The blog..

Pubforum kicked off, and against all odds, Wireless was running at kickoff, so i think we have shown that there is hope that we will be online throughout the event.

The day kicked off with Alex Yuschenko welcoming everyone to the 11th Pubforum, and passed the word to Raimonds Martinovs.

Raimonds Martinovs kicked off Pubforum with a good presentation on "VMware latest developments" giving us all a run through of how Raimonds and Novosco work with VMware and surrounding technologies. Raimonds ended his presentation with a great demonstration of the Site recovery manager functionlality live.

After a quick bit of lunch we moved on to the Citrix side of things.

Oliver Lomberg from Citrix EMEA started out with a great session on "XenApp 5.0 – first impressions". Oliver gave us the whole truth and nothing but the truth, he actually used the term Crap… i wont say what it was in regards to, but it was a feature that helps in automating application installation.. or should help..

my key take-aways

• OS Platform on the applicances Citrix is working with seems to be changing to CentOS which will help in the quest towards full virtualization, so we may soon be able to virtualize CAG, EasyCall etc.. Yehaa! i am gonna watch this closely
• Installation Manager is being revamped and relaunched by the end of november 2008 with better functionality, but it does seem that Citrix is moving focus even more away from the installation manager product.
• The new ressource manager is based on Edgesight technology and gives us an even better overview of the Server ressources and similar.
• The new version of Edgesight inlcudes robot-procedures so you can monitor SLA using scheduled robot operations.
• ICA optimization using WANScaler technology, Oliver had graphs showing a 12x better compression using the new feature with only session, so way cool for branch offices on low bandwith/high latency connections.

Oliver did a good live Demo of the new streaming features, package relations and so on.

Helmut Hauser from VisionApp did a great presentation of "Citrix Edgesight 5.0 whats new, and better", very honest presentation on good reasons to upgrade, whats new and whats great. A live demo would have been cool, but Helmut did great on the presentation, and with lots of good screenshots which explained the views way  better than a live demo with limited information in the database.

Kowing alot more on what to keep in mind with edgesight installation. The day went on with Rick Dehlinger and an inspiring presentation of the VisionApp products vWM – VisionApp Workspace Management, vSM – VisionApp Server Management. Check out www.visionapp.com.
Rick tried to place the product in the world of Delivery Centers, sharing the vision that Citrix and it made alot of sense, Rick did a great demonstration of the products and it surely touched my interest and i will be sure to pick his brain sometime tonight or during the weekend. Especially the "Factory" tool which could be a good way for companies and consultants to reuse and secure that implementations are done in the right way with the right experiences being kept in play.

Rich Crusco did a presentation on "Whats new in Provisioning Server 5.0". I have been looking quite a bit into that so there wasnt much new, but overall the product is now much more enterprise ready, SQL Server, Farm design etc, so its looking good for Provisioning Server. But there is no doubt in my mind, Provisioning server is going to be a key component in the future implementations.

Thomas Monahan did a great runthrough of the Hotfix rollup pack 3 for XenApp 4.5 and 5.0 on windows 2003.. go figure. Some of the optimized areas are:

• Zone Data Collector election
• resilience to election storms
• black hole effect
• optimized election performance
• ZDC Election Perfmon Counters
• Load balancing performance
• Static Data Broadcast Optimization
• Data Store improvements

Best practice for deploying HRP3: CTX118659 do read!

• Having XenApp 5.0 on 2008 and XenApp 5.0 on 2003 with HRP is considered a mixed farm.
• CTX118658 – IMA Performance and Resiliency Enhancements in HR3
• CTX118771 – Installation Guide for Hotfix Rollup Pack 3 for XenApp 5.0 and Presentation Server 4.5

As always a very technical and well presented presentation from Thomas.

And that made the first day at pubforum, time for dinner and a beer.. maybe two..

Rene Vester