Wilco van Bragt has a nice article in a series of articles describing alternative products to Citrix Presentation Server.  It's definitely worth reading.

MSTerminalServices.org - Alternatives to Citrix Presentation Server (Part 1)

Shawn

In a recent blog entry titled "A brief architecture overview of VMware ESX, XEN and MS Viridian", Massimo does a great job explaining the architectural differences between the competing virtualization products from VMWare, Microsoft, and the open source Xen.  While it's clear that there's no true winner from an architectural perspective, my personal thoughts are that many people are going to adopt Viridian simply because it will be made available more easily and cost effectively.  Time will tell though.

Shawn

So those Mac user's out there that have been using the Coherence feature of Parallels virtualization product, you need to checkout this video posted on VMWare's VMTN blog.  It's pretty amazing!

Shawn

Michael Burke has a nice article up on MSTerminalServices.org on high availability and recovery strategies for TS Licensing Servers.  Hopefully most of you are aware that in the absense of a functional TS Licensing environment, your entire Citrix environment is useless.  To that end, Michael has some great info on how you should design your TS License servers for high availability.

Read the full MSTerminalServices.org article.

Shawn

Tim and Kevin (both regulars on SoftGridGuru.com) have announced that they have built training courseware on SoftGrid and will be conducting independent training classes on the courseware.  While this is unofficial training, I'm extremely excited to see this type of thing available for the SoftGrid platform.  I think it's going to be a great opportunity once SoftGrid starts to gain more traction in the industry.  Besides, I'm already biased on supporting independent training.

Read the forum posting on SoftGridGuru.  Add read more about the training on the GridMasterTraining.com.

Shawn

In a forum post on SoftGridGuru, smileyej posted links to download locations for SoftGrid 4.1 SP1.  The strange thing is that the download links are public?!?!  Mistake?  Get 'em while they're hot!

Shawn

Citrix has posted information that their acquisition of ThinGenius's load testing product has been productized as Citrix EdgeSight for Load Testing and will be available beginning June 24th, 2007.  This announcement came with the official launch of EdgeSight 4.5.  Pricing for the load testing product is $7500US for 100 virtual users (approximately 1k more than previous pricing under ThinGenius).  Frankly I'm surprised this was launched as quickly as it was.  It seems Citrix is really getting this M&A thing down pat now.

Read the official press release for full details.

Shawn

Microsoft has posted additional details on the SoftGrid Team Blog about the outstanding survey for participation in the SoftGrid 4.5 Technology Adoption Program (TAP).  Here are some of the interesting plans for SoftGrid 4.5 (bold emphasis is mine): ·         Enhanced client scalability: improvements to allow very large deployments and integration with ESD systems, such as System Center Configuration Manager

·         Availability and maintainability: the most stable and reliable version of SoftGrid to date

·         Security tightening: the first SoftGrid release to go through the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) and enhancements to support internet-facing scenarios

·         Globalization and localization: support for both virtualizing non-English language applications and running the SoftGrid user interface in certain non-English languages

And here are the requirements of the TAP:Requirements for participating in the SoftGrid 4.5 TAP:

·         Executive...

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While it can't be used in a production environment, Microsoft has posted a Tech Preview release of SoftGrid 4.2.  SoftGrid 4.2 brings support for Windows Vista and Side-by-Side (SxS) support for things like Office 2007 and Visual Studio Express.  The release of 4.2 is slated for July 2007.  Read the full details at the SoftGrid Team blog entry.

Shawn

From this forum thread on the official Citrix Support site, I found a link to a published KB article about the effects of WAN optimization technology on Citrix ICA traffic.  View the whitepaper from Citrix Consulting at the following link:

CTX113505 - FAQ - Truths and Myths of Presentation Server and WAN Optimization

Shawn