C/D/H Talks Tech

Author:

Eric Inch

I enjoy learning, using and helping others through technology. This is my second year with C/D/H after many years of consulting for numerous small and mid-sized companies. I enjoy challenging projects and continual improvement in all areas. Most recently, I have been working to help grow the virtualization practice at C/D/H and hopefully add that area to the already impressive expertise in infrastructure consulting at C/D/H.

When I’m not working, I enjoy spending time with my family. I have two little girls who keep me extremely busy but are always the highlight of my day.

For a more in-depth bio and a list of my areas of expertise, please visit http://www.cdh.com.

More about Eric
Articles by Eric Inch

For those of you that don’t know, the Citrix VDI solution is an amazing collection of technologies. It addresses all of the key VDI solution areas: desktop deployment, user data management, application deployment, flexibility and a high quality end-user experience.

I’ll start by talking about XenDesktop.

XenDesktop is the connection broker that provides user authentication, desktop provisioning and assignment, and pool creation. One interesting feature is idle pool settings which allow you to specify work hours so you can pre-start virtual machines before users get to work. This helps to reduce the performance overhead from hundreds of VMs starting simultaneously.

The second piece, and my personal favorite, is Citrix’s Provisioning Server. Provisioning Server provides the OS streaming capability, and allows you to create a single master image that can streamed to hundreds (or even thousands) of virtual or physical machines.

You can save a loton storage space and it provides great flexibility. You can take a single vDisk and configure write-cache for any changes outside of the read-only disk.

The third area they really shine in is application deployment, with their flagship product, Citrix XenApp (formerly Presentation Server). Through the use of XenApp, applications can be deployed to virtual desktops as hosted or streamed applications. They also have the capability to use a pool of virtual machines for application deployment with their VM-hosted apps.

Finally, the HDX (High Definition Experience) technologies are what make the product a phenomenal user experience, delivering the desktop to the endpoint over any network.