TSSJS_header Home Home

Technical Sessions


At BriForum 2010, you receive the most independent, advanced, technical information and expert strategies from industry analysts, bloggers and best-selling authors who work with VDI (or a supporting technology) every day. Our experienced expert speakers are in the trenches and know how the latest products work in the real world - arming you with virtualization tips, tricks, and verified techniques that you can apply immediately within your organization.

Confirmed breakout sessions for BriForum 2010 include:

A Complete Application and Desktop Delivery Solutions Overview (2010-2011)
Ruben Spruijt, PQR

With a wide range of application and desktop delivery solutions available, determining which solution can best accommodate your requirements and desires is no simple matter. Ruben Spruijt will present a complete vendor independent overview of all the current and upcoming application and desktop delivery solutions. Topics of this presentation will be:

  • Server hosted VDI
  • Server hosted VDI GPU Accelerated
  • Terminal Services
  • OS Provisioning
  • Application Streaming and Virtualization
  • Local Desktop/Laptop
  • Web Application and Acceleration
  • BladePC
  • Display Protocols
  • Connection Brokers

The goal of this presentation is to give a complete overview of all application and desktop delivery concepts. Attend this session to be updated on this booming market-area.

The Best Freeware Tools for SBC and Application Virtualization Administrators
Wilco van Bragt, VanBragt.Net Consultancy

This presentation will cover the available freeware tools for SBC and App-V / SoftGrid infrastructures. Find out what's missing in the product and what the freeware tool can accomplish through a live demonstration.

Best Practices in Virtualizing Terminal Services and Virtual Desktops, THE Virtual Reality Check
Ruben Spruijt, PQR
Jeroen van de Kamp, CTO, Login Consultants

In this energetic session Jeroen van de Kamp (CTO, Login Consultants) and Ruben Spruijt (CTO, PQR) will present all the important results and best practices for Virtualizing Desktop (VDI) and Terminal Server workloads found in Project Virtual Reality Check.

This unbiased and independent R&D project started in early 2009. All together more than 400 tests were carried out. The goal of Project VRC is to analyze the developments in the Application and Desktop Virtualization market and present the results in an unbiased and independent way. In the haze of the extreme amount of innovations and many marketing promises, this information is highly appreciated. The topics in this fast paced session are:

  • Introduction to Project VRC
  • Highlights, performance differences and best practice conclusions for Terminal Services and VDI workloads
  • Bare metal Terminal Services 2003/2008/x86/x64
  • Hypervisors: Microsoft Hyper-V v2, VMware vSphere 4.0, Citrix XenServer 5.5
  • VDI: Windows XP, Vista, Windows7
  • Performance impact using different HP Proliant state-of-the-art hardware solutions
  • Performance impact of Application Virtualization in Virtual Desktop environments
  • Future plans and roadmap
  • Q&A

Building a Low-Cost Home Lab, the Virtual Way
Simon Gallagher, Blogger

Ever wondered how you can run all that enterprise-scale goodness in your house in a way that others won't complain about it? Then you need this session. Learn about how to use VMware vSphere and open source tech to build a lab with shared storage, layer 3 networking, replicating SANs and as many virtual hypervisors as you need for less than $1k USD. Want to build a 20 node ESXi cluster on 2 physical boxes? Or test out VDI scenarios, scripts and provisioning processes? Attend this session to find out how!

BYOPC: IT Panacea or Management Nightmare?
John Whaley, MokaFive

IT departments are starting to look seriously at BYOPC (Bring Your Own PC) or employee-owned PC initiatives, driven by a range of factors including cost, employee demand for choice and freedom, more contractors and part-time workers, and challenges with provisioning and reclaiming physical laptops. In a BYOPC scenario, the company provides a stipend for the employee to purchase their laptop of choice (typically with some minimum requirements), which will then be owned by the employee. Is this a panacea for IT, who can get out of the business of provisioning laptops and save a bunch of money and headaches in the process? Or will this turn into a management and legal nightmare where IT will have to play Geek Squad to personal machines, and end up opening the company up to huge liabilities? This session will cover some of the pros, cons, and lessons learned from actual and attempted BYOPC deployments. From the technical - How do I keep the network secure? How do I support Macs? To the psychological - What do the users think? To the political - What are the internal roadblocks that have to be overcome? Bring your opinions and experiences - audience participation is strongly encouraged.

Citrix EdgeSight for Load Testing Best Practices
Claudio Rodrigues, WTSLabs Inc.

This session will show you how EdgeSight for Load Testing (ESLT) works and how to get the most out of it. The content of this session is based on years of experience using the product since its TLoad days. Learn what works, what does not work and how to use this tool to mimic as close as possible, real world workloads on your servers. Even though this is a Citrix tool, you can use it for load testing your Terminal Services environment, even if you do not currently own any Citrix products.

Citrix Provisioning Services Survival Track Reloaded
Thorsten Rood, net.workers AG

Within a dynamic data center world, almost no reason exists why not any kind of XenApp workload should be powered by Provisioning Services (and referring to VDI with XenDesktop, it's obvious). But PVS will become a monster if you are working with demanding customers and expect to scale out a solution easily, while meeting SLA and expectations. Due to the overwhelming success of this session last year, this by nature is the reloaded version with the most up-to-date notes from the field.

Citrix XenClient Hypervisor in-depth Architecture
Thorsten Rood, net.workers AG

Type1-Hypervisors feel like the ultimate weapon and the long awaited remaining piece in the puzzle on flexible application delivery concepts. Citrix is there, providing the first enterprise-targeted mature release of such technology. Let's drill down what's in the product and which things to take care of. This is a rock-solid walk through on the componentization puzzle you get with XenClient and all its surrounding technologies and services.

Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View - Head-to-Head
Mike Nelson, NelMedia / Kimberly-Clark

This session will focus on the two most prominent players in the desktop virtualization market, XenDesktop and View. They will be examined both from a technical and non-marketing point of view, without the FUDD, with direct comparisons between them. A live demonstration of both technologies will be previewed with real world examples. Audience participation is greatly encouraged as there is a lot of information and examples to share with everyone.

The Client Hypervisor: A Deep Dive into Type I Virtualization on Client Devices
Steve Greenberg, Thin Client Computing

"Client-based VMs will leverage the power of local computing, enable offline, allow great local performance, require smaller data center footprints, provide for centralized management, provide for easy backup and rollback, , etc. and 90% of the future ‘VDI’ will be client-based"- Brian Madden

This session will set out to explore and examine these statements by looking at the underlying architecture and design of a client hypervisor to identify the potential benefits and limitations of this approach. Discover the technical architecture of a Type I Hypervisor and how and where it can be successfully used. A comprehensive demonstration of XenClient will be done live as well as an interactive stress test to see how and where it can be broken.

Live Debate Smackdown: Virtualization vs. Bare Metal for XenApp and RDS workloads
Steve Greenberg, Thin Client Computing
Joe Shonk, Thin Client Computing

Are we seeing the promised results of virtualization for complex workloads? One school of thought believes so, another thinks we may have been led down a marketing rabbit hole. This session will provide an entertaining and thoroughly geeky look at this important debate topic including:

  • To virtualize or not virtualize XenApp and RDS workloads
  • Bare metal vs. Hypervisor performance
  • When is bare metal actually a better choice?
  • How do we compare user densities when using a 64bit OS?
  • Is the cost of virtualization worth it?
  • What is the performance cost of virtualization?
  • Do we really gain better management?
  • Is Provisioning Services worth deploying?
  • Does Application virtualization deliver on its promises?
  • Does shared storage bring benefits for the added cost?
  • When are there simply too many layers in the stack?

The format will be an informed and passionate debate on both sides of the question providing valuable information and observations.

Live Demo: Installing & Implementing Citrix VM Hosted Apps and Microsoft Remote App for Hyper-V
Wilco van Bragt, VanBragt.Net Consultancy

Both Microsoft and Citrix included a feature in their latest product releases, which allow you to publish applications from a workstation version operating system (such as Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows XP). In this presentation, the feature will be explained, as well as the installation and configuration of these features using a live demo.

Mandatory and Default User Profile Tuning
Jon Wallace, AppSense

As the industry moves on, profiles are becoming more and more visible. In fact, most third party personalization vendors recommend the use of a mandatory profile to begin with. There are various elements on tuning that can be applied to a mandatory profile to improve log-on speed, usability and much more.

This session will focus on practical applications of these elements. Watch as Wallace builds and tunes a mandatory profile with tuning live. There will be little to no power-points as he will explain all of the various registry changes during a walk through of the creation. Wallace based the session on a Windows XP mandatory profile due to the wide knowledge in the community but the principals and application also apply to Windows 2008, Windows 7 etc.

My Life with Citrix XenClient Hypervisor, the Ultimate Beta Customer Report
Thorsten Rood, net.workers AG

Let's imagine somebody stole your laptop and right after you grab a new device you immediately jump on the beta track for an upcoming solution and start using it for your daily productive usage. At the same time you run into a PoC with a demanding customer that seeks to deploy a highly complex mobile LoB application generation. My life with XenClient‚ ultimately summarizes the time Rood 100% hooked on the platform, starting in December 2009. Find out the great options and the mad things that make you pull out hairs. It's going to change most of your known best-practices on desktop operations.

Scaling XenDesktop to the Enterprise
Nick Rintalan, Citrix

Learn how to scale XenDesktop on a massive scale. Sit back while Rintalan shares his experiences and lessons learned from designing and implementing XD for his largest customers. Rintalan will discuss some of the things he has learned around DDC roles, Virtual Center bottlenecks and PVS as well as walk through a XD architecture that is able to scale to 10,000+ users and beyond. Learn some of the "XenDesktop Worst Practices" and the most common mistakes that real world customers make when deploying XD at the end of the session.

The Top 10 Mistakes: Why TS/Citrix Projects Fail
Claudio Rodrigues, WTSLabs Inc.

Wonder what the top 10 mistakes are when implementing/planning a TS/Citrix environment? Find out how to avoid these traps for a successful deployment!

The Top 10 Mistakes: Why VDI Projects Fail
Claudio Rodrigues, WTSLabs Inc.
Steve Greenberg, Thin Client Computing

What are the top mistakes that are made when implementing/planning a VDI solution? Learn how to avoid these traps for a successful deployment!

Towards a New Desktop - The Future of Client Computing
Martin Ingram, AppSense

Keeping in mind the quote 'The past is like a foreign country, they do things differently there, this session will start by looking back at how the future appeared to us a year ago and then see what have become major themes and what has gone away. Looking forward, Ingram will examine new technologies that may become the standard ways to serve users in the future and what has to happen for them to be useful. He will provide a summary at the end of the key directions for the year to come and for the longer term.

Understanding and Optimizing Disk Access Patterns for Desktop VM Workloads
John Whaley, MokaFive

Most of the time your desktop feels slow, it is waiting on IO. Desktop workloads have a very different IO profile than server workloads, and require different optimization techniques and performance metrics. An optimized and tuned storage layer can be the difference between a desktop VM that runs silky smooth and one that runs like a dog. This highly technical session will delve deep into what typical desktop VM disk access workloads look like and how to measure IO performance in a way that mirrors the users' perception. You will learn the unique IO profiles of "typical" desktop activities like Windows boot, Outlook usage, Office and web browsing. The session will cover the performance impact of defrag in the guest and defrag on the host, on-the-fly compression and encryption, different IO caching policies, and special considerations for SSDs and flash memory. With a little bit of magic, it is even possible to achieve BTN ("Better Than Native") performance.

VDI: Good, Bad and Ugly
Ruben Spruijt, PQR

Virtualization seems to be the magic word in IT landscapes of today. Desktop Virtualization seems to be the ultimate goal for a lot of people. Ruben Spruijt will present VDI: Good, Bad and Ugly in an energetic way and gives his view and vision combined with real life experiences to the audience. This session covers:

  • Desktop Virtualization Overview
  • What are the real world reasons to use VDI?
  • What are the lessons learned for implementing VDI at large scale deployments?
  • What are best-practices for optimizing a XP and Win7 VDI template
  • Live demo - Understanding the storage impact of VD
  • Q&A

Who Cares About Backup and Restore of VDI?! - The Topic No One Talks About
Brad Maltz, International Computerware, Inc. (ICI)

While Virtual Desktops have been around for a few years, organizations are starting to truly transition into newer Virtual Desktop designs through VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop, Microsoft VDI and others. Unfortunately, backup and restore environments have not been redesigned along with the new VDI rollouts. This session will discuss many facets of backup and restore for VDI including:

  • Do you need to backup anything? The Desktop OS? Application Data?
  • What are backup technologies / vendors that can simplify VDI backups?
  • How do other large VDI environments backup their environments?
  • What administrative best practices can be implemented to simplify VDI backups?

Windows 7 and the Virtual Desktop Revolution
Daniel Feller, Citrix

This "Ask the Architect TechTalk" is focused on the Windows 7 migration challenge. More specifically, this TechTalk will focus on the following:

  • Learning from the past
  • Understanding how desktop virtualization fits into the puzzle
  • Technical factors to consider for the migration
  • Planning for the migration

Why is Desktop Virtualization Getting so Complex? Pulling out the Complexity
Martin Ingram, AppSense

Every new technology brings with it a new set of requirements that make implementations increasingly complex. This cannot go on or we will end up with unmanageable, fragile systems. This session will look at the sources of complexity and how you can partition your architectures to avoid spiraling complexity. Ingram will start by showing how the addition of new technologies into existing systems leads to increasing levels of cross dependencies and complications and hence makes adoption of new technologies difficult and expensive. He then moves onto look at how we can partition our architectures to control complexity.


BriForum 2009 breakout sessions:

Last year’s sessions covered topics including: server based computing, VDI (including OS streaming), application streaming, and platform virtualization. Below you will find the full listing of titles and abstracts from BriForum 2009 to get a feel for the depth and breadth of the content covered during this essential three-day event.

Sample breakout sessions from last year's BriForum:



The All New, Totally Redone, Windows 2008 R2 Logon Process Chart
Kevin Goodman, CEO, RTO Software, and
Brian Madden, Industry Analyst and Blogger

This is the all new, totally revamped logon process chart for Windows 2008 R2. In this session, Brian Madden and Kevin Goodman document the steps of a logon to a Windows 2008 R2 Server all the way from a successful credentials negotiation to the displaying of a published application (RemoteApp). Each step will be described in detail, including how virtual channels, user profiles, and user sessions are initialized. The chart has been totally redone and is in an easier to read format. Even if you have seen previous charts you must attend this session.

App-V: Sequencing and Deploying Using MSI and Active Upgrade
Tim Mangan, Founder, Tmurgent

A recent survey of Network Operations Personnel by Network World revealed that over 39% of their time is taken up dealing with applications, as opposed to servers, WAN, security and storage.  Application virtualization reduces  application issues by eliminating application conflict and allowing for easier centralized deployment, management, and compliance.

In this session, Tim Mangan, using Microsoft App-V to prepare an application for the simplest form of application virtualization deployment without back-end streaming servers, will demonstrate how he customizes the deployment such that the applications can be upgraded without loss of user personalization.

Behind the Scenes: Mastering User Profiles in Terminal Server and Virtual Desktop Environments
Benny Tritsch, CTO, Immidio, and
Shawn Bass, Independent Consultant; Citrix Technology Professional

When you talk about user profiles, you touch a very emotional aspect of people’s experience when interacting with Windows; it’s about individual workspaces, each one reflecting its owner’s personality. As an IT professional, you had better not try to reduce workspace flexibility, or your users will make your working life harder every day. Once upon a time, when you only needed to deal with one desktop and one profile per user, things were relatively simple. But now, with remote desktops and applications delivered through ubiquitous terminal servers and the advent of virtual desktop infrastructures, we are facing a very different situation. Using a spectrum of applications from multiple desktops, with each desktop optimized for dedicated tasks, seems to be the new user paradigm both in enterprise and in home environments. If you are being challenged to support such a scenario, than you need to learn some tactical strategies and best practices on how to deal with multiple profiles per user. From dividing and merging user settings on various Windows versions to central profile management and situation-specific adaptation, this session will introduce you to the secrets of what they call “user profile virtualization.”

Behind the Scenes: Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services Exposed
Benny Tritsch, CTO, Immidio

As an IT professional responsible for remote desktop services and remote application delivery, you need to dig beneath the surface if you really want to understand how the technology works. So let’s go on a journey right down to the core.

This session introduces you to details about the system components required for remote sessions and RemoteApp programs. Learn how the negotiation sequence with the server works when a remote desktop client connects. Get in-depth information on application compatibility, in particular about Microsoft Remote Data Services (RDS) installation and execution modes, their impact on file system and registry, and changes introduced with Windows Server 2008 R2. Discover how to modify system settings in order to fine-tune user experience and remote desktop performance.

Comprehensive demonstrations and comparisons will help you to improve your technical and professional skills in mastering the Windows Server 2008 R2 remote desktop services platform.

Client Hypervisors: Does What's Out There Now Live Up to the Hype?
Brian Madden, Industry Analyst and Blogger

A lot has been written about the concept of the “client hypervisor.” Some people think these things represent the future of computing and that they’ll soon be “built in” to every PC in the world. Others think they’re a bunch of hogwash.

Regardless of what you think, they’re coming! Neocleus and Virtual Computer are both shipping products today, and both Citrix and VMware have announced their client hypervisor visions and plan to release something by the end of the year.

Meanwhile two huge companies, Microsoft and Symantec, have both publicly made fun of client hypervisors.

In this session, Brian Madden will look at the promise of the client hypervisor. He’ll provide some hands on show-and-tell of the two shipping products, and he’ll talk about what’s publicly known of the offerings from Citrix and VMware. Finally, he’ll share insight into his talks with Microsoft and Symantec, two (big and powerful) companies who arguably have a good stake in making sure client hypervisors never reach the mainstream.

Citrix Provisioning Server Strategies: From High Availability to Throughput and Reliability - How to Survive Demanding Customers
Thorsten Rood, Principal Architect, Net.workers Corporation

With the world moving towards dynamic data centers, many reasons exist for using Provisioning Server to deploy your XenApp workload. In some environments, this is easily accomplished with a straightforward implementation without too much thought or experience, but when your company or client requires baseline metrics based on service-level agreements, enterprise dependencies, throughput limits, or use density, things can get quite complicated. Since Citrix Provisioning Server relies on I/O strategies, proper system sizing and deep implementation design are crucial aspects to the success of the project from an end-user, systems administration, and management perspective.

This session with Thorsten Rood is about the high availability and write-cache strategies for CPS in enterprise environments. These strategies are based on business needs, and you’ll be able to use them to measure the performance of your environment and ensure your project’s overall success. Thorsten will also cover how to customize applications at boot time and how to ensure XenApp application publishing remains bullet-proof and reliable when your server footprint is dynamic and the workload is unpredictable.

Cloud Computing -- What Does It Mean To Me?
Charlton Barreto, Platform Architect and Technology Strategist

There is much discussion about Cloud Computing, yet given the breadth of architectures and technologies that are part of Cloud, it is unclear to many what it can do for them, and how to quickly deploy and scale their applications, platforms and infrastructure. In this session, Charlton Barreto, Platform Architect and Technology Strategist will discuss what the Cloud offers to users, developers, IT and the business.  Also explored in this session:

  • How you can strategize for Cloud Computing
  • The three principal models that are represented by Cloud Computing and the scenarios that they address
  • What you can do to get started with Cloud Computing
  • How to ramp up your Cloud Computing knowledge quickly

A Complete Application and Desktop Delivery Solutions Overview
Ruben Spruijt, Solutions Architect, PQR and
Shawn Bass, Independent Consultant; Citrix Technology Professional

With a wide range of application and desktop delivery solutions available, determining which solution can best accommodate your requirements and desires is no simple matter. In this session Ruben Spruijt and Shawn Bass present a completely vendor independent overview of all of the current and upcoming application and desktop delivery solutions.

Topics include:

  • Server hosted VDI
  • Server hosted VDI GPU Accelerated
  • Terminal Services
  • OS Provisioning
  • Application Streaming and Virtualization
  • Local Desktop/Laptop
  • Web Application and Acceleration
  • Blade PC
  • Display Protocols
  • Connection Brokers

Decreasing VDI Login Times
Michael Thomason, Chief Technical Architect, Emory Healthcare

Are your users complaining about your VDI login times being way too slow? Are your logon problems only getting worse? Attendees of this session will learn first hand best practices from Michael Thomason, Chief Technical Architect for Emory Healthcare for decreasing VDI login times. Many of you have attended Michael's many sessions on decreasing Terminal Services logon times... this session will concentrate more on VDI logon times with an analysis of best practices for VDI logins of client operating systems such as Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

A Deep Dive Into the 20 Year History and Technical Developments of Citrix Systems
with Brad Pedersen, Citrix Chief Architect and Senior Fellow and
Steve Greenberg, Founder, ThinClient

This session will be a lively  and interactive presentation with intesive Q&A. Join Steve Greenberg, Founder of ThinClient, as he sits down with Citrix Chief Architect and Senior Fellow Brad Pedersen for a truly unique opportunity to get an inside technical view behind the scenes at Citrix.

Topics to be covered include:

  • Citrix’s first product and how it failed 
  • Citrix’s first successful product
  • How the ICA protocol really get created
  • The creation of web interface, secure gateway, published applications, IMA and more
  • What really happened with Microsoft in 1997

Dynamic Server Provisioning: This is How We Do It!
Michael Thomason, Chief Technical Architect, Emory Healthcare

What if you could build and deploy 10, 20, 1000+ servers in the amount of time you could deploy one? In this environment, what if your backup plan was easy as a simple reboot? Want to learn how to share storage in order to minimize storage costs? Still having issues getting your images to work due to application incompatibilities? Then this is the session for you! You will learn first hand how to architect, build and scale your environment using Citrix Dynamic Server Provisioning using real-world examples taken from my CPS deployments.

Attendees will learn best practices for installation, configuration and design of the CPS server side components. Attendees will also learn how to build, create and deploy images using CPS. After this session, attendees should be able to architect and deploy CPS in the data center using proven, real-world strategies. Bring me your hardest CPS deployment problems! There will be an open discussion and Q&A for your image deployment issues and possible resolutions.

Topics covered include:

  • Installation and design best practices.
  • Storage de-duplication and performance scalability using clustered file systems.
  • Network design and bandwidth requirements.
  • High Availability Design and Architecture
  • Exciting new CPS V5.1 New Features!
  • Streamline your CPS environment.
  • Best practices for image creation and design.
  • VHD Dynamic Growth best practices.
  • Reducing number of images required.
  • CPS and application streaming
  • How to create a common image that actually works!
  • Tools and tricks for getting your applications to work

Envisioning the Desktop of 2015: A Tale of Three Clouds and Liquid Desktop Computing
Chetan Venkatesh

What happens when we take the most powerful trends in computing (stateless desktop virtualization, private/public clouds, and pervasive connectivity) and project a trajectory to 2015? The result is that desktop computing looks nothing like we think it will. The 2015 desktop is a fluid and dynamic blend of services aggregated from the enterprise and consumer clouds adaptable to any device.  In this session, Chetan Venkatesh explores potential models, architecture and looks at a few prototypes that might eventually turn to reality.

Concepts covered include:

  • A new componentized view of the OS: statelessness is more than virtualizing applications and user data
  • The three clouds: The Here Cloud, Near Cloud and Far Cloud
  • Latency and IO: fluid computing
  • The blended desktop: architecture and implementation

Chetan will demo several “application VMs” (VMs built for just a single application) blending together to create a desktop session. Some of the VMs will be corporate IT apps other will be consumer ones.  He’ll then demo how those services can run and migrate dynamically between different clouds—the here cloud (my devices), near cloud, (closest datacenter), and far cloud (the service provider) based on different conditions (IO, latency, SLA etc.).

A Geek’s Look at How Application Virtualization Works Under the Hood
Randy Cook, Chief Architect, Symantec Endpoint Virtualization

Most application virtualization or application isolation products work the same way. They install some sort of driver or wrap an executable in a “shim” and then redirect file system reads and writes to a special area or package. It all seems well and good. But have you ever wondered how it actually works? I mean how it REALLY works? How can a driver redirect all writes from one folder to another? How can a shim virtualize a registry key? This session will be led by Randy Cook, creator of the product that ultimately became Symantec’s application virtualization solution. In this session, Randy is NOT going to tell you about Symantec or why one product is better than the other. Instead, he’ll explain the voo-doo and tricks that these things all use behind the scenes to do what they do. While this session may not be too high on the “practicality” list, it sure will teach you some neat things you can use to impress your geek friends!

Getting Ready for the W2K8 and 64-Bit Revolution
Nicholas Rintalan, Citrix Consulting

In this session, Citrix Consultant Nicholas Rintalan will discuss how to prepare your SBC environment for x64 architectures from a security and optimization standpoint.  Attendees will come away with an understanding of the thought process and best practices used by Citrix Consulting.  Also in this session, users will see/learn:

  • Live demo illustrating how to use custom security and ADM templates
  • A deep dive into kernel memory and differences between x86 and x64 architectures
  • Worst practices -- or most commonly misconfigured settings and tweaks
  • Terminal Services optimization on Windows 2003 and Windows Server 2008
  • How to increase user density by reducing kernel memory usage
  • Application integration into an x64 environment

High Availability Guarantees Enterprise Uptime -- But Do You Really Need a Netscaler?
Thorsten Rood, Principal Architect, Net.workers corporation

Centralizing access by means of Terminal services and VDI requires the infrastructure to be as reliable and as fault-tolerant as possible. The Citrix Delivery Center has become a complex set of interacting products; its individual points of failure have increased and need to be analyzed properly as they typically impact user experience. Does it really make a difference to use load balancing hardware solutions instead of classic DNS-based, NLB-based or proprietary fault-tolerance configurations? Does Citrix NetScaler behave different than other solutions or does it matter at all? This session is about to show some “lessons learned” while doing customer-driven HA-projects in the wild, and outlines the respective tasks and advantages of having a vendor-agnostic solution. We’ll also have a look at virtual NetScaler (VPX) technology.

How Remote Desktop Protocol Graphics and Media Remoting Really Works
Benny Tritsch, CTO, Immidio, and
Shawn Bass, Independent Consultant; Citrix Technology Professional

It’s an urban legend that Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) shipped with Terminal Services has designed shortcomings and scalability limits. How much truth is in such a legend? Are there ways to improve RDP performance for common user scenarios? And what is Microsoft doing to improve graphics remoting with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2? How good is RDP in dealing with GDI, GDI+, DirectX, OpenGL, Windows Presentation Foundation, Flash, Silverlight, videos and animations?

Let’s face it -- there is a very simple goal. It’s all about improving the user experience. This means, it’s about getting faster and reducing latency when transmitting graphics and multimedia data over a network, no matter what their nature is and what the target device may be. In the best of all worlds, a user wouldn’t be able to differentiate between a local and a remote application when it comes to graphics and multimedia performance.

Join presentation virtualization geek and computer graphics expert Benny Tritsch in an in-depth look at how desktop, application and media remoting works. After attending his session, you will have no excuse for not knowing what RDP is good for.

How to Tune a Desktop OS to Run in VDI
Tim Mangan, Founder of TMurgent Technologies

One of the most often overlooked challenges in VDI environments is that most people don’t know how to tune a desktop OS so it can run as a VM on a remote server. Sure, we know all about server sizing and VM monitoring and SLAs. But when it comes time to actually build your XP or Vista image, what options should you choose? What hidden registry keys do you need to know about? What little “gotchas” did you later learn that you wish you first knew?

The problem is that there is not comprehensive “best practices” guide out there. So Tim Mangan wants to fix that. In this session, he’ll lead a discussion and gather ideas and best practices. So if you’re planning on rolling out any central image managed virtual desktop environment, this session is for you!

Hyper-V and System Center: How Good Can it Be?
Mike Burke, Practice Director, VIRTERA, Inc.

In this session, Mike Burke, Practice Director for VIRTERA, Inc will explore what exactly Microsoft’s Hyper-V and System Center suite of management tools can offer to an organization. Mike will also examine whether the cost differentials from VMware solutions offset any gaps in functionality.

Leveraging Hyper-V R2 and System Center VMM/Operations Manager R2, this session will look at the capabilities this platform can provide, from virtualizing development, test and production workloads, to being able to maintain and operationalize the environment to meet the demands of the business.  This session will also include demonstrations of key functionality while outlining the distinct differences between VMware and Microsoft offerings, and understanding just how far Microsoft’s message of a “single pane of glass” can effectively manage VMware environments. Attendees will leave with a good understanding as to the limitations of Hyper-V/SCVMM vs. VMware and where each is a good fit in an organization.

Hypervisors vs. OS Virtualization Smackdown
Steve Greenberg, Founder, Thin Client Computing

This session is a live technical walk through of various workloads running in a hardware virtualization environment and side by side in an OS virtualization environment. Steve Greenberg will demonstrate the details of the setup process and the resources required for success. The session will contrast virtualized server workloads and VDI desktops in detail when hosted on Xen and Parallels platforms. The demonstration will be followed by a short technology PowerPoint presentation in which Steve will show you the different approaches, address some of the pros and cons and take questions from the audience.

An Inside Look at the Gotchas of Desktop Migration
Amy Hodler, Tranxition and
Jeremy Keen

So, you’ve decided to go to VDI, but you still need to get there and attain an acceptable level of cost savings and other benefits.  Switch costs, implementation complexities and demand for a rich, customized user environment are the major impediments to greater adoption and ROI. Attending this session will help you understand some of the common pitfalls encountered when migrating to VDI and how VDI plus desktop personality virtualization can help you more efficiently migrate, increase user adoption and reduce ongoing management complexity. Amy Holder will review strategies for dealing with high switch costs, look at the level of desktop personalization required and walk you through some best practices for bringing your users’ personalized environments along to a VDI environment. 

There will also be a discussion of current and future trends in end user environments and desktop personality management that you should be aware of to further optimize your desktop management and significantly improve ROI and VDI adoption. 

Inside the OS
Tim Mangan, Founder, Tmurgent

Are you the type of person who likes to pop off the cover to see what is inside?  In this session, Tim Mangan, founder of Tmurgen,t will pop the cover off of the Windows OS kernel, explaining how multi-core and multi-threaded CPU scheduling happens and how memory management, including paging and caching works.

An Introduction to Citrix Workflow Studio
Jason Conger, System Architect; Citrix, Virtualization and .NET Expert

Citrix Workflow Studio is an infrastructure process automation platform that allows system administrators to automate their environment via a graphical user interface.  Since Citrix Workflow Studio is built on top of Windows Workflow Foundation and Microsoft PowerShell, the platform is very extensible.  In this session Jason Conger will explore what you can do out of the box with Citrix Workflow Studio, as well as how to extend the framework.  After attending this session, attendees will be able to easily implement complex workflow tasks in their entire infrastructure environment -- not just Citrix environments.

After leaving this session, you will have an understanding of:

Citrix Workflow Studio Introduction

  • Citrix Workflow Studio components
  • Setting up Citrix Workflow Studio
  • Real world examples of what you can do out of the box
  • How Citrix Workflow Studio interacts with XenApp, XenServer, Provisioning Server and XenDesktop

Overview of Windows Workflow Foundation

  • How Windows Workflow Foundation works
  • How Citrix Workflow Studio uses Windows Workflow Foundation
  • Where workflows are stored
  • Creating custom workflow tasks

Overview of PowerShell including new XenApp PowerShell cmdlets

  • High level overview of PowerShell cmdlets
  • How Citrix Workflow Studio uses PowerShell
  • XenApp cmdlets

Citrix Workflow Studio extensibility

  • Reaching beyond the Citrix environment
  • Building custom workflow components
  • Infrastructure “orchestration”

Looking Towards the New Desktop
Martin Ingram, Vice President of Strategy, AppSense, and
Brian Madden, Industry Analyst and Blogger

At BriForum 2008 we looked out into the future with a session on ‘The Future of Client Computing.’ Well, it is now a year later, so what has happened? And what does it tell us about where we are all heading? This session with Martin Ingram and Brian Madden will begin by looking back at what we thought back then, dig into what has changed over the year and then set out the agenda for the years ahead. We will cover off the options going forward and the technology gaps for each of them with plenty of opportunity for everyone to have their say.

Maximizing Your SBC OS and Hardware Investments During Difficult Times
Ian Parker, Senior Web Services Administrator, ThomsonReuters

This session will focus on how to use free tools to identify where your user density and stability constraints are, and how to address them via software or hardware upgrades. Ian Parker, Senior Web Services Administrator for ThomsonReuters will begin the session with a brief review of CPU, disk and memory constraints, and then move forward into an in-depth analysis of memory usage and limits. Ian will discuss:

  • How to identify common 32 bit Windows scalability limits such as paged and non-paged pool limits
  • How to contrast those common 32 bit Windows scalability limits with 64 bit Windows
  • Memory management options in 32 bit Windows (You might be able to increase your available RAM by as much as 20%!)
  • Session memory analysis using Windbg. Including a hands on demonstration configuring Windbg and performing memory analysis on a live server, including statistics not available via Perfmon.
  • Why Windows 2008 session architecture may perform better than Windows 2003 for some applications and users

An Overview and Demo of Microsoft's Inbox VDI solution
Joe Shonk, Project-based Consultant; Thin Client Computing Expert

Did you know that Microsoft is entering the VDI space with their upcoming release of Windows Server 2008 R2?During this session Joe Shonk will teach attendees about the new RDS/RDV architecture and offer a glimpse into Microsoft's strategy going forward. Experience Microsoft's inbox solution though a series of demonstrations put together to highlight the features and components of RDV.

Performing Your Own Benchmarks with the Free Login VSI Indexer
Jeroen Van de Kamp

The (free) Login VSI indexer is quickly becoming the de facto way to measure the performance of a desktop session (TS or VDI) on a certain piece of hardware with a certain number of other sessions on it.

The tool then creates detailed graphs showing how many sessions at a certain level of performance you can get on a server, meaning you can compare TS to VDI architectures, or VMs with 512MB versus VMs with 1GB.

In this session, Jeroen van de Kamp, the creator of the Login VSI indexer, will show you how to use this free tool to measure the performance of your own environment.

Project VRC: Performance Best Practices for Virtualizing Desktops and Terminal Services
Ruben Spruijt, Solutions Architect, PQR, and Jeroen Van de Kamp

In this session Ruben Spruijt and Jeroen Van de Kamp will discuss all of the important results and best practices for virtualizing VDI and TS workloads found in Project:  “Virtual Reality Check.” Jeroen and Ruben decided to research the various virtualization platforms with VDI and TS workloads in relationship to the end-user performance experience. All together over 170 tests were carried out, analyzed the results and published on ww.virtualrealitycheck.net.

Topics in this fast paced session are:

  • Introduction Project VRC
  • Highlights and best practice conclusions for TS and VDI workloads on
  • Baremetal TS2003/2008/x86/x64/Xenapp
  • Microsoft Hyper-V
  • Citrix Xenserver
  • VMware ESX/vSphere
  • Sneak preview unpublished results

Quick and Dirty Performance Analysis
Ian Parker, Senior Web Services Administrator, ThomsonReuters

Performance analysis can be a complicated, difficult and even obscure topic. If you are faced with an urgent performance issue, it can be very difficult to gather relevant performance information and analyze it quickly. Performance base-lining is something that most of us know we should be doing, but that doesn't mean that we are actually doing it! The good news is there are some excellent free tools that can take a lot of the pain and difficultly out of the process.  In this session Ian Parker, Senior Web Services Administrator for ThomsonReuters will focus on using free tools to identify performance problems and gather performance data for historical purposes.  Some of the tools covered will include:

  • Performance Analysis of Logs
  • Server Performance Advisor
  • Performance Analysis Toolkit

By using these tools, even the performance analysis novice can quickly identify performance issues and develop a plan to eliminate them.

Running XenDesktop and Provisioning Server with VMware ESX
Mike Nelson, Senior SME Analyst for Virtualization, Kimberly-Clark Corporation

Are you considering implementing XenDesktop or PVS and have an existing ESX infrastructure but don’t want to struggle with implementing XenServer just for them? While Citrix would prefer that you use XenServer as the backend hosting platform for its VDI and provisioning offerings, the real world configuration of having Citrix on the frontend and VMware ESX on the backend is a common one. This session will cover using a VMware ESX as your hosting environment for a VDI solution that uses Citrix XenDesktop and Provisioning Server products. Some highlights we will be covering include:

  • Getting XenDesktop and PVS to talk to vCenter
  • Tips on how to best utilize ESX with PVS, including templating and the creation of master images.
  • How the DDC interacts with ESX and some things to watch for
  • Some things that Citrix does and does not document on compatibility
  • What about vSphere compatibility?
  • Audience input and Q&A

We will have a live interaction with a running demo environment and talk about real-world examples.

Saving Administration Costs by Utilizing the Hidden (And Not So Hidden) Print Management Features of Windows 2003 and 2008
Christoph Hammer, Chief Technical Officer, ThinPrint

It is surprising how much time goes into printer management and how much of that time can be saved without spending a single cent. In this session Christoph Hammer, CTO for ThinPrint, will address how you can save administration costs by using the powerful features to manage printer drivers and printer queue creation included with Windows 2003 and Windows 2008. In this session, you will learn:

  • How to manage remote print systems with Microsoft Print Management Console
  • How to use WMI and rundll32 for automated administration of local and remote print systems
  • How to test and deploy print environments by using MS Print Migrator
  • How to use “hidden” shortcuts to remote printers and spool folders to get to information faster
  • Information of the Server Properties GUI to troubleshoot drivers and printing
  • How Group Policy preferences can help to create printer queues and map printer shares based on location, operating system, user type, etc.

The techniques and tools presented in this session are either built in into the operating system or free of charge, independent of any additional software and can be used in all Windows based environments including VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop, Blade Desktop, Terminal Server and Citrix XenApp.

Streaming Smack Down 2009
Ruben Spruijt, Solutions Architect, PQR

More and more customers see the benefits of application virtualization, but there are several players in the market space. From a marketing perspective these solutions have a lot in common, but there are some key technological differences that can make the process of choosing the right solution confusing. This session is based on customer cases and covers the basics of application virtualization, the demands of customers, the technical differences between the product, and how to choose the right solution.  All of these aspects will be presented and combined with live demos of InstallFree, ThinApp and AppDNA  from the PQR's solution showcase.

Attendees will come away from this session with:

  • An overview of application virtualization players
  • An in-depth review of Microsoft App-V, VMware ThinApp, InstallFree, Citrix XenApp Client-side virtualization, Xencode and Symantec Workspace Virtualization
  • Advantages and disadvantages of products in the space
  • The architecture of the products
  • A live demo of the different products (from an end-user perspective)
  • A checklist to help answer the question, “Which solution is the best!?”

Tech Therapy: TS vs. VDI
Brian Madden, Industry Analyst and Blogger, Benny Tritsch, CTO, Immidio, and Rick Dehlinger, Chief Technologist, visionapp GMBH

VDI is still one of the most hyped technologies in the industry. It ’s hip, it’s cool, and, well, it’s virtual! But what about Terminal Server (err, Remote Desktop Services)? Despite TS’s proven history and broad installation base, some of industry pundits insist that TS is going the way of the dodo bird.

In this ‘alternative format’ session, Benny Tritsch, Brian Madden, and Rick Dehlinger explore the battle between TS and VDI. Come join Dr. Karl Friedrisch von Dehlingerhausen as he attempts to help Terrence Singletary and Viktor Dean Ignacio sort out their differences and accept the things they share in common.

Understanding Microsoft Licensing for Client and Server Virtualization Environments
Nathan Coutinho, Virtualization Solutions Manager, CDW

This session will provide an in-depth view of how to license Microsoft products while utilizing virtual machine technologies.  Nathan Coutinho will take you through server operating systems, desktop operating systems and applications as well as application server products and the use cases in which they can be used, including the impact of migrating virtual machines from host to host, streaming operating systems and applications, as well as licensing operating systems properly for server and desktop solutions across any platform.  With the continued focus on virtualizing the entire data center, migrating client technologies into the data center, disaster recovery and cloud computing, compliance will be key to your organization’s success to ensure the proper and compliant use of Microsoft software for any project involving virtualization.

Come and learn what the compliant way to virtualize actually is, and get a glimpse of what the complexities are when it comes to software licensing in virtual machines as well as the costs involved to implement Client or Server Virtualization.  Nathan will also discuss tools available to monitor software inventory/compliance if such tools haven’t been implemented in your current infrastructure.  At the end of the session, attendees can go back and rethink how to implement their solution based on the benefits of the licensing models as well as fix any compliance issues in order to avoid unnecessary legislation.

Use of Layers in Desktop Virtualization Management
John Whaley, MokaFive

This session is for those interested in addressing the challenge of individualizing centrally managed virtual desktop environments. John Whaley will explore the challenges inherent in persisting user data, preferences and user-installed applications in a centrally managed virtual desktop while enabling updates and patches to the OS and other core IT-managed applications. This session will include an in-depth overview of management software architecture and policy considerations required to solve specific challenges related to security and compliance as well as user flexibility. With a thorough understanding of both the challenges and solutions to managing system and user aspects of a virtual environment, attendees will better be able to make decisions about deploying and managing virtual desktops in the enterprise, especially for remote and mobile workers. The session will include an on-the-spot demonstration of how a variety of management and use case scenarios impact user experience and IT management concerns when a virtual image is deployed and run from various platforms and distributed devices.

Users Versus IT
Amy Holder, Tranxition, and Rick Dehlinger, Cheif Technologist, visionapp GMBH

A new tension is building in IT. Businesses want end users to be efficient and productive while at the same time pushing IT to be more cost efficient and provide more compliance.

These two concepts are at direct odds with each other and really promote an “us versus them” conflict.

In this session, we’ll highlight this tension, inviting everyone in the audience to share their experiences so we can better figure out how to bridge the gap between IT and users.

(And we’ll love to hear your opinions and experiences with compliance in controlled workspaces, as IT is typically the one group who doesn’t want to be locked down!

VMware Infrastructure Best Practices: Tips and Tricks
Mike Burke, Practice Director, VIRTERA, Inc.

There's a lot of buzz around terms like "best practices" and "performance tuning" as it relates to VMware. However, best practices are only as applicable as the environment they are applied to. In this session Mike Burke, Practice Director for VIRTERA, Inc. will take you through an approach to VMware design best practices for VMware ESX and vCenter and show you how to apply them to your specific environment. Areas covered include:
  • Central Processing Unit
  • Memory
  • Networking
  • Storage best practices
  • High Availability
  • VMware DRS best practices
  • Other areas to get the most out of your virtual infrastructure

This session will also cover some new practices around VMware vSphere, VMware’s next generation of virtual infrastructure. Attendees will learn how to interpret and adapt best practices to their organization's specific needs and will learn specific do's and don'ts from experts that have designed some of the world’s largest VMware Infrastructure environments.  Finally, attendees will walk away armed with specific knowledge that they can immediately apply to their environment.

Why did that application just disappear?
Kevin Goodman, CEO, RTO

How many times have you been running an application and it just disappeared off of your screen with no warning or error message? In this session, Kevin Goodman, CTO for RTO takes your through the reasons why applications abnormally terminate and why developers choose to hide abnormal terminations from the user. Kevin will also present a “free-to-Briforum-attendees” utility that will not only prevent the apps from disappearing but will enable you to send the resulting error messages to Microsoft Online Crash Analysis (OCA). Not familiar with OCA? That’s okay; this session will cover that as well.

Windows 7/2008 R2 Native .VHD Boot
Joe Shonk, Project-based Consultant; Thin Client Computing Expert

Microsoft added a cool new feature to both Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 called Native .VHD. Not only will the OS be able to mount a .VHD disk, but it will be able to boot and run off of a .VHD disk as well! No Hypervisor required! In this session Joe Shonk will demonstrate how to create and install the OS into a .VHD file on a blank machine. You can even chain .VHDs and merge them together. This session consists mostly of live demos with only a handful supporting PowerPoint slides.

Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2: Experience Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP7 -- Think Outside of These Four Walls)
Nelly Porter, Principal Group Program Manager, Microsoft

A core element of the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution and Remote Desktop Servers offering is Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) that provides users access to remote desktops and remote applications from any device. The session covers RDP7 architecture and new scenarios introduced with Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7, where RDP7 accelerates all media types, including Silverlight, Flash and Windows Media Player, and delivers a rich remote desktop experience with D3D visual applications. This deep-dive session explains the different types of remoting, the benefits and drawbacks of each approach, architectural impact and provides an understanding of impact on the customer and end users.

Windows 7: Changing the face of VDI?
Eric Musgrave, VP of New Product Development, triCerat, and
Andrew Parlette, Director of Product Development, triCerat

This session will highlight the new Windows 7 workstation operating system, with a focus on how it could affect the VDI market.  Attendees will benefit through a clear hands-on demonstration of Windows 7 running in a virtual environment, along with direct comparisons to virtualized instances of Windows XP and Vista.  The primary goal of the session is to independently determine whether or not Windows 7 will provide the VDI market with an advanced operating system. 

Attendees will learn whether they will be able to show their organization that there is benefit in VDI as an upgrade path to Windows 7, versus the current perception that VDI is just a costly reimplementation of a Windows XP environment.

Additionally, attendees will be able to see and learn:

  • The performance of Windows 7 running in a virtualized environment
  • Performance Compared to Windows XP
  • Performance Compared to Windows Vista
  • Highlights of the new features in Windows 7
  • Compatibility pointers for upgrading to Windows 7 from Windows XP or from Windows Vista
  • Baseline ROI calculations for VDI with Windows 7 versus VDI with Windows XP

Attendees will leave this session better equipped to do their jobs because they will have a clear understanding of the upcoming Windows 7 operating system and its advantages and disadvantages.  By seeing a clear comparison of Windows 7 running in a virtual environment versus its predecessors, attendees will have a head start when they begin their evaluation of upgrade paths to the latest Microsoft operating system.

Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services:  Honest Opinions One Year Later
Claudio Rodrigues, Senior Technical Architect/Consultant; Terminal Services MVP

In this session, Claudio Rodrigues will lead a discussion with Microsoft regarding what they learned from the original 'Honest Opinions' session at last year's BriForum.  Nelly Porter from Microsoft will join in to talk about changes that have been made since then and listen to your questions, comments and concerns about Remote Data Services or RDS (formerly Terminal Services) on Windows Server 2008.  This session is no-holds-barred, and attendees are invited to speak honestly about the problems that they're having.  After all, if you don't bring it up, Microsoft may never know!

Workload Sizing and Candidate Identification in Today's Virtual Environments
Ron Oglesby, Virtualization Practice Exec, Dell

With the accelerated rate of adoption we are currently seeing in the virtual server and desktop world, more and more administrators and engineers are being asked to push their servers farther, and virtualize more workloads. The issue we see is that workload analysis, sizing the targeted environment properly and candidate identification overall is often somewhat of a mystery beyond "grab the low utilized servers and leave the SQL boxes alone".

In this session we will review industry average utilization data on popular applications like SQL, Citrix XenAPP and Exchange and how that impacts VM design/specifications. We will explore the steps in identifying candidates from existing server pools and sizing their targeted VMS. We will then wrap up the session by looking at the types of workloads that can be hosted in today's environment with analysis of today's hardware and how it impacts your consolidation ratios.

XenApp Fringe Benefits
Jason Conger, System Architect; Citrix, Virtualization and .NET Expert

There are many cool features built into XenApp that don’t get a lot of press.  Now that Citrix has changed their licensing model, a lot of these features are available to a wider audience.  These features can help a system administrator gain higher visibility of their overall environment, automate routine tasks and checks and better control and manage their infrastructure.  After attending this session, the attendees will have a better understanding of built in tools as well as gain knowledge on how to tailor these tools to their unique needs.

XenDesktop Design and Best Practices
Joe Shonk, Project-based Consultant; Thin Client Computing Expert

In this session, Joe Shonk will talk about his experiences while working XenDesktop and XenApp deployments. Attendees will learn about design principles and implementation best practices in real-world scenarios from someone who's been working with this technology from the very beginning.

This session will cover topics such as:

  • XenDesktop components, architecture and design
  • XenDesktop vs. XenApp or should you use both?
  • XenServer design and considerations
  • Provisioning server design and considerations
  • Storage and network design and considerations
  • Active Directory and other infrastructure design and considerations
  • Remote Access design and considerations
  • High Availability considerations
  • New Image Build or P2V existing desktops?
  • To stream or not to stream your applications?
  • Private images vs. standard PVS images
  • Where to place the standard image vDisk?
  • Where to place the standard image write cache?
  • Desktop OS tweaks and optimizations

Solution Sessions with Our Sponsors

Client Computing for This Millennium
Bill Corrigan, Chief Strategy Officer, Neocleus, Etay Bogner, Chief Technology Officer, Neocleus

It is no secret, client computing is changing!  No longer can IT or end user needs be compromised for the sake of the other. Client computing must deliver uncompromised control and flexibility for IT without impacting performance or productivity for the end users. With the advent of technologies such as virtualization, especially bare metal virtualization, it is now possible to create solutions that enable a radically better approach to client computing.

This session explores the effect that innovations in virtualization and centralized management of these VMs have on the client computing environment. Attendees will hear how enterprises and large government agencies are creating a much more secure, reliable desktop and laptop platform using virtualization at its core. In addition, attendees will see the solutions firsthand in a series of technical demos.  

Complete Desktop and Application Access Solution - Usability Through Innovation
James Lui, Director Technical Services, Ericom

If you’re carrying the burden of managing multiple remote applications and desktop infrastructures, in a heterogeneous environment made up of Windows Terminal Services, Remote Desktop Services, VDI, legacy hosts and other systems, this session is for you. This session underlines an important principle  managing and publishing apps and desktops residing on multiple platforms and platform types can be easy, simple, and yes – quick!

This session features a complete (live) Installation, configuration and use of Ericom’s Desktop and Presentation virtualization solution, providing users with secure, centrally managed, access to enterprise-wide applications and desktops, running on Microsoft Windows Terminal Servers, Virtual Desktops (VDI), Blade PCs and other systems. This walkthrough session includes:

  • Preparing the environment - installing PowerTerm WebConnect, verifying network connectivity, connecting to Directory Services
  • Basic configuration - connecting to virtualization platforms, deploying Ericom Tools (agent) to VMs, creating pools, specifying pool policies etc.
  • Publishing desktops and applications - from Terminal Servers, from VMs, from physical machines
  • Publishing streamed applications to clients, VMs and Terminal Services - including integration with Microsoft App-V
  • Publishing multiple applications in a single operation
  • The end-user perspective - accessing desktops and applications, personalized web interface, rich client interface and automatic browser-based client deployment and update
  • Providing remote support - view VM properties, view and control virtual / local desktops, built-in messaging and logging and auditing

In addition, you will have the opportunity to view two of Ericom’s coming innovations:

  • RDP acceleration technology, compressing RDP up to 98% and delivering performance up to 20 times faster than standard RDP
  • Ericom’s Unified Desktop technology facilitating the use of multiple desktops at the same time, including content redirection for optimal resource utilization, ideal for telecommuting, consultants and employee owned PCs

Dynamic Workspace Management
Steve Atkinson, Pre-Sales Consultant, RES Software

Citrix veteran Steve Atkinson has extensive knowledge and experience within the IT industry. As a Pre-Sales Consultant Steve spent 10 years at Citrix Systems in which period he looked after a wide range of Citrix products ranging from XenApp to Provisioning Server.

Presentation synopsis:

  • What is Workspace Management and why do you need it when virtualizing desktops and applications?
  • How do you create a personalized and secure workspace across a range of application and desktop delivery mechanisms, including Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop and terminal services?
  • How do you maintain user consistency?

Freeing Prometheus-Solving Storage, IO Performance & Management Challenges for VDI & Virtual Servers
Chetan Venkatesh, CEO  & Founder, Atlantis Computing Inc.

Atlantis Computing is a provider of Storage and IO virtualization technology products. Atlantis's ILIO technology hasreceivedindustry wide recognition as game changing and revolutionary. ILIO is a desktop image management solution that transforms the way enterprises manage virtual machines from managing hundreds of gold images to assembling VMs on-the-fly from a common source image. ILIO cuts the cost of managing Desktops by 40-50%, makes provisioning of applications and patches instantaneous, while boosting performance and scalability of Virtualization by an order of magnitude.

How To Reduce Endpoint TCO in Three Steps
Brian Duckering, Senior Manager Product Marketing, Symantec

Reducing endpoint TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is on everyone’s initiative list, but how best to accomplish that while maintaining manageability and end-user productivity. It’s NOT all about server-based computing! This session breaks down the major costs of endpoints into three practical categories and demonstrates specific technologies and actions that can be taken today to dramatically reduce those costs. Come learn how to cut costs while 1) provisioning new desktops, 2) managing application licenses and lifecycles, and 3) slashing support costs.

The Next Evolutionary Step In WAN Optimization
Efi Gatmor, Chief Technology Officer, Expand Networks

In this session, Efi Gatmor, Chief Technology Officer of Expand Networks, will discuss the challenges of deploying Server Based Computing and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) over the WAN. Learn how utilizing Optimization Technologies will allow you to reduce bandwidth, improve user experience, mitigate latency, prioritize and support larger number of users while having your WAN perform like a LAN. Efi Gatmor will also demonstrate integrating into the Server Based Computing / VDI ecosystem through Expand’s newest, award winning virtualization products – the Virtual Accelerator and their new Mobile Accelerator Client (MACC) with unique ‘HIVE Technology’. Discover how consolidation and mobility work in tandem to deliver business efficiency and add to the bottom line.

An Open Source Approach to Securing Virtual Desktop Infrastructures
Daniel Walsh, Principal Software Engineer and Project Lead for SELinux, Red Hat, and Fred Osborne, Senior Solution Architect, Red Hat

Hosted desktop virtualization offers tremendous security benefits to enterprises by allowing them to move critical data off of the end point and into the data center. The consolidated nature of this approach, however, eliminates the physical isolation that exists between desktops in a traditional deployment model, along with the security benefits that result from this isolation. Without proper security measures, one compromised virtual desktop can pose a threat to all other virtual desktops running on the same host. 

In this session, Red Hat's Daniel Walsh will examine how open source technologies, specifically SELinux, sVirt and the KVM hypervisor, can be used to apply Mandatory Access Control (MAC) security to a virtual desktop infrastructure. This layered approach provides virtual desktop deployments with a level of isolation equivalent to that which exists in physical deployments, and in doing so dramatically increases the security of virtual desktops and the hypervisors on which they reside.

Storage - No Longer the Bottleneck for VDI Deployments
Mike Slisinger, Technical Marketing Engineer, NetApp

As Desktop Administrators attempt to justify the ROI for VDI deployments, SANs (shared, networked storage) have often been viewed as a major bottleneck to cost justification, user-experience and management integration. In this session, NetApp will highlight how each of these barriers have been removed. The session will provide a combination of technical discussion and demonstrations of storage array technologies that are available today for deployment with Citrix/XenDesktop, VMware View and other Desktop Management environments. You will learn how to: 

  • Reduce amount of storage required for VDI, while maximizing performance
  • Enable the provisioning of large number of virtual desktops in real time
  • Experience a boot storm and live to tell about it

It’s Time for an Alternative Architecture – the Pieces are (Almost) in Place
Jeff McNaught, Wyse Technology Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, and Neill Kelly, AMD Director, Strategic Software Alliances

Wyse's Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer, Jeff McNaught, and AMD's Director of Strategic Software Alliances, Neill Kelly, will share the latest news on Wyse's client and virtualization software strategy, and AMD's server hosted client architecture. The session will include how their solutions are aligned at simplifying access to mixed data center cloud environments with the highest possible user experience quality.

Mr. McNaught and Mr. Kelly will address the technical and user differences between the datacenter models, show which is best for each user type, and show how the "six things that will kill virtualization" are being addressed.

Save $500!

REGISTER TODAY and take advantage of our early bird discounted pricing - only $995 through March 19!

Hotel and Travel Discounts

BriForum 2010 attendees are eligible for discounts on airfare and accommodations. Visit the Hotel & Travel tab to learn more about these special offers.

Conference Photos