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

The presenters did an extraordinary job presenting their techniques, their tools, or the company products, no sales-nonse .. just pure technical sessions done by the technicians who work with the tools and products every day.

I will try to go over a few of my experiences from the Presentations:

Day 1:

Pubforum Olympics sponsored by Appsense.
The Pubforum olympics was a great thing, it was an event that ran over the entire Pubforum with different challenges each day and it gave us all a little more to discuss and talk about. The Challenges included tasks like “Hosting Microsoft Project in a server farm, obeying EULA and being accessible only in business hours”, “Smallest possible Profile build” and others like “name all registry keys which can be used to ‘autorun’ an application at startup”.

Simon Frost – “What has Citrix been doing since the last pubforum”?
Simon did a presentation about what has happened since the last pubforum, which must have been great for everyone but me, since this was sadly only my first. However there were alot of good stuff i will name a few of the topics.
-Support for W2k3-R2 ADFS
-Citrix Access Essentials 1.5 - Simon mentioned some of the new features in 1.5 and also told that CAE will have a much faster development cycle than CPS 4.0. So alot of stuff coming in this area and seems to be an area that Citrix has a large amount of focus on.
-Teros a firewall for the netscaler
-MOM 2005 Management pack – its here ..
-Password Manager 4.1
-New tools: Medevac, automatic farm tuner(mainly focused at large farms)
-The blackhole hotfix(ctx108645)
-Tarpon – Mentioned briefly but i am guessing we will have to wait for next NDA-event with more information on this.

Bill Gleeson – Scapa Technologies
Bill Gleeson from Scapa Technologies did a good presentation and demonstration of their products. Scapa Technologies specialize in Performance measuring, diagnostics and testing. They provide a product line which can simulate and measure tasks from a client pc, giving customers the ability to measure and know what the client is experiencing during heavy load or other situations that can be hard to measure or troubleshoot. Scapa Technologies were also kind enough to host an evening event for socializing and ofcourse a couple of well diserved belgium beers.

Walter Weinfurter – Microsoft EMEA “A look under the hood of the new Virtual products”
Walter did a great and in depth demonstration of Virtual Server and the administration of the machines. It seems the virtual products have come along way, but it is still hard for me to compare the products as i dont see many customers using GSX from VMware or Virtual Server, from my experience the main focus at the moment is on the ESX technologies, but from what Walter showed Microsoft is surely investing time and money into their virtual products, so i am guessing we will see them competing with ESX in the near future.. somehow.

When the recording of sessions was turned off, Walter did a demonstration of the Longhorn terminal Services, we talked about the gateway and the new “seamless application”-features.. Seems like Terminal Services are moving towards providing some of what Citrix is providing for us now, however they do it in their own way, so as i see it Terminal Services and Citrix products will continue to compliment each other and solve different challenges. But it was great to get a glimpse of the future with a Microsoft Support Engineer behind the wheel.

Day 2:

Simon Frost – “How does Presentation Server Work?”
Simon did an in depth presentation of Presentation Server under the hood, sadly i had to attend work issues at home so i was not able to follow the first 2 presentations too closely, but i am definately looking forward to the publishing of the Presentation.

Marc Killduff - Metaframe troubleshooting case studies
Marc presented case studies fresh from the Citrix support team, showing us exactly what goes on when they are troubleshooting and working with an issue in his team. It was a great look into the techniques for troubleshooting, but sadly i was forced to run to and from the session and admittedly i lost track at some point, it was hardcore technical stuff.

Stefan Vermeulen and Gavan Smythe – “Everything you ever wanted to know about printing in terminal service environmetns.”
These guys know a thing or two about printing issues. Stefan and Gavan gave a great in depth presentation of problems, workarounds and Gavan went into detail with how he solves issues at his customers. Presenting how he managed to script retaining printer settings, default printers and similar stuff. Gavan and Stefan promised to release the scripts to the community when i find the url i will cross-link it here.

Toby Coleridge – WISP Web Interface / SharePoint integration
Toby did a nice presentation of WISP and it looks really great adding the possibility of chosing whether to open documents, pictures or similar on your local machine or through published applications. The Webinterface intregration should also work on even the small version of SharePoint, so maybe this is a way to go for people who want just a little more from their webinterface

Andreas Schulze - Real life examples of designing print solutions for SBC and also a look into ThinPrint.
Andreas is an independant SBC consultant from Germany, he shared his experiences on with ThinkPrint to solve some of the most common issues in printing.

Kobie Crawford – Netscaler architecture
Kobie swung by and did a great presentation of the ‘still new’ Netscaler products, and the architecture of the solutions. Kobie is from the original netscalers so he shared alot of information and answered any questions we had.

Dr. Bernhard Tritsch – “Can i pimp my terminal servers by migrating to 64-bit Windows”
Bernhard “Benny” Tritsch did a great and indepth presentation of his findings while doing performance tests of Windows 32-bit and 64-bit. There were some very interesting findings and for one the whitepapers from MS and Citrix might have to be up for adjustment or atleast in real life situations it might be wise to do your own tests or study Bernhard Tritsch and Visionapp’s findings.
Some of the key findings and Bernhards conclusion seemed to be that there might not be direct “pimpage” from converting your terminals to 64-bit as there is an increased memory usage and using 32-bit applications on 64-bit systems will not improve performance. However, i have to agree that 64-bit is here to stay we all have to get started on changing our scripts, procedures and such to match the coming multi-platform era.

Day 3:

Alex Danilychev – “Ishadow – under the hood”
Alex went first from the morning going through the Ishadow product, and what lies beneath.. Awesome features and great user interface.. i surely hope i will be able to optain myself a copy.
Ishadow provides the missing link between Terminal Services and what an administrator needs to have the objective view of farms, applications and servers. Great product will have to look into this produkt.

Sander Hofman – Wisdom “The Windows maintainance software”
WISDOM seems to provide a great way to administration and maintain windows software on machines and provides great administration options. I signed up for a trial, i will try to look more into this when i get some time.

Asaf Ganot – Cockpit 3.6
Asaf did a great presentation of Cockpit which is a completely new world to me, he explained in depth how the product works but also a few options for tweaking and optimizing. Cockpit might be a platform worth looking into it is also on my to-research-list.

Log-in Consultants – “SBC recipes straight from the Log-in kitchen”
These guys are good, the Log-in consultants showed how they do scripting. They have gone to great lengths to make their scripting perfekt. They showed several developed tools to help in process, publishing apps from commandline and much more. They also promised to share these scripts on their website http://www.loginconsultants.nl/ so go look around, alot fo great tools and scripts.. great for inspiration and really shows how unattending your administrative tasks can be done.
Roger Jansson  - Tricerat Simplify Suite & Screwdrivers v4 Core and beyond.
Roger presented a suite from Tricerat called simplify, it is in many ways a direct competitor to Citrix and also adds administration benefits on Terminal Services, on top of all this they have their own new printer driver to solve all our printing issues and also nifty things like creating printers on the fly inside sessions to reflect the local client. Many cool things, also a product on my to-research list.

Day 4: Last day

Sadly due to something with an alarm clock, an awesome party and Champagne flowing in endless cascades.. i missed the first Presentation on day 4.. but luckily it was a taped presentation by Doug Brown talking about his Mythology in a Box 4.0(MIAB). So looking forward to the video release.. please soon Mr. Conti

Sander Hofman - showing Powerfuse
Sander Hofman did a presentation of powerfuse, alot of great things, but in my situation the product is often too expensive for the solutions or the customers does not seem to have the need, or willingness to pay so it is not that interesting for me, however there are alot of great stuff in this product and alot of good to find if you are willing to pay and have the needs.

Jack Chote – “Server Deployment”
Jack did a great and deep technical presentation of his Server deployment “best practice” what to do, why, and what to be aware of. Alot of good and useful information and alot of links to tools and whitepapers to help us all along the way to ease our server deployments.

Chip PC – Excalibur Global TC Management
Chip pc, some of you might have heard about these guys, they have a line of products awesome for many purposes like their JackPC a Think client made for the purpose of being build into the wall.. leaving only mini jack, Video-out, and USB for mouse and keyboard. If this is not the best solution for classrooms or places haunted by break-ins i dont know what is. Along with their great products they made a demonstration of their Excalibur management tool, and it looks great. A great AD-look’n'feel easy to get into and it makes it easy to administrate and keep an overview of what have happened on the clients. Great product from what i saw, i hope i will get a chance to work with these guys in the future.

This was a quick run-through of some of the topics from PubForum Brussels.. but as i mentioned in the beginning of this post, Pubforum is much more than the sessions and this was put in stone throughout the event by the happenings and experiences, from the Group-photos to the Pubforum Olympics and the Log-in hosted Carting event. This event was most of all about making friends, spending time with colleagues in the business you didnt know and social networking.

It was a great 4 days.

A special thanx to Pubforum team: Alex Yushchenko, Brian Smyth, Alex Danilychev. All the Presenters and sponsors for the great presentations and keeping us all well fed, not thirsty and up to date on what is hot in the SBC-world today. Log-in Consultants for a great carting event, Ruben Giacotto this was a great event and did the last bit to get everyone together. And last but not least, my pubforum olympics team “We have been framed”: Chris Marks, Simon Frost, Toby Coleridge, Stefan Vermeulen, Nick Daniels and Marc Killduff – Appreciate you guys showing me how this thing is done. .