From the partially RES related dept. It finally happened! Last year RES Software’s US-resident Cowboy Viking got the marching orders to head out west, to set up shop, in what happens to be my old stomping grounds around the Bay Area. While Philadelphia and the east coast have been an interesting and rewarding experience, as the song goes; my heart never really left San Francisco. Within the year I’ve been here on the east coast, a lot of good things have happened; we’ve trained and certified partners from Toronto down to Miami, from New York to Chicago. 2011 was inded a busy year in the RES US channel.
Here in 2012, it’s now time for yours truly to head “home” and focus on getting the western US territories stood up technically. As you may have noticed, we have significantly leveraged our relationship with Citrix this year, hence I really look forward to working more with the guys in Santa Clara in the near future. This article will kick off a series of mini photo-blog articles on a separate page (book mark this), started January 28th, 2012, covering the trip from Philly to San Francisco, expected to last 6-7 days. Read more »
From the RES Community Hero Dept. Today I’d like to introduce a new blog site, which one of my good colleagues, Musa Cakar from RES Support has launched. The blog is called My Virtual Environment, or MYVE.nl. His first article is very useful, as it deals with reducing the size of Mozilla Firefox profiles, using the RES Workspace Manager. Be sure to check out the article here!
From the Mayday-We’re-Syncing Dept. On the last day of 2011, the Service Release 3 for the RES Workspace Manager 2011 was released. Among a bunch of new cool enhancements, there is one that I especially would like to elaborate on. Workspace Manager supports Microsoft Sync Center, a part of Windows 7. Specifically the support consists of that network drive-mappings, created in Workspace Manager will continue to work nicely, when Sync Center is used to bring stuff offline. This means you don’t have to worry about scripts to map the network drive when you’re offline. A new technote RG044 has been added to the Technote Library describing how this works. A helpful buildingblock has been included.
<<< Click here to read the article
From the Technotes-R-Us Dept. With the Automation Manager 2012 currently available as RC2, a RESguru article describing the nuts, bolts and registry settings of the new Dispatcher+ has been overdue for a while. To the rescue comes Rob Aarts with a great article, which explains the ins and outs of the new dispatcher component. Also covered in the article is the Master Dispatcher/Cache feature. The most important registry settings to tweak the behavior of the Dispatcher are also covered. Finally the article also covers the new WebAPI for Automation Manager.
<<< Click here to read the article!
Tags: Automation Manager, Dispatcher, Dispatcher Plus, Master Caching, Master Dispatcher, Registry Hack, RESTful Web Services, SOAP, WebAPI
2012, Automation Manager, Technote | RESguru | 
January 8, 2012 09:24 | 
Comments (0)
Today, Jan 3rd we celebrate the 3rd year of RESguru.com and a new staffmembers arrival. As you may recall there was a bit of controversy surrounding RESguru.com’s date of inception, but I’m glad this is behind us now and the usurper was silenced – at least for a while anyway :-) At this time, I wanted to take the opportunity to thank YOU, our regular readers and commentors for help in making the site what it is today. Your feedback and constructive critique has been essential to motivating myself and the other writers to continue what is essentially a labor of love.
I would also like to thank my current co-writers for providing quality content over the years. As all contributions to RESguru.com are on a completely voluntary basis, it’s with gratitude that I am able to publish the shared works of our regular staff, colleagues, friends and industry partners. To all of you: Thank you!
On that note, I would also like to welcome another RESguru onto the regular writer’s staff: Mr. Rob Aarts. Rob has a load of technical RES product experience which he’ll be sharing here on the ‘Guru site. His first article is about the new Global Variables in the RES Automation Manager. I’d suggest you give it a read! Rob’s bio can be found here.
From the sideline comments dept. Just before xmas Brian shares his view on what’s important for vendors in relation to Desktop Virtualization. I’m not going to recap his article in total, you can read it here. What I wanted to comment on specifically, is that it’s really nice to have been working with a vendor for 11+ years now, who all along has been doing what the good Dr. Madden orders today! :-) While we originally back in the late ’90s started out being a product only for Terminal Services/Citrix environments, RES products were kept in tune with the times and trends to embrace all windows platforms: Workstations, Laptops and Server Based Computing – what I referred to as tri-platform support back in the day.
With the emergence of virtualization, first on hardware, then later on applications, it was possible for RES to add 3 more innovative dimensions to that picture:
- Early VDI Workspace support: RES Software actually didn’t have to change much, if anything in the Workspace Manager (back in the day known as PowerFuse) to support VDI. As the Workspace Composer runs inside the user’s session, seen from a technical perspective of the product, it’s running on a workstation OS, which just happens to be accessed as a terminal server through RDP, HDX or whatever. In other words, all the goodness which Workspace Manager offered already for Laptops, Physical workstations and Terminal servers, was available for VDI from day one.
- First App-V integration: RES was TRUTHFULLY, THE VERY FIRST VENDOR who worked proactively with the Grand-Daddy of all application virtualization technologies, SoftGrid by Softricity – now known as App-V by Microsoft. Since then, we’ve adapted to support pretty much every major App Virtualization platform out there. Application virtualization is an important piece of VDI as it will allow you to have more apps to co-exist in the same image. Using the workspace manager to differentiate access to these apps, you can litterally cut down your VDI configuration to one golden image per operating system. Look out for an article on this topic later.
First Reverse Seamless provider: Back in the day, RES had this little – relatively un-noticed – sidecar utility to the Workspace Manager, known as the RES Subscriber aka Workspace Extender. These were the first implementations of Reverse Seamless Windows. Few people saw the potential early on, but I’d like to highlight a specific video, made by my former colleague Rick Eilenberger, that demonstrates what it was able to do already then in 2007. It was known as the RES Subscriber. The technology later licensed by Citrix, evolved to a stand-alone product, known as VDX. For more information on VDX, go read here.
The only thing we’ve left alone in regards to virtualization, is so called ‘User Virtualization’. This is some sort of horn which the Usual Suspects likes to blow (and do I mean blow… ;-) To my experience, the concept of virtualizing the user makes no sense at all. The user is the only real “object” in the entire getup anyway. Sure, hardware is quite real too, however unlike the behavior of users, it’s behavior is way more predictable, hence virtualizing it is relatively easy in comparison. This is one of the reasons why I believe the idea of redirecting the profile to a database is a flawed concept to begin with. You want as fast and reliable access to your settings to your settings as well as your documents to cater for the user’s sometimes erratic behavior. This is why the RES Workspace Manager was built with purpose to store User Settings in the same manner as User Data is stored; in a location which is unique and readily accessible to the user.
With the ever-growing adaptation of Cloud Computing into the Enterprise space, the profile game is a-changing. Boatloads of other pundits have been describing in vivid detail how users will demand access to their settings virtually anywhere. One way of dealing with this is to provide ACCESS from anywhere to a centralized solution. Citrix have been doing this for well over 20 years. Thing can however quickly become harrowing if changes the user makes should follow them between different infrastructures (different server farms, operating systems or even different laptops). This is where an intelligent and granular approach to handling user settings is required. If you are contemplating storing your settings only in a standard SQL database – or on a fileserver for that matter you are asking for trouble, or at the very least unnecessary complexity. I’ve discussed this previously in this article.
Anyway, while the usual suspects are duking it out on the commentary section over on BM, RES Software is ready to take on the new year. Stay tuned to this blog for even more tidbits and useful info in 2012! Happy new year everybody.
Tags: App-V, Azure, Citrix, Cloud, Integration, SoftGrid, VDI
External stuff, RES News, RES Products, Uncategorized, Workspace Manager | RESguru | January 2, 2012 03:45 | Comments (0)
From the Get-Yerself-Certified Dept. As the year is drawing to a close, it’s my pleasure to share with you the partner training calendar for the United States, 2012. We’ll be hosting a number of classes where you can learn the nuts & bolts of the RES product line, from the ground up. The classes will primarily be run by yours truly in 2012. According to the wishes of existing and new RES partners, we’ve selected a number of US cities where technical training will take place. Mark down the dates and contact me if you want to reserve a seat. Registered participants will receive information about the venues, prerequisites and everything else, when time is approaching. Read more »
Tags: Automation Manager, Lab Build, PoC, Proof of Concept, Provisioning Server, Unattended Install, Xenapp, XenDesktop
Automation Manager, BuildingBlocks, Citrix, External stuff, Technote | RESguru | December 19, 2011 16:57 | Comments (1)
From the Read-Between-The-Lines Department. Okay, so I got your undivided attention by tweaking an old movie title, didn’t I? Amazing. It seems a strategic lie here and there is all it takes to get peoples attention these days and maybe also their money – I figure I’d give the attention part a try with the headline! :-) The irony is that Lies and Virtual Applications is exactly what’s at the heart of today’s article. Interested? Read more »
Tags: AntiFUD, App-V, Bullcrap, Business as usual, Clueless Marketing People, Crappsense, LMFAO, RES Software, SoftGrid, Softricity
External stuff, Fun, Reference | RESguru | December 15, 2011 16:58 | Comments (2)
While Hollywood probably aren’t adopting said title just yet, there’s definitely some Practical Magic to be shared here. A couple of months back, my old partner-in-crime, British RES Wizard Mr. Grant Tiller, created a pretty cool video. In one swift go, it shows all 
the goodness there’s to be had with the Citrix XenClient in combination with RES Workspace Manager, Automation Mananger, and the Service Orchestration Module. All in less than 11 minutes. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can still catch it here.
I’d recommend you to watch this one, as it will be well worth your time. The good folks over at Citrix did so already, and highlighted it in their announcement of the XenClient 2.1 release last week. Read more »
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