Troy's IT Blog

Today I am going to talk about the design decision on how to manager your user profiles on VDIs. This topic has been evolving over the years as technology has made new solutions possible. The important thing to point out is out of all the solutions none of them are bad. It just depends on the use case you are working with as to what is the best fit. Below you will find 6 profile solutions and details about when to use each. Don't Use Any Solution - With this solution you chose to not do anything with the profiles. This means if you are running a non-persistent VDI when the VDI is refreshed all user data will be deleted. This has no real impact in a full persistent VDI environment. Recommended use case: Full Persistent VDI or Non-persistent VDI where you do not care if you do not retain user data. Horizon Persistent Disks - With this solution you redirect the user profile to a 2nd hard drive on the VDI. This allows you to be able to refresh the C drive of the VD...

So you might be building a new environment or you might be doing a hardware refresh for your VDI. If this is the case you have three options one being Traditional Infrastructure, Converged Infrastructure, or Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI). In this post i am going to focus on HCI and why it is such a great option for VDI. What is Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI): HCI is a type of infrastructure system with a software-centric architecture that is comprised of the following building blocks compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources in a commodity hardware box supported by a single vendor. HCI Systems are managed as a single system using a common tool set. Advantages of Hyper-Converged Infrastructures: Simplified management: a HCI helps unifies management into a single interface. This  can allow the rest of your IT team to focus on proactive parts of the business. Reduced costs and increased efficiency:  With HCI lower costs of pur...

When working with Citrix XenDesktop / XenApp 7.12 and newer. You might have a need for a reboot schedule within a delivery group that requires multiple reboot schedules. When you go to try to do this in the GUI of Citrix Studio there is no option to do multiple reboots schedules inside of a delivery group. Good news is there is a new command let that will let you do this in in XenDesktop / XenApp 7.12. I found this GUI tool to help make this process a little easier here http://wedelit.no/blog/2017/01/20/wedel-it-citrix-reboot-scheduler/ .  The way it works is based on TAGs that you set within a delivery group in Citrix Studio. A few requirements are needed to make this work • This tool must be run from a delivery controller running version 7.12 or later • Delivery groups must be defined in Citrix Studio • TAGs must be set in Citrix Studio