I am very happy that Synergy is a success in Europe and i hope it leads to more pan-european events just like Synergy. Where my frustration comes into the picture is with the fact that european partners and customers are now unable to attend and refered to a SynergyOnline concept which will bring a few keynotes and most popular sessions.

Normally a sold out event would just mean exactly that to me, a great success for the people doing the event and also for the participants, so why is it that i am irritated by this? Well yes, the reason this Citrix Synergy is such a huge success, in my oppinion can be contributed to the fact that Citrix has an extremely loyal network of distributors, partners and customers who are fully devoted to the strategy and the products. So when Mark Templeton goes on stage in Las Vegas and says “We are going to make a european event, full scale event, just like the one we have had in Las Vegas, and i hope you will all help us get people to attend”(essense of his words, not a direct quote) .. Well the european partners, distributors and customers start preparing. I think for several reasons:

• Bringing this to europe would save travel costs and make it easier to attend
• Making this a success would encourage Citrix to give the european event the same focus as the us-based.
• For distributors and Partners, making a european event like this sends a signal to customers that Citrix cares.

So.. what happend after the announcement from Mark Templeton in Las Vegas? Well the local Citrix offices started focusing on gathering people for the local event, participation from the local offices in europe at the San francisco event was almost nothing compared to earlier, and customers were told, wait! Berlin will be great! And who are the big liars now? The partners and distributors? Maybe we should not have suggested customers wait for Berlin, as i remember there were still available seating at the Synergy in San Francisco.

And Citrix, yes.. you should have known.. you could have prepared, you promised a fullscale event in Berlin, and booked room for like 50% more attendants than you have previously had at local German events..

Want alternatives?

Citrix has done a few things to help ease the pain on some of the people unable to get tickets for the real event, one of which is Synergy Online, more infomation can be found here: http://www.citrixsynergy.com/about/synergyonline.html

I will be blogging and tweeting from Synergy so stay tuned, if YOU are blogging from Synergy, let me know i will make a page with links to blogs from Synergy in Berlin.

And if you have the time and budget an alternative to get the information would be to attend Pubforum Berlin. Pubforum Berlin will be held right after Citrix Synergy in Berlin, and will be featuring sessions with “Best from Synergy” and some of the speakers from Synergy will also be present at Pubforum. For more information about Pubforum check www.pubforum.net . Pubforum is an Expert to Expert european event and there will be no sales sessions.

Anyways.. i have not been blogging lately and even my participation in the forums have fallen to a nonexistant level, and ofcourse i chose to blame my son 100%.. but what i started thinking about the other day was, how lucky i am to actually miss this, there has been times where i wondered if i blogged for myself or for everyone else, so the last few months spend getting to know my son, surely told me it has been just as much for myself as anyone else. No doubt an extra little guy in the house will take more time, but luckily i have been able to turn my focus back to what i truly love, virtualization technologies and especially Citrix which naturally has a special place with me.

I will be working with Citrix more focused looking ahead and i am looking forward to share my experiences with you all.

The Danish Citrix User Group is just now planning the next Meetup, and shortly there will be news and information available on www.dkcug.dk

Just as importantly, the preparation for Grand Pubforum Frankfurt 2010 is under way and it looks great so far, i truly believe this might end up being the best Pubforum ever. It is being held in the hometown of the Father of Pubforum, Alex Juschin, and information will be released to www.pubforum.net as it is finalized, book the flights now.

Citrix User Group Norway is also in the middle of preparations for their spring event in Lillestrøm, just outside Oslo, these guys never cease to amaze me, so i am truly looking forward to the finalized agenda! you can keep up to date here: http://cug.no/xenzone/

/René

General information:
Starts: Friday May 28, 2010
End: Sunday May 30, 2010
Location: InterContinental Frankfurt
Frankfurt Am Main, HESSEN 60549 DE

The price of this event will range from 125 – 199 EUR depending on Early bird registration etc.

You can read more and register your participation here at the Linkedin Event: http://events.linkedin.com/Grand-PubForum-2010-Frankfurt/pub/173529

And you can keep up to date, following the development at the Pubforum website here: http://www.pubforum.info/welcome/PubForumEvents/PubForum2010FrankfurtMain/tabid/83/Default.aspx

Stay tuned for more information and the big surprise, Pubforum Boston 2010!

/René Vester

Alex finished publishing videos and presentations from Pubforum in Dublin 2009!

You can now go visit the pubforum site here to access the materials: http://www.pubforum.info/welcome/PFResources/tabid/55/Default.aspx

On another note i would like to mention a new initiative which Alex is launching in Europe. The RDS999.. you can find more information here: http://www.rds999.com

I will be hosting Alex’s european tour in Denmark through The danish Citrix User Group with help from sponsors. Maybe you are in a position to help Alex in another country so we can spread the word on the great new features in Remote Desktop Services 2008.

More information will follow with the dates and venues for the Danish event. Dates are set to 14+15th of September.

Rene Vester

After having visited the Norwegian User group on their spring event from Oslo to Kiel, then visiting Las Vegas for the Citrix Partner Summit and the Citrix Synergy event which i have blogged about earlier i we held the 2009 Pubforum Dublin just earlier this month. It was a great event, sadly my duties during the event kept me from blogging as much from the event has i have done earlier. But i can tell you that the event was great, awesome presenters and as it is with Pubforum wonderful attendees. At Pubforum everyone is a family.. presenter and attendee alike, it is one of the great things and i am happy to be a part of the event. Next Pubforum will be in Frankfurt Germany the home city of Pubforum Founder Alex Y..Dr.Conti, so i bet he will do what he can to make us all feel like we were at home

Now i am back to attending my day-job, and at last i have worked my way through the work which had piled up on my desk. And with the summer coming i hope i will have time to write articles and blog posts about all the many impressions i have gotten over the last couple of months. I will be kicking of today or tomorrow with the first part of a serie i have chosen to call The Essentials of Virtualization.

Back on the Blog.. back on twitter.. its good to be home ……… maybe i should get out more

Rene Vester

PubForum 2009 Dublin
June 5 – 7, 2009
Dublin, Republic of Ireland

So the time is drawing closer and the European expert-to-expert event of the year is almost here. I am super exited and looking forward to Dublin and catching up with regulars and new attendees at this years Pubforum.

There are still a few seats available for the event and if you are interested in a few days of strong technical content i really suggest you check out the Pubforum Dublin 2009 Site. also throw a glance at the action-packed agenda which is pretty much finalized. This time around we will have a lot of cool speakers at the event including Shawn Bass, Benny Tritsch, Alex Danilichev and many others including internal Citrix SEs and experienced consultants and architects.

Pubforum is always a great event, open people great atmosphere, with a lot of pictures and friendships to prove it.

I will be there and of course blog during the event as time allow it

The Agenda is available here: http://www.pubforum.info/welcome/PubForumEvents/PubForum2008Nice/AgendaPubForum2009Dublin/tabid/87/Default.aspx

Rene Vester

PubForum 2009 Dublin
June 5 – 7, 2009
Dublin, Republic of Ireland

So the time is drawing closer and the European expert-to-expert event of the year is almost here. I am super exited and looking forward to Dublin and catching up with regulars and new attendees at this years Pubforum.

There are still a few seats available for the event and if you are interested in a few days of strong technical content i really suggest you check out the Pubforum Dublin 2009 Site. also throw a glance at the action-packed agenda which is pretty much finalized. This time around we will have a lot of cool speakers at the event including Shawn Bass, Benny Tritsch, Alex Danilichev and many others including internal Citrix SEs and experienced consultants and architects.

Pubforum is always a great event, open people great atmosphere, with a lot of pictures and friendships to prove it.

I will be there and of course blog during the event as time allow it

The Agenda is available here: http://www.pubforum.info/welcome/PubForumEvents/PubForum2008Nice/AgendaPubForum2009Dublin/tabid/87/Default.aspx

Rene Vester

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

It is almost time..

Pubforum is getting closer, and registration has begun. It seems become as good an event as always with lots of great technical minds attending.

For more information have a look here:

http://www.pubforum.info/welcome/PubForumEvents/PubForum2008Nice/tabid/74/Default.aspx

The current agenda is still being put together but here is the quick overview:

Conference Topics – about 20 sessions delivered by true SBC and Virtualization Experts, Citrix, Microsoft and other companies – uncensored, community friendly no sales stuff:

Citrix XenApp, XenServer, XenDesktop, NetScaler, WanScaler
Microsoft Terminal Services Windows 2008
Citrix Virtualization
Microsoft Hyper V Virtualization
Vmware Virtualization
Case Studies, Best Practices, Alternative Products
System Monitoring and Performance Optimization
Profile & User Management
VDM
VDI

I will try to keep a record of what goes on, news, guides and what have we.

I will update the Pubforum page here: http://www.nightshade.dk/?page_id=19

Day 3: So, i was trying to update this page with what has been going on, and you will have to wait a bit for that, i will have to make a description when i get bit more energy. For some reason my head seems to be a bit exhausted so i will try to concentrate on the description from the sessions. There will be an update here… in time..:-)

Day 4: So this was it for me this time, i have tried to relay the information i could and i will review my posts try to fill in the blanks forced by time, and interesting sessions. If you have any comments or suggestions please drop me a message or an email.
I will try to fill in the blanks as soon as possible.

if you are interested in more information you can also check out www.pubforum.net the home page of Pubforum or visit one of the other blogs from Pubforum Amsterdam:

Stefan is blogging at www.printingsupport.com
Wilco is blogging at his site at http://sbc.vanbragt.net/

A big thanx to the attendees, presenters and last but not least to the Pubforum Team, Alex, Bryan and Alex for a great event.
/Rene