This whitepaper provides an overview of Citrix AppDNA with Liquidware Labs FlexApp.
Optimizing the way applications are delivered and managed has been an ongoing challenge in enterprise IT, and the variety of approaches over the years have been received with varying degrees of success. While every method has pros and cons, some of the most stubborn issues include time-to-deliver, application conflicts, plug-ins and licensing. The too-frequent result is high IT overhead, too many gold images and excess spending on application licenses.
Too many companies are settling on less than optimal solutions because that is all they are presented with and they are unaware of the true state of the art for application management. It is possible to dramatically reduce the number of Windows gold images, in some cases to a single image. It is possible to deliver exactly what each and every end user needs to do their job, and nothing else. It is possible for a user to log into a random system and instantly be presented with their personal desktop, all the right applications, plugins and add-ons, the right printers, and the right fonts. It is possible and it is simple.
Citrix AppDisk, when integrated with FSLogix Apps, provides a unique set of features that can improve end-user productivity, reduce IT overhead and lower the cost of desktop management. With FSLogix patent pending Image Masking technology, AppDisk gains very granular and powerful user-based policy control over every aspect of a user’s desktop and applications, and enhances the ability to distribute applications on network attached disk images. FSLogix Apps also enable AppDisks to scale to a much greater degree than any other similar technologies available today.
OVERVIEW
The virtualization of physical computers has become the backbone of public and private cloud computing from desktops to data centers, enabling organizations to optimize hardware utilization, enhance security, support multi-tenancy and more. These environments are complex and ephemeral, creating requirements and challenges beyond the capability of traditional monitoring tools that were originally designed for static physical environments. But modern solutions exist, and can bring your virtual environment to new levels of efficiency, performance and scale.
This guide explains the pervasiveness of virtualized environments in modern data centers, the demand these environments create for more robust monitoring and analytics solutions, and the keys to getting the most out of virtualization deployments.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
· History and Expansion of Virtualized Environments
· Monitoring Virtual Environments
· Approaches to Monitoring
· Why Effective Virtualization Monitoring Matters
· A Unified Approach to Monitoring Virtualized Environments
· 5 Key Capabilities for Virtualization Monitoring
o Real-Time Awareness
o Rapid Root-Cause Analytics
o End-to-End Visibility
o Complete Flexibility
o Hypervisor Agnosticism
· Evaluating a Monitoring Solution
o Unified View
o Scalability
o CMDB Support
o Converged Infrastructure
o Licensing
· Zenoss for Virtualization Monitoring
Fulton Financial Corporation has a long and storied history that began in 1882 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where local merchants and farmers organized Fulton National Bank. The bank’s name was chosen to honor Lancaster County native Robert Fulton, the inventor and artist best known for designing and building the Clermont, the first successful steamboat.
In an effort to optimize the productivity of its employees and enable them to have more time to focus on their customers, Fulton sought to upgrade the thin clients for its Citrix application virtualization infrastructure, with the help of its Citrix partner and IGEL Platinum Partner, Plan B Technologies.
In selecting a desktop computing solution to support its Citrix application virtualization infrastructure, Fulton had one unique business requirement, they were looking for a solution that would mirror the experience provided by a Windows PC, without actually being a Windows PC.
During the evaluation process, Fulton looked at thin clients from IGEL and another leading manufacturer, conducting a “bake-off” of several models including the IGEL Universal Desktop (UD6). Fulton like the fact that IGEL is forward- thinking in designing its desktop computing solutions, and began its IGEL roll-out by purchasing 2,300 IGEL UD6 thin clients in 2016 for its headquarters and branch offices, and plans to complete the roll out of IGEL thin clients to the remainder of its 3,700 employees in the coming months. The bank is also leveraging the IGEL Universal Management Suite (UMS) to manage its fleet of IGEL thin clients.
Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union is more than just a bank. It is a financial cooperative intent on helping its members save time, save money and earn money. Over the years, the credit union has grown from providing financial resources to military service members and their families to serving hundreds of thousands of members across Texas and around the world. RBFCU has a presence in three major market areas — Austin, Dallas and San Antonio — and has more than 55 branches dedicated to serving members and the community.
First and foremost, RBFCU is people. It’s the more than 1,800 employees who serve members’ needs each day. It’s the senior team and Board of Directors that guide the credit union’s growth. It’s the members who give their support and loyalty to the credit union each day.
To help its employees provide the credit union’s members with the highest levels of services and support, Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union relies on IGEL’s endpoint computing solutions.
Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Trinsic Technologies is a technology solutions provider focused on delivering managed IT and cloud solutions to SMBs since 2005.
In 2014, Trinsic introduced Anytime Cloud, a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) designed to help SMB clients improve the end user computing experience and streamline business operations. To support Anytime Cloud, the solution provider was looking for a desktop delivery and endpoint management solution that would fulfill a variety of different end user needs and requirements across the multiple industries it serves. Trinsic also wanted a solution that provided ease of management and robust security features for clients operating within regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services.
The solution provider selected the IGEL Universal Desktop (UD) thin clients, the IGEL Universal Desktop Converter (UDC), the IGEL OS and the IGEL Universal Management Suite. As a result, some of the key benefits Trinsic has experienced include ease of management and configuration, security and data protection, improved resource allocation and cost savings.
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.
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.
Read this eG Innovations white paper, and understand: