Briforum Day 3; The finals
Last week Thursday was the final day of Briforum 2009. On this day I followed another 4 sessions. After that we stayed until Friday in Chicago and went home. Satisfied with my head full of information and after a great Briforum 2009.
To all the presenters I want to say: “ Guys it was great and the topics were from a very high level of knowledge sharing ”. To Brian, Gabe and their team “ Guys keep up the good work Briforum 2009 was magnificent “ and to all the vendors “ there are some great new products in the market place wordy to investigate”
Hereby a short summary from the last 4 sessions I attended.
Maximizing Your SBC OS and Hardware Investments During Difficult Times by Ian Parker
This session focused on how to use free tools to identify where your user density and stability constraints are, and how to address them via software or hardware upgrades. Being the first session in the morning and PTE’s, non-paged pool and paged pool limits,memory issues and all other technical language where thrown up on us. It turned to be a real geek session. Ian talked about checking available memory, debugging it with WinDBG, optimizing to your needs, using for example the /PAE switch. Also he talked about why Server 2008 session architecture may better perform for some user and applications. etc etc
This was not what I expected from it but I was really impressed by all the wonderful information we got.
I have to say Ian impressed me at this Briforum. He’s a first time presenter at the Briforum and I followed 2 sessions from Ian and both session where very impressive and contained total geek stuff. I hope to see Ian back next year.
XenApp Fringe Benefits by Jason Conger and Brandon Shell
This session was about all nifty features that are hidden within the Citrix Access management console and what we can do by using powershell and the XenApp commandlets.
Al the features within the AMC like, configuration logging, personal views, reporting etc, etc where not new to me so I thought the session was a little basic. As a Citrix consultant al those features were not new for me and I use those in daily business.
Brandon came up with the advantages of using Powershell within XenApp environments. He showed us a some commands and how to use them. He also suggested that if people are not using Powershell yet they need to learn it. I can only agree with that. I think there are a lot of advantages by using Powershell in daily business.
Tech Therapy: TS vs. VDI by Bennie Tritsch and Brian Madden
The best conclusion out of this session is “ VDI is just another form of SBC “. Bennie and Brian battling each other over what is the best solution TS or VDI. Last years Briforum Brian made a statement that VDI will rule the world in June 2010. On this Briforum Bennie and Brian did a rebate on this subject.The VS vs VDI battle is an old topic from Briforum 2008 and they presented it on many congresses like VMWorld. Although there are a lot of pro and con’s for both solutions one of the outcomes is that VDI will be the future but the way it looks now it will definitely change.
At the moment their are many advantages for using TS. It’s proven technology so to say but VDI is making his way into the offices. Also they use the same connection protocols at the moment like ICA and RDP and that is also the bottleneck. There are a lot of upcoming products and vendors that will change the way of connections to VDI environments. Some examples of vendors that have products that are very interesting at the moment are VDIworks, Atlantis Computing, Kaviza.
Performing Your Own Benchmarks with the Free Login VSI Indexer by Jeroen van der Kamp.
The (free) Login VSI indexer is the only benchmark tool on the market today that can do benchmarks on multiuser environments like TS and VDI. Al other benchmark tools out there are single user benchmark tests
The tool creates detailed graphs showing how many sessions at a certain level of performance you can get on a server, meaning you can compare TS to VDI architectures, or VMs with 512MB versus VMs with 1GB.
Jeroen van de Kamp, explained during this session how to use the tool and how to set it up.Also there was information about the new VSI Indexer 2.0. In the new version there will be a free and a pro version. And users will have the ability to customize the pro version to their needs and adapt it to their organization and needs.
