Antivirus in VDI is often overlooked or installed and managed the same way it is for traditional desktops. In truth, antivirus is as important in VDI as ever, but there are some things you can do to manage it more effectively and reduce the impact it has on your virtual systems. In this session, you'll learn:
All applications crash unexpectedly. But, are they crashing more than you expect? Did that last service pack or security hotfix really cause more application crashes? Do you have the data to prove it? Few businesses have centralised application stability data. What tools can help gather such data? This session will focus on strategies to gather application stability data and crash dumps to allow you to have an accurate picture of the state of the applications you deliver.
Click here to view all sessionsWould you like to gain additional insight into the various best practices that other App-V customers are doing? This session will provide you with an opportunity to obtain exclusive insight from Ment, an App-V MVP with over 10 years of experience in the field. Ment will reveal the numerous best practices, challenges and solutions that have been witnessed in the field of application virtualisation. He will demonstrate some uncommon advanced streaming scenarios to optimise application delivery as well as share hisvision on common questions like: "Should we be virtualising middleware applications? How about Microsoft Office? If we apply Dynamic Suiting Composition, what challenges come with that?" Ment will also provide some ready-to-use best practices on how to optimise and apply client configuration.
Click here to view all sessionsIn this energetic session, Ruben Spruijt and Jeroen van de Kamp will present all the important results and best practices for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and Remote Desktop Services (formerly Terminal Server) workloads as found in Project "THE Virtual Reality Check." This R&D project started in early 2009 and has involved more than 850 tests. The goal of Project VRC is to analyse the developments in the application and desktop virtualisation market and present the results in an unbiased and independent way. In the haze of massive amounts of innovation and marketing promises, this information is highly appreciated.
Specific topics in this fast-paced session include:
If you are looking for independent advice and a "reality check" in relation to virtualising desktop workloads, and are searching for best practices for your virtual desktops, this is the session you must attend!
Click here to view all sessionsIt has been a while since the Bring Your Own Computer/PC (BYOC/BYOPC) idea stormed the IT world. In this session, we'll discuss what has happened since then in terms of adoption, implementation and challenges. We will also look at some of legal implications mostly forgotten or overlooked in a BYOC/BYOPC model.
Click here to view all sessionsMost Web Interface sessions show you how do customisations by modifying headers and footers or modifying colors. That is not what we'll do in this session. Instead, we will learn about the nuts-and-bolts building blocks of Web Interface—the "gross anatomy," if you will. Then, we will take these building blocks and use them to make Web Interface totally new—"an extreme makeover" of sorts. The following is a rough outline of what we'll also cover in today's session:
Type 1 hypervisors feel like the ultimate weapon and the long-awaited remaining piece in the puzzle of flexible application delivery concepts. However, Citrix is there, providing an enterprise-targeted mature release of such a technology. In this session, we'll take a look at what's in their product and drill down on which things you need to take care of in order to match this platform to user expectations. We will also discuss where it may fit and where it doesn't.
Click here to view all sessionsIn this session, Ron will present best practices for GPO implementation for desktops and show you how to completely configure your desktops via group policy in Windows 2008 domains. The configurations will include: basic desktop look and feel; start menus and icons; configuring printers and applications; custom application GPO templates; adding "non standard" registry entries; and applying preferences via the GPO. You'll learn how to stop hacking your desktop image's registry and, instead, maintain all changes where they are easily found and audited... the AD domain's GPO structure.
Click here to view all sessionsWhether you're still struggling to get IE8 out to your Windows XP population or if you've given up on rolling IE8 to Windows XP and are hoping to deal with that in Windows 7, you might need to have a "Plan B" in place for those corporate applications that do not work properly under IE8. There are many different ways that this can be accomplished and each method has its own pros, cons and costs associated. In this session, Shawn will talk about the different strategies for mitigating IE6 compatibility issues, will discuss the different approaches that are available and provide guidance on what the best solution is for your particular needs.
Click here to view all sessionsThe display protocol we have known and loved under the name of 'ICA' has evolved dramatically in the last few years. What once was a fast, WAN-friendly way to remote applications has evolved into 'HDX', and now provides a rich, high-definition user experience for applications and desktops. Along with increased sophistication comes increased complexity: Speedscreen? Flash acceleration? Server-side/client-side rendering? Queuing and tossing? Compression levels? Audio quality levels? Bufferation? There are lots of bits to twiddle in there, and if you're not careful, you can do more harm than good along the way to getting it right. This deep dive session into HDX Multimedia will tear apart the different components which make up the high-definition user experience that Citrix promises to deliver, leaving you with the knowledge and skills to get it right the first time.
Click here to view all sessionsImagine you have an expensive 3D and rich graphical application that you want to deploy over Terminal Services. You install it and test it; only to find the 3D view just looks black. As a software vendor who makes medical software, Brainlab faced this problem when they were developing their own server solution to distribute their product to their customers.
Throughout that process, Pietro learned that a lot needs to happen to turn a standalone application into a fully compatible Terminal Services one, including several challenges and compromises to meet. In this session, Pietro will discuss and demonstrate:
In this session, we'll get into the underpinnings of XenDesktop 5 management by diving into the PowerShell SDK that XenDesktop 5 management is built on. You'll learn the common use cmdlets and also see how Desktop Studio can teach you the PowerShell commands you need to successfully automate XenDesktop 5.
Click here to view all sessionsHow do we determine the performance of the complicated interdependent systems we use today? In his now classic white paper and presentation from BriForum 2005, Tim Mangan introduced a new term, "Perceived Performance," as a way to look for answers. In this session, Tim will explain and update the concepts for our virtualised worlds.
Attend this session and you'll learn how to measure perceived performance in terms relevant to your users and see the results of tests involving both real and virtual users. Ultimately, you will walk away with an understanding of how to improve the perceived performance of your users in a virtual desktop environment.
Click here to view all sessionsVMware isn't the only data centre virtualisation solution anymore, and organisations are poised to have multiple hypervisors within the data centre due to hypervisor-specific features like like Microsoft RemoteFX or Citrix Intellicache. Having multiple hypervisors introduces new challenges that need to be considered, including:
In this session, you'll learn techniques to deal with these challenges. Topics discussed will include VM file formats (VHD, OVF, Citrix Project Kensho), management tools (SCVMM, libvirt), VM Operations (V2V), Monitoring (SCOM), and Backup (Veeam, PHD), as well as what the future holds for interoperability between platform hypervisors.
Click here to view all sessionsJon returns to BriForum again to present this default and mandatory profile tuning session. As the industry moves on, profiles are becoming more and more visible and pretty much every third party personalisation vendor recommends the use of a mandatory profile to begin with. There are various elements of tuning that can be applied to a mandatory profile to improve log-on speed, usability and more. This session will focus on practical applications of these elements. As an expert in the registry, Jon will walk you through the step-by-step tuning process, showing the various tweaks to gain every ounce of performance from the user profile. There will be little-to-no PowerPoint slides, but instead, a live performance. This session will also build on that of BriForum 2010 being based on Windows 7 which can be transferred easily to Windows Server 2008.
Click here to view all sessionsMFCOM has been the de facto standard for programmatically interfacing with Citrix XenApp. Whether you wanted to write a simple script or develop an application that interfaced with XenApp, MFCOM was the answer. Now, Citrix is committed to building their management architecture on PowerShell—not just for XenApp, but for all Citrix products. That's great news for standardisation across platforms and aligning with Microsoft on using PowerShell for management architectures. Now, the question is: How do you take what you know about MFCOM and translate that to PowerShell? In today's session, we'll dig down deep to find the answer to this question and more.
Click here to view all sessionsThere's been a lot of talk about the "consumerisation" of IT—the idea that individuals can make their own IT choices rather than follow the demands of the central IT department. The most visible aspect of this today is "BYOC," but, it goes so much more beyond bringing iPads or MacBooks into the office.
The most important part of IT consumerisation lies with the increasing number of rank-and-file end users that are more computer-savvy than ever. These users not only know what work they need to do, but also HOW they need to do it. An organisation is no longer able to dictate exactly what software and processes are used to complete a task and expect a user to blindly fall in line. Road blocks such as policies and DLP solutions all have workarounds, and when one user discovers a workaround, so do all the rest.
In this session by Brian Madden, you'll learn about the trend of the consumerisation of IT. You'll hear about situations where organisations are losing control without even knowing it. Using Gmail to archive all email messages against company policy, for instance, storing and sharing internal data via an unencrypted Dropbox rather than using an invasive client-side VPN, or using 3G wireless cards to bypass perimeter web security. If your users can't do what they want working with IT, they are more and more capable (and willing) to go around IT altogether.
Fortunately, there are technologies available to enable this transition, including desktop virtualisation, VDI, app virtualisation, and client-based VMs. Attend this lively and energetic session to help get a grip on the entire situation and take back control of your IT.
Click here to view all sessionsThe Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) infrastructure has been around since Windows 2000, but few administrators were able to do much with it. If an administrator wanted to do any performance analysis or profiling, performance monitor (perfmon) was often the best option. But, the most recent Windows server versions now allow us to take advantage of ETW for performance analysis like never before. This session will focus on using the free Microsoft Xperf tool to analyse system and process performance, and the advantages of Xperf compared to other tools like perfmon.
Click here to view all sessionsMicrosoft RDP/RemoteFX, Citrix ICA/HDX, Quest EOP and VMware/Teradici PCoIP represent a selection of popular virtual desktop remoting protocols. But, how are they different from each other and what does this mean for virtual desktop users? How good is the user experience when remoting standard graphics and multimedia output formats such as GDI, DirectX, OpenGL, Windows Presentation Foundation, Flash, Silverlight, videos and animations? In this session, Benny Tritsch and Shawn Bass will take an in-depth look at how graphics and media remoting really works, comparing the different remoting protocols head-to-head.
Click here to view all sessionsFind out why VDI adoption has been slow and how desktop virtualisation will change the future. In this session, Ron Oglesby will discuss why server virtualisation has been so successful, but desktop virtualisation has had relatively limited acceptance thus far. Ron will also take an in-depth look at the acceptance pattern and reasons for adopting server virtualisation, and talk about why those same reasons are not sufficient to drive adoption of virtual desktops.
Click here to view all sessionsReprising the top-rated session from BriForum Chicago 2010, Kevin Goodman explains how to ensure the quality of your vendors' code before you buy. Using step-by-step examples, Goodman shows how your enterprise can enact policies to raise the quality-level of your vendor products. You'll also learn specific ways to spot poorly tested code and poorly qualified vendors. Attend this session and never get burned by a vendor again!
Click here to view all sessionsThe IT world is changing, but it remains to be seen whether or not the cloud will fully penetrate the corporate desktop. In some ways, moving some or all desktop services to the cloud makes a lot of sense; but, is the reality of something other than a traditional desktop practical in the enterprise? Will corporate constraints "hold back" the desktop, or will corporations eventually embrace new desktop models?
Don't miss your chance to join in the discussion with two outspoken visionaries about the future of the desktop. Brian and Harry will express their shared thoughts on desktops and what the future desktop should look like, while also voicing their different opinions on just as many counts. This session will dig in to how practical and feasible different desktop models are today and will be in the future, giving you an edge after seeing two industry experts' visions.
Click here to view all sessionsProviding network communication Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees in VDI is a significant problem. Whether it's a terminal, thin client, repurposed PC or traditional PC with terminal client software, communication to and from the VM is facilitated through a connection brokering technology or infrastructure access package. Common protocols include PC-over-IP, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and ICA.
In a traditional physical PC network architecture, applications and their associated data are assigned specific ports on which to communicate. Web traffic is generally port 80, SQL traffic is port 1433 and FTP traffic is port 22, etc. Network routers take advantage of traffic segregation by port to prioritise business-critical traffic over non-critical traffic.
The problem with QoS in today's VDI implementations resides in the underlying display protocol. Communication to and from the VM to the thin client or terminal is facilitated through a single protocol communicating on a single port, regardless of the application in use. All network traffic is treated the same, whether it is video, email, file transfer or some other application. As an example, if you're using PC-over-IP to connect your thin client to a VM, the data that flows between the two devices communicates via the PC-over-IP protocol on port 50002. There is no differentiation between the various applications in use because all traffic to the VM is on the same port, and is, therefore, treated with the same priority.
In this session, you'll learn how to set priority dynamically based on applications being executed and outside the protocol is another way to increase the user experience for VDI. We will demonstrate how to easily configure DiffServ priority based on the application or website with which the user is actively working which would then be dynamically applied to the Windows TCP/IP stack, resulting in packets being DS-tagged according to the application in use and priority assigned. You'll also learn how you can increase user experience outside of the typical protocols like RDP, PCoIP, and ICA and dynamically do it based on applications that the user is using.
Click here to view all sessionsChoosing from different types of desktop virtualisation is a powerful and strategic decision within an application and desktop delivery infrastructure. And managing such a dynamic environment from a user perspective is fundamental. With a wide range of user environment solutions available, determining which solution fits your requirements is no simple matter. Based on a white paper co-authored with Ruben Spruijt, Aaron Parker will discuss the functionality, benefits, disadvantages and vendors of this market space in this unbiased session. You'll get a complete overview of user environment management concepts and solutions, as well as a complete update on this booming market area. Topics of this session include:
Today, more and more customers are seeing the benefits of server hosted virtualisation desktops (VDI). However, there are several important players in this market space, making the process of choosing the right VDI solution a tricky one. From a marketing perspective, these solutions have a lot in common, but from a technical perspective, there are many differences that need to be considered before making a strategic decision about your virtual desktop solution. This session is based on customer cases and will answer important questions such as:
In this session, come join VDI connoisseur Ruben Spruijt as he takes an in-depth look at different vendors and explores key strategic questions around the impacts and solutions of storage in VDI. Attendees will learn the answers to these questions and have a chance to interact with a respected industry expert.
Click here to view all sessionsVUEM (Virtual User Environment Manager) is the culmination of over a year's worth of work from Pierre in an effort to—at least initially—get rid of the logon scripts in his customers' environments. It has grown far beyond simple logon scripts, however, and VUEM now contains many of the same advanced features as provided by other user workspace management companies in the industry—for free!
Attend this session and be among the first to see VUEM in action and get a detailed demonstration of all of the product's features from its creator. You'll not only learn about the product first hand, you'll also be able to ask questions of Pierre and potentially shape the future of this valuable, free tool.
Click here to view all sessionsIn this extremely technical session, we'll dive deep into the guts of the Windows 7 disk system:
On stage with industry guru, Dr. Benny Tritsch, virtualisation expert Pierre Marmignon (Citrix CTP), and AppSense's Simon Townsend and David Shepherd, Brian will discuss this year's hotly debated new category, User Virtualisation.
User Virtualisation focuses on decoupling all aspects of the user away from the underlying device, OS and applications allowing centralised management of the user which can be deployed on demand regardless of platform or application delivery mechanism.
Key discussion topics will be:
This will be a discussion with Brian, CDG and the audience to find out the place for VDI in the current time and the future.
Click here to view all sessionsIf you are involved in planning virtualisation projects or you are further down the path of executing an end-user computing transformation strategy, there are steps you can take to increase the success of your implementation
Many virtualisation projects are at risk from day one because capacity planning is based on guess-work and gut assumptions about current usage and importance of software and hardware. Having a fact-base about end-user computing behaviour leads to a wide range of advantages in planning and executing transformation projects, increasing success for both IT and the business. From analysing the opportunities for asset rationalisation to determining the correct blend of virtualisation technologies to meet user needs, we will discuss how to use end-user computing analytics to maximise the value of desktop transformation projects.
In the second part of the session we will wind forward to consider the challenges facing organisations who have successfully adopted a flex-cast approach to delivering applications to users over virtual technologies but who are still partially reliant on local applications, and are already adopting, or considering, cloud applications within their IT strategy. Whether trying to aggregate multiple Citrix farms, blended application or desktop resources from a combination of virtualisation platforms, or dealing with the identities on behalf of users, there is a need for a unified approach to end-user computing, there are many issues to address beyond the initial successful implementation of individual virtualisation projects. Centrix has a pedigree in consulting on such projects, we will highlight in this session how our software now is available to all for unified end-user computing.
Click here to view all sessionsJoin Ian Pratt from Citrix and Brian O'Regan from Intel in a demo based session walking you through the various models of desktop virtualisation all on a single PC. This session will demonstrate how PC capabilities map to desktop virtualsation delivery models to maximise flexibility in the way users access their desktops and applications. And what session from Intel and Citrix would be complete without XenClient? Attend to get an update and learn the latest on our joint collaboration.
Click here to view all sessionsDeploying end-to-end desktop virtualisation solutions has been perceived as overly complex and cost prohibitive. In this session, Bill Platt, NComputing's SVP of Engineering, will discuss the architectural trade-offs that need to be considered when tightly integrating virtualisation software, protocol and hardware to achieve the proper economics for mass adoption of desktop virtualisation. Bill will outline how to keep the thin client "truly thin," take advantage of host server processing power, and keep protocol throughput to a minimum while still delivering a rich end user experience. Simultaneously, Richard Butler, NComputing SE, will be on stage deploying an end-to-end desktop virtualisation solution to demonstrate how deployments can now be completed in hours or days rather than weeks or months.
Click here to view all sessions It has been two years since Oracle announced its intention to acquire Sun Microsystems, and this session explores the advancements Oracle have made with the Desktop Virtualisation products it inherited from Sun. The investment has been significant, and we will open the lid on a unique architecture - Oracle has the only complete VDI stack - thin client hardware (Sun Ray), protocol (ALP/AIP), broker, hypervisor (VirtualBox), operating system (Solaris), file system (ZFS), servers and storage. Through a live demonstration we will show how we are tackling and overcoming some of the challenging issues of deploying VDI, highlight some of the uniques that can be exploited by this architecture, and look to the near future to demonstrate what you can expect to see. Larry Ellison wants Oracle to be number one in VDI. This session gives attendees a chance to see whether this aspiration is justified.
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As IT pros, when we here things like "I want to bring my iPad to work!" or "I need to access all of my information that I have at work from my desktop at home" we're thinking about challenges like security and complexity. But to end users, it seems only logical to use the devices they want, from various locations and at any time. And they expect a familiar desktop experience with all the personalisation they are used to.
What if IT and end users had to reverse roles for just one day? The user would see the complexity behind all the different delivery models required to get them the applications and data they need to get their job done. They would realize that allowing access to critical company data from anywhere could pose many security risks. On the flip side, IT would see the frustration that users experience if personalisation is lost or inconsistent. IT would notice the advantage of mobile workers being able to have key features to improve productivity, like folder synchronization.
In this session, IT will get a glance into the everyday experiences of a user in typical environments versus those running RES Software, including:
Session attendees will see the challenges faced by IT each day, and how RES Software can help alleviate much of this complexity, including:
VDI delivers enormous management and costs savings throughout an enterprise. However, the benefits of virtualisation can easily be lost if application performance hampers end user productivity, as often happens when virtual desktops are delivered across a Wide Area Network (WAN).
WAN optimisation helps enterprises reap the rewards of virtualisation by overcoming network challenges that impact the performance of these applications across the WAN. More specifically, WAN optimisation fixes latency, packet loss, and bandwidth challenges that cause virtual applications and VDI to be unresponsive and/or unreliable between locations.
This session discusses these WAN challenges in detail, and describes how they can be overcome using WAN optimisation. In addition, it provides best practice recommendations for deploying WAN optimisation in virtual desktop environments.
Click here to view all sessionsVirtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is the most sought after client computing technology of the past decade, due to the enormous potential benefits for IT. However many are finding that these advantages can come with increased costs and greater infrastructure complexity. Much of this comes from the dynamic nature of VDI, and its ability to be deployed, multiplied and recycled very easily and rapidly, and having to coexist with other computing models, like laptops, desktops and terminal servers. Endpoint Virtualisation is rapidly becoming a standard component of successful VDI implementations. This session will discuss the specific technologies and methods that best complement the VDI platform and complete the promise of VDI.
Click here to view all sessionsFaced with constant pressure to do more with less, IT teams are increasingly evaluating Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) as part of their next-generation desktop strategy. While VDI certainly lowers support costs and improves security, it brings additional costs in server, storage and network infrastructure and network costs while creating numerous usability, mobility, and productivity limitations for end-users. This presentation will showcase real-world case studies and examples of how companies have used distributed desktop virtualisation leveraging an enhanced Xen™-based hypervisor to get all the manageability benefits of VDI for a fraction of the cost, while improving end-user productivity and flexibility at the same time.
Click here to view all sessionsThis session will tackle these controversial topics head-on with demos, data and discussion. In April, Quest Software released vWorkspace – MokaFive Suite to extend its vWorkspace product family into the most comprehensive desktop virtualisation offering in the market. See it in action and learn why Quest and MokaFive believe that offline VDI is expensive and dumb, type 1 hypervisors don't meet your needs, and direct attached (local) storage will slash the cost of hosted VDI.
Click here to view all sessionsJohn Dodge is VMware's practice lead for VDI. During this Lunch and Learn Session John will share his experiences and best practices of View in Production.
Click here to view all sessionsAs desktop virtualisation technology has matured, the role of the client device has developed too. Today we have zero clients, thin clients, cloud PCs and a range of client-side software available. This presentation will take you under the covers of the client device and tackle questions such as: How thin should the client be? How best to handle video and can it do unified comms? Do you need management, and if so what? And what about mobile: users are, but can devices support this? By the end of this session, you'll be equipped to decide on the best clients for your environments, and will know the difficult questions to ask the vendors too.
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