One of the most critical aspects to securing your VMware vSphere environment is replacing the self-signed certificates with trusted certificates. VSS Labs is releasing a new product, called vCert Manager, which will vastly improve the SSL certificate management experience for VMware customers. Over the years I've written several articles detailing...
Hot off the press DISA has released the VMware vSphere 5 STIG, which includes vCenter, ESXi and VM components. For those of you familiar with U.S. Government IT systems, you've probably heard of the DISA STIGs. STIGs are Security Technical Implementation Guides, which set the baseline for a variety of operating systems, network...
And here we are....the last step to publish "XenApp" applications to the Citrix receiver and ultimately your users. This installment creates and application delivery group for the XenDesktop 7 applications that we've installed on our Windows Server 2012 server. Once you create and customize this group, users can refresh their...
Creating a XenDesktop Machine Catalog for server-class operating systems in XenDesktop 7 is virtually the same process as creating one for a dedicated desktop OS. A machine catalog is a grouping of similar "XenApp" servers, and if you were using MCS or PVS, you'd provision several at once and group them....
Citrix radically changed the "XenApp" 7 architecture in XenDesktop 7. Gone is the massive complexity, many consoles, and lengthy configuration times. I don't have much XenApp experience, but the consoles I've seen of prior versions seemed mind bogglingly complex. Two major themes of XenDesktop 7 is simplification and unification. The "Application" portion of XenDesktop...
Now that we've completed the first six parts of this series to configure the XenDesktop 7 back-end services, it's now time to use Citrix Receiver v14 and connect to our new VDI infrastructure. This is super easy, and the most fun part! Unlike previous versions of the Citrix Receiver, there is...
Hot off the presses are some ESXi 5.1 patches. This build of ESXi 5.1 (1157734) fixes several bugs and more importantly addresses some security issues. As always in any environment, please test out the patches thoroughly before putting them into production. Each environment is unique, and issues may surface that could cause you some headaches. These...
A few days ago Cisco released an incremental upgrade to the Cisco UCS Manager firmware, version 2.1(2a). This is more than just a bug fix, and it enables some new hardware, storage enhancements, and operational enhancements. Cisco finally enabled the SD card slot, found on the B200 M3 and other...
In the first five parts of this series on XenDesktop 7 we've done everything needed to complete the last step, which is creating a XenDesktop 7 Delivery Group. This enables users, or groups of users, to access their desktop or applications. Delivery groups are where you can target various user...
One of the last steps to configure XenDesktop is to setup Citrix StoreFront. What is StoreFront? StoreFront is basically the web tier in a three tiered architecture (StoreFront, Desktop Controller, SQL database). It's more than just a pretty face. Citrix Receiver directly talks to StoreFront, even if you never use...
This is the fourth installment of the XenDesktop PoC guide, where we create a XenDesktop 7 machine catalog. As we near the point where we can dole out VDI VMs to users, one of the last steps is to create a catalog of VMs. These could be Windows 8, Windows...
This installment of the XenDesktop installation series will show you how easy it is to install the XenDesktop 7 VDA (Virtual Delivery Agent). The VDA can be installed on client VMs, servers (for XenApp), or physical PCs if you want to remote high-powered 3D graphics. It contains the 'secret HDX...