0825 Rene Bigler – Building a HCI Lab with Nutanix Community Edition

It’s always handy to have access to some sort of lab gear at work/home for testing and learning. Nutanix Community Edition allows you to bring the latest HCI technology to your lab setup. In this session I will outline some basic considerations when planning to go with Nutanix CE. What do you need to start your lab project, what are the possibilities and limits of the platform and how is the look and feel of a four node cluster setup deployed on Intel NUCs? Be warned – after seeing it in action, you will want to build your own!

0930 Setup Commander – Above & Beyond by Roel van Bueren

Setup Commander 2.0 uses an ‘as a service’ infrastructure to provide support for the setups you use. For your vendor setup we provide a ‘Configuration Wizard’ which is based on ‘best practices’ and a Repackaging Wizard to virtualize if needed. This is done intuitively and quickly. Wizards are updated daily based on customer and partner feedback. Not only the setup itself is properly configured, ‘best practices’ are brought in to prepare for traditional deployment using e.g. Microsoft ConfigMgr, RES Automation Manager, Quest Software SMA and Micro Focus ZENworks, but also for deployment using VDI and Application Layering solutions from Citrix, Unidesk and VMware. Additionally our ‘Setup Store’ offers the latest versions of the vendor setups you use, with a similar user experience to using App Stores in the mobile world. Learn how the Setup Store and ‘Configuration Wizards’ will save you hours and hours of (re)searching forums and packaging related websites. Learn about the upcoming Setup Commander Service Edition, bringing the Setup Store to your door ‘as a service’.

0945 James Rankin – Profiling The Profile

It’s all about applications and data. At least that’s what everyone always seems to be telling us. But in the background, keeping your applications and data together, providing the “workspace” and “personality” that complete the user experience, is the Windows user profile.

In this session, you will learn about the history of the Windows user profile, and how it has changed and evolved across the years. And now, in 2017, what considerations do we need to make to manage the Windows profile on desktops or RDSH? How do we ensure that the user’s experience remains consistent, responsive and intuitive? What tools can we use to manage it – or, indeed, do we still need to manage the profile at all?

1045 ControlUp

1100 Daniel Feller – Go Big or Go Home: The Latest Performance Analysis

All of us want to make things better and faster. We want to know what impact enabling a setting will have on the system. Will it improve density? Will it improve responsiveness? Will it improve logon speed?

Performance testing should not be limited to server density based on a particular Windows operating system level. We should look across the entire solution for areas that can improve the overall user experience.

That’s why this session will look at performance analysis for operating systems, user logons, user experience, cloud, profiles/policies, and much more.

1215 eG Innovations – How to Ensure Great Citrix User Experience with End-to-End Performance Monitoring

A great user experience is key for the success of any Citrix application virtualization or desktop virtualization initiative. To ensure user satisfaction and productivity, Citrix administrators should monitor the user experience proactively, detect times when users are likely to be seeing slowness, pinpoint the cause of such issues and initiate corrective actions to proctively resolve issues. Srinivas Ramanathan of eG Innovations will demonstrate how to monitor the Citrix user experience, diagnose problems quickly and plan in advance in order to mitigate user experience issues.

1230 Jason Samuel – 10 Real World Use Cases for NetScaler Responder & Rewrite

NetScalers are very powerful appliances capable of doing many things.  They are like a swiss army knife in Enterprises but some organizations don’t take advantage of all the features available on their NetScalers.  In this session I’ll go over 2 of my favorite modules on a NetScaler, Responder and Rewrite.  You’ll learn 10 real world use cases for Responder and Rewrite complete with actual policies & actions that I’ve used in production environments.

This session will focus on:

• The differences between Responder and Rewrite

• Troubleshooting tips

• 10 Responder and Rewrite policies/actions showing before and after implementation

1330 FSLogix – High Performance Office 365 Implementations on VDI and XenApp

Join David Young, FSLogix, for an overview and live demo of the latest FSLogix product announcements and features that make Office 365 “enterprise ready” on virtual desktops. See how enterprises are using FSLogix to enable real-time email and calendaring performance, Outlook Search on XenApp, Skype for Business, and other critical use cases like, non-persistent VDI, multiple Java versions, sub 10 second logons, massive reduction of gold images, silo elimination, and more.

1345 George Kuruvilla – Citrix on Azure – The future of the Digital Workspace

Join solutions offered on Azure, XenApp and XenDesktop on Azure – Deployment scenarios and lessons from the field
Extending on premises deployment into the Azure, Hosting XA/XD in the cloud, Citrix Cloud, XenApp and XenDesktop Essentials. Determining the right solution based on use case, Xenmobile for EMS, Value proposition, High level overview, Availability Cost Calcutators – Tools available to estimate costs for running Citrix on Azure and compare with an on premises deployment.

1445 Jarian Gibson – Provisioning Methods & Image Management for Desktop Virtualization

When deploying desktop virtualization solutions such as Citrix XenDesktop or VMware Horizon there are different methods for handling image provisioning and management. In this session, we will talk about the different methods such as full clones, MCS, PVS, linked clones, & instant clones along with how solutions such as AppVolumes and Unidesk come into play. We will also discuss how the different hypervisor options come into consideration when choosing an image management solution and how hypervisor caching, optimization, and storage features/functionality help with these solutions.

1545 Esther Barthel – Automating NetScaler deployments: talking NITRO with PowerShell

This session will provide practical tips and tricks for automating a NetScaler VPX deployment and configuration using NITRO (NetScaler’s REST API) and PowerShell. Learn how to include NetScaler in your deployment strategies to automatically deliver a preconfigured XenDesktop infrastructure.

This session will focus on:
• REST API and NetScaler’s NITRO-based API framework
• Automating NetScaler configurations with PowerShell & NITRO (REST API) calls
• Scripting the automatic deployment of NetScaler VPX on XenServer or vSphere hypervisors with a fixed IP address

1645 Julien Stanojevic – Advanced Windows Automation on AWS using CloudFormation, Packer and Chocolatey

Build your infrastructure in minutes using AWS CloudFormation. Automate your AMI builds using Packer and Chocolatey. Make your XenApp servers truly immutable. Autoscale infrastructure based on environment conditions. Reduce infrastructure build times to minutes. #Windows #Automation #AWS #Powershell #Chocolatey #Packer