Virtualizing Windows applications and desktops in the data center or cloud has compelling security, mobility and management benefits, but delivering real-time voice and video in a virtual environment is a challenge. A poorly optimized implementation can increase costs and compromise user experience. Server scalability and bandwidth efficiency may be less than optimal, and audio-video quality may be degraded.
Enabling voice and video with a bundled solution in an existing Citrix environment delivers clearer and crisper voice and video than legacy phone systems. This solution guide describes how Sennheiser headsets combine with Citrix infrastructure and IGEL endpoints to provide a better, more secure user experience. It also describes how to deploy the bundled Citrix-Sennheiser-IGEL solution.
With hardware-based thin client shipments in the region of 4–5 million units annually, this market is still a drop in the ocean compared to the 270 million PCs shipping each year, though the latter figure has been declining since 2011. And within the thin client market, Igel is in fourth place behind Dell and HP (each at around 1.2 million units annually) and China’s Centerm, which only sells into its home market.
However, the future for thin clients looks bright, in that the software-based segment of the market (which some analyst houses refuse to acknowledge) is expanding, particularly for Igel. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology has stimulated this growth, but the greatest promise is probably in the embryonic DaaS market, whereby enterprises will have standard images for their workforce hosted by service providers.
This paper is written in the context of modern virtualized infrastructures, such as VMware or Nutanix. In such systems, a hypervisor runs on each compute node creating multiple virtual machines (VMs) per compute node. A guest OS runs inside each VM.
Data associated with each VM is stored in one or more virtual disks (vDisks). A virtual disk appears like a local disk, but can be mapped to physical storage in many ways as we will discuss.
Virtualized infrastructures use clustering to provide for non-disruptive VM migration between compute nodes, for load balancing across the nodes, for sharing storage, and for high availability and failover. Clustering is well known and has been used to build computer systems for a long time. However, in the context of virtualized infrastructures, clustering has a number of significant limitations. Specifically, as we explain below, clusters limit scalability, decrease resource efficiency, hurt performance, reduce flexibility and impair manageability.
In this paper, we will present an innovative alternative architecture that does not have these limitations of clustering. We call our new approach clusterless federation and it is the approach used in the Cloudistics platform.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we describe the limitations of clustering and in Section 3, we drive the point home by using the specific example of VMware; other virtualized systems are similar. In Section 4, we present the clusterless federated approach and show how it avoids the limitations of clustering. We summarize in Section 5.
For years, IT managers have been seeking a single-pane-of-glass tool that can help them monitor and manage all aspects of their IT infrastructure – from desktops to servers, hardware to application code, and network to storage. But, many fail to achieve this as they do not know how to implement a single-pane-of-glass solution.
Read this eG Innovations white paper, and understand:
The technology of cloud computing has caught up with virtual desktop infrastructures. Tapping into the agility and flexibility of cloud-hosted infrastructures, Citrix Cloud enables organizations to simplify digital workspace delivery. With many of the critical components of the Citrix delivery infrastructure hosted in the cloud and managed by Citrix, organizations can speed up deployment, lower hardware footprint, increase ROI, simplify IT operations. Despite the many benefits of Citrix Cloud, the performance management challenges still persist, just as they do in traditional on-premises Citrix deployments.
As detecting and troubleshooting application performance issues increases in complexity in today’s distributed, heterogeneous environments, the siloed monitoring of applications and infrastructure tiers (network, storage, virtualization, database, etc.) is no longer sufficient. eG Enterprise delivers the first converged application and infrastructure performance monitoring solution, providing unified visibility of application performance, end-user experience, and infrastructure health—all from a single pane of glass.
Read this white paper to find out how eG Enterprise’s converged application and infrastructure monitoring capabilities help you:
Managing Windows user profiles can be a complex and challenging process. Better profile management is usually sought by organizations looking to reduce Windows login times, accommodate applications that do not adhere to best practice application data storage, and to give users the flexibility to login to any Windows Operating System (OS) and have their profile follow them. Note that additional profile challenges and solutions are covered in a related ProfileUnity whitepaper entitled “User Profile and Environment Management with ProfileUnity.” To efficiently manage the complex challenges of today’s diverse Windows profile environments, Liquidware ProfileUnity exclusively features two user profile technologies that can be used together or separately depending on the use case.
These include:
1. ProfileDisk, a virtual disk based profile that delivers the entire profile as a layer from an attached user VHD or VMDK, and
2. Profile Portability, a file and registry based profile solution that restores files at login, post login, or based on environment triggers.
Many large enterprises are moving important applications from traditional physical servers to virtualized environments, such as VMware vSphere in order to take advantage of key benefits such as configuration flexibility, data and application mobility, and efficient use of IT resources.
Realizing these benefits with business critical applications, such as SQL Server or SAP can pose several challenges. Because these applications need high availability and disaster recovery protection, the move to a virtual environment can mean adding cost and complexity and limiting the use of important VMware features. This paper explains these challenges and highlights six key facts you should know about HA protection in VMware vSphere environments that can save you money.
You’ve virtualized your company’s most critical applications (or are about to) but you might have found that the virtual world is much more complicated than the physical world when the unexpected inevitably happens. So how do you prevent application performance problems and how do you troubleshoot application performance issues when they do happen? Learn the solutions to the top virtualization application problems BEFORE your critical applications go down in this white paper by David Davis from ActualTech Media.