virtuEs.IT

Citrix Summit Barcelona 2012

And the second day of the Summit is passed as well, so time to write up a new summary of the day.

Free exam

I started the morning by taken the free complimentary exam, which in my case was the A16 – Architecting a Citrix Virtualization Solution. The last exam to tackle to gain that Citrix Certified Integration Architect (CCIA) title I set out as my goal for this year.

I did not have the preparation time I hoped for and this exam is known as a tough one to pass. So I didn’t feel that sure about having a good chance when I started the exam. I took the time to read the assessment carefully and had to recheck it with a lot of questions to determine the right answer. The decision tree questions were hard as the second part of the question sometimes showed very clearly I did not pick the best answer for the first part. So by the time I finished the exam, I had no idea what score to expect anymore. But to my surprise I did have a better understanding of all the products, techniques and solutions decisions to make as an Citrix Architect. I passed with a very impressive score of 71%, which made me walking around with this big grin on my face all day. Real proud of myself for sure.

One of my missions for this Synergy down! So I joined the DUCUG crew and Andrew Morgan and colleague for a very entertaining lunch with good tapas, beer and great conversations.

CloudGateway

After a great lunch it was time to join some more sessions, starting with SUM211:Deep dive on CloudGateway for Cloud Service Providers. This session tried to explain the different components that make up the CloudGateway solution, especially the Enterprise variant, including the Access Gateway (for VPX use the new AG Enterprise VPX), StoreFront (replacement for the Web Interface) and the AppController. Multiple tenants can be combined on the Access Gateway and StoreFront. But you will need one virtual (linux) appliance AppController per tenant.

One thing that became clear during an after-session discussion was the fact that CloudGateway and the different components it consists of is not that clear for all attendees.So there is still work to be done to clear up some misconceptions and provide a clear and understandable introduction of the new components to the customers. Or maybe even for ourselves as well, ’cause if we don’t have it all figured out ourselves, we’ll have a hard time explaining the benefits to our customers too.

Provisioning

The next session was all about Citrix Provisioning Server and the many steps to cover during the troubleshooting phase. Even though a lot of steps were pretty obvious, it sure was a nice list of steps to cover and settings to check. Looking forward to save the presentation and build an easy checklist out of the bullets

And after those sessions it was time to track down the secret demo room and get a glimpse of the cool stuff they are currently working on from the engineers themselves. As all is NDA, I cannot enclose any details, but it definitely triggered some new ideas for future projects

Geek Speak

Last session of the day was the first Geek Speak sessions for this event, which started on IT consumerization and onwards to Cloud security. The first part started of nicely with some good statements, but did linger too long (to my taste) on the ‘Google is profiling you’ statements. Profiling has been around for a long time and is not really a Cloud related or IT consumerization related topic. And it usually doesn’t add to a constructive discussion. The second part of the Geek Speak session, on Cloud security wasn’t what I hoped for, as it quickly went to the ‘Google owns you’re data’ rant and discussed the same data security statements I have heard when we started with building corporate web applications and hooked our corporate networks to the internet. No new lessons learned so far.

So hopefully we’ll here some good discussions on sessions to come!

Expo

Last program of today was the Partner Solution Centre, where I met some new partners, tested some new products and discovered some fun goodies as well, like the beer opener/usb stick, which must be standard issue tooling for each Geek #wink

So time for me to wrap up this daily summary, as I’m looking forward to tomorrows keynote, which should (as always) have some great announcements.
Keep you posted!

Tags: Citrix Summit Barcelona 2012, Citrix Synergy, Feed The Buzz

Citrix Summit Barcelona 2012

The first day of Citrix Summit is past as I write this summary.

CloudPlatform

For me the Summit started with Learning Lab session SUM602W, which guided me very well through all the steps to take with CloudPlatform to build my own highly scalable and reliable Amazon-style cloud. With the step-by-step guide I quite quickly had my own CloudPlatform up and running and was checking out the different options it offers you to set up templates, customers, zones and business models. I would love to be able to design and build an use-case with CloudPlatform. Especially when the next release is out and support for XenServer’s workload balancer is implemented as well, integrating with the XenServer 6.1 engine and API, and the additional NetScaler integration they have planned to allow predefined load balancing rules and even allow the NetScaler to dynamically add extra VM instances to the pool to increase capacity for webservers (based upon the CloudPlatform integration) and also ensure those same webservers are added to the existing NetScaler load balancing rules to actively use those newly created VM to spread the additional web requests to the newly available capacity.

How’s that for some nice features to be seen in CloudPlatform and NetScaler future editions!

ShareFile

After my lab I planned a quick trip to the hotel to drop off my backpack and settle for the lighter shoulderbag version for the remaining sessions. Unfortunately that took a little more time than planned, so I entered the next session (SUM201) a bit late and did not have the best seat in the back of the room. So I did not get all the news on the ShareFile features. I did understand that the On-premises feature of ShareFile is not currently integrated with Citrix Receiver, an update to support it is scheduled for later this quarter. The demo did not answer all my questions, so I still need to do some more reading on the requirements that were mentioned as one did mention the need for a public addressable internet address. Which to me seems as a little odd requirement for an exclusive on-premises implementation. So I’ll try to get some more details on that requirement at the demo pods this week.

RemotePC

After ShareFile, I went to SUM239 to check out the latest news on RemotePC. A very clear and understandable session on how RemotePC is part of the FlexCast model as the Physical solution. If you want to try out RemotePC, you might just want to download the XenDesktop express (with Feature Pack 1) version, which gives you the latest (FP1) VDA with RemotePC support.

Summit Welcome Address

And the day was closed with a Summit Welcome Address. During that session Mark Templeton took the stage as well to tell us the story of the Why, How and What. (see the video of Simon Synek’s presentation at TED.
You can watch Mark Templeton’s presentation during the Plenary session on youtube: here

Partner Appreciation party

I did attend the Partner Appreciation party as well, meeting with alot of dutch (DUCUG) community members while enjoying tapas, drinks and some great conversations.

A good start of this years event, with alot more to come…

Tags: Citrix Summit Barcelona 2012, Citrix Synergy, Feed The Buzz