some reverse seamless windows solution for use with it that could combine everything into one interface.

The last thing is Office, which, even in its limited form, might be good enough for use in a thin client scenario. It's certainly more useable with a keyboard and mouse, so it stands to reason that the possible use cases expand in this scenario, too.

Management

This is where things get a little dicey, because there isn't a built-in way to manage Windows RT devices like there would be for managing thin clients with embedded versions of x86 Windows. Still, Windows RT devices are manageable via EMM solutions, so it's not outside the realm of possibility that thin clients would be as manageable as other non-Windows thin clients. Then again, perhaps we don't need to manage them. Brian and Jack might argue that you should treat all devices as insecure no matter what. I'm not quite as black and white on the matter, but if you are then management isn't going to be a problem.

Wrap-up

Adding in other capabilities as they come along (Lync support?) only serves to expand the use case even further, and the fact that you can save $100/device/year on licensing means that there are more funds available to put into a management platform (that you need anyway for all those mobile devices you're dealing with). Ultimately, you could wind up actually saving money and getting more flexibility (because of something Microsoft did, no less)!

So what am I missing? Why isn't anyone making these? I'm in the honeymoon phase of this idea, so everything is wine and roses at this point. Someone hit me with a dose of reality!