Introduction One of my customers asked me about migrating Horizon linked clones (with persistent disks) from one Nutanix cluster to another. Traditional way of doing this is to detach the persistent disks and then recreate the persistent desktops as documented below. https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2086416 But if the requirement is to have minimum downtime and to minimize touching … Continue reading Migrating Desktops with Persistent disks to new VMware Cluster and Desktop Pool

There has not been a single week at VMware so far that I have not been asked to clarify vSphere for Desktop licensing. Last week, two of Singapore’s biggest FSI customers contacted me on exactly this. I thought it will be a good idea to document some of the clarifications that was needed. Introduction vSphere … Continue reading Simplifying(hopefully) vSphere for Desktop licensing

One of the features of Horizon 7 is the ability to redirect USB and Client Drives as Read-only. This is extremely useful for customers who are security conscious and do not want users to modify files on drives or usb devices connected to the endpoint devices from their virtual desktops. A good example is a … Continue reading READONLY USB and Client Drive Redirection in Horizon 7

Recently I had a high profile customer having a terrible connection experience launching ICA sessions. I checked the usual suspects like connection timeouts, disabling session reliability, checking for NAT settings and so on. No improvement. However one thing I observed was launching the ICA session from within the same desktop network did not exhibit this behavior. … Continue reading Launching an ICA session takes forever – Stuck at Connecting

On my recently completed project, I spent quite a bit of time debugging Storefront as I missed seemingly irrelevant but important practices. I also burnt my fingers few times because I failed to fully understand the basic principles of a redundant and fault tolerant Storefront implementation from a design perspective. The following are the 3 … Continue reading Citrix StoreFront – Few good things

Installing XenApp throws Error 1603 and breaks the installation midway. The Citrix website points to http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX132117 but I strongly suggest check for the following before doing that. If you are installing XenApp 6.5 on Windows 2008 Server R2, please ensure that the following services are turned on. RPC Baseline Filtering COM related Services Baseline Filtering … Continue reading XenApp installation throws 603 Error Message