NVIDIA GRID 4.2 released (367.92/369.95)
Hi All
Its time to update your NVIDIA GRID K1, K2, M10, M6, M60 environment.
NVIDIA have released new drivers for NVIDIA GRID 4.2 for March 2017.
Hi All
Its time to update your NVIDIA GRID K1, K2, M10, M6, M60 environment.
NVIDIA have released new drivers for NVIDIA GRID 4.2 for March 2017.
Earlier this year I have seen several customers having issues with AutoCAD in Citrix not defaulting to the primary display adapter, so the GPU wouldn be fully functioning and Autodesk AutoCAD 2016/2017 would turn off hardware acceleration. This issue have been seen on NVIDIA Gpus such as GRID, NVIDIA also have a official KB on this http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4092/ and issue is also seen with INTEL gpu such as Iris Pro Graphics more specific on solutions with HPE Moonshot 710p and 710x.
Issue is identified on both Citrix XenApp 7.x (Windows Server OSs) and Citrix XenDesktop 7.x (Workstation OSs)
“The primary display adapter is not shown as the default in a Citrix environment.”
I am happy to share that Autodesk have finally fixed this “bug” with Citrix and now the GPUs will work correctly with Autodesk AutoCAD 2016 and Autodesk AutoCAD 2017 when you apply below hot fix for the product you have.
This hotfix for citrix applies to the following releases with the AutoCAD 2016 Service Pack 1 already installed:
this hotfix for citrix applies to the following release:
Apply this Service Pack to the following Autodesk products running on all supported operating systems and languages. Be sure to install the correct Service Pack.
This Service Pack can be applied to AutoCAD 2017 installed as a standalone application, AutoCAD-based Vertical products, and the Autodesk Design Suites listed below.
AutoCAD and Verticals Products:
Autodesk Design Suites:
Display
Open and Save
PDF Import
Xref
General
Download the Autodesk AutoCAD 2017 Service Pack 1 here
Download Accumulated hotfix 4 for AutoCAD 2016 based products here
Last year I was invited by HPE to go to their EMEA event HPE Discover in London, which took place the first week of December. I was invited there as part of their Hewlett Packard Enterprise Independent Influencer Program, and I was super proud of being part of this well organized program, which Kristen Reyes manages. HUGE kudos to Kristen Reyes and her team for putting together one of the most organized events I have ever attended as a blogger. Last time I attended HPE Discover was some years ago at their big US HPE Discover which took place at Las Vegas. I remember it was HUGE with lots of people – an epic experience that my previously employer, Arrow ECS managed the trip for. I had pretty high expectations going to the HPE Discover and I knew it was going to be good, but not as good as it REALLY was.
I am proud of being part of this program – let me tell you which profiles are part of the program including myself.
The team behind HPE took care of us from the time I flew all the way from Denmark to London. They made sure we got the right hotel and then once at the venue, we got a special VIP room where we got introduce each other. Team had a plan for what happend exclusively for the group. This reminds me of the Citrix CTP program I am humble to be part of where we also meet 2 times a year and are taken especially care of.
If you want to read more about the individuals tech bloggers, that are in the program, click here.
I highly recommend you follow above persons, as they are awesome people. This is the first time I have been with such a wide range of technology bloggers in my life and it was a huge difference – so thank you to HPE for daring to put so many different profiles together.
There was 13.000 attendees. YES! That is INSANE and it felt like being in United States but I was in London. London can also have huge venues and they succeeded with cherry top on the beautiful cake. Yes HPE pulled it off! Please other big vendors – start making EMEA events because London is a perfect spot for this! Citrix, VMware, Microsoft… EMEA salutes you..
I was in for a surprise the first day of the keynote when Meg Whitman kicked off HPE Discover, and Satya Nadella Microsoft CEO talked even thought it was via a conf call (but still pretty cool) and Microsoft showed the flag. I would have loved if Satya could have come in person since that would have been my first time seeing Mr. Nadella in person.
After a great keynotes learning about where HPE is taking the company, it was time to walk around the expo to see what innovative technologies were hidden and what others I was allowed to blog about.
This device is so beautiful the brand new HP Envy 34, its the widest screen I have ever seen on a professional computer and its powered by Intel HD530 GPU and NVIDIA GTX 960A GPU. The speakers are B&O (Danish design brand).
Price for this device is approx 1700 USD – that’s pretty cheap for an All-in-one machine.
Another beautiful Augmented Reality device I tried was the HP Sprout. This device makes it possible to quickly edit 3D models in real time by taking objects from reality and scanning them directly in to the device. Then you can manipulate with the object and then print it out on a 3Dprinter. This process increases the speed of making a design. Right now, the device is only available for consumers but we might see that change soon for enterprises since the unit was displayed at the HPE Discover 🙂 – so watch out for this space. I also saw AMD had setup several Oculus Rift DK2 units running some great demos. Great to see that VR was at HPE Discover.
I meet many of the brains behind the Deep Learning “things” HPE are doing, and its VERY impressive where they are, and how HPE differs to their competitors. I can’t talk much about it now – and will leave it up to how things are evolving later this year – and then blog more about it when the information is available to the public. But if you are fascinated by the future and AI / Deep learning you should look at what HPE is doing with the concept, “The Machine”. If you look at what they are trying to accomplish and put the puzzle together yourself, you might see for yourself how HPE will make a difference in how next generation datacenters will be built – that’s a fact.
Learn more about the HPE “The Machine” here
HPE Smart Digital Collaboration Space (1107), a.k.a. “The Cube.” . That was the name of this cool concept.
This was mind-blowing – and one of the most innovative things I saw at HPE Discover with IoT using Citrix Octoblu.
HPE, together with Aruba and Octoblu have teamed together to create a beautiful workflow that automates a conference room with iOT.
All visitors could try this at the event. HPE allowed 3-4 people to enter the cube as a group. We were asked our name and then were given an iPhone to bring into “The Cube”. The system then welcomed use by name and the room went from “green” to “red” (which was Philips Hue that did this), so the people outside could clearly see that the room was occupied and a meeting was taking place. An HP tablet on the door outside also showed the room was occupied and listed the attendees by name. Inside, the HP surface PCs connected to Skype for Business, Samsung TV started and a business session went live. At the end, “The Cube” took a selfie and put on twitter and sent the photo to our emails and after we left the room. Upon exiting, it reset all the workflows and the room was lit green again – ready for next group. Amazing 🙂
Below is the workflow that was created in Octoblu
Try out octoblu here if you havent tried it yet. Its still beta and “FREE” https://octoblu.com/
Read the official blog post from Citrix about the solution
It was great to see all the new NVIDIA GRID 2.0 solutions. Two gentlemen proudly showed the HPE ProLiant WS460C Gen9 that now supports NVIDIA Tesla M60 and NVIDIA Tesla M6. This means higher density and more performance. So great to see that HPE is a pioneer, offering the entire solution from NVIDIA. There is soon NVIDIA GTC – and I expect we will see some data on customers running on HPE solution with M60/M6 and we get some data on how many users can run on these new offerings. It’s actually my first time seeing on-hands the M6 GPU from NVIDIA and it looks beautiful and green. These GPUs are made for low end GPU workloads all the way up to high end GPU workloads. The performance of the M60 is 2x the performance compared to K2 (GRID 1.0)
Please keep in mind that NVIDIA has changed GRID 2.0 so when you buy the GPUs, you also have to buy a “software” license.
Your NPN (NVIDIA preferred partner) should be able to help you with providing you the correct information. This license is required both for Pass-through and vGPU of the M60 and M6.
HPE Moonshot has been a subject I have been following for a while now. It all started when one of my great friends (and fellow CTP) Dane Young talked about HP Moonshot and why it differs to the market. HPE liked Young’s view – and his face is now on the wall at the Houston research facility. So if you are a client or a partner, you might know Dane Young – or you will if you are in Houston to see what HPE is doing with HPE Moonshot.
Citrix had a booth at the HPE Discover and they showed how Citrix is working and offered on a HPE Moonshot stack.
The HPE Moonshot team had several sessions talking about the next generation “trader workstation” which opens my eyes on how users use a computer. Traders are actually some of the most “difficult” users to satisfy – and they have a very short lifetime as an employee because its so hard what they do is so stressful. The amount of monitors and amount of data they look at is shocking and the high availability for this is nothing like you have never seen before. If these people cant work, the moneyflow stops moving – something you don’t want in the financial world. Designers are one thing, but I would definitely call traders the most difficult users. So what´s so amazing about the HPE Moonshot offering? HPE has a new catridge called the M710P, which was released in the Summer 2015. It has a high amount of CPU/GPU (or as others call it APU which is a CPU/GPU processor in 1 unit). Lots of memory and high speed disks. This is all build in a super small server which we call a cartridge. This cartridge can be put in a system and an OS can be installed and now you can have many users connecting to the catridge and using multiple sessions from Microsoft Remote Desktop Services combine this with Citrix super power “XenApp” and you now have an amazing flagship for having high amount of users with low cost. Nothing is virtualized and everything is running on bare metal. The beauty about the moonshot is that in 1 chassis you can put in 45 catridges of the M710P.
These are the offering that HPE have with Moonshot and Citrix and you can build amazing workloads. Personally, I would look at the M710p because I think this is the cartridge that is mature for the workload. I normally design Citrix solutions with.. wait are you talking about GPU? Yes I am..
If you remember some time ago, Brian Madden, said “Imagine if you could put 20.000 users in a single rack? Let’s see what has happended since then. Things have evolved – and with the new cartridge M710p, its much more powerful than the first cartridges that were built for Citrix
At HPE Discover, Citrix had a session with Bob Thompson from Citrix and together with the HPE Moonshot team EMEA telling how Citrix is using HPE Moonshot.
I had never heard about Citrix is using it at this scale – and big surprise their demo cloud is also running on Moonshot.
“WOW so why arent more people using Moonshot, if this is so good and Citrix is doing this, it is mature”.
I am very impressed about this new machine and HPE is having HUGE success with this machine for the financial buisness. In fact, some of the biggest banks in the world are running on this. Surprised ? IT’S TRUE
Let’s look at the details of what it is.
Here is a typical trader running with 4 monitors connecting to 1 catridge M710p and only 47% of the GPU is utilized. AMAZING!
WORKLOADs | Video transcoding , Application Delivery |
CPU+GPU | Intel Xeon E3-1284Lv4 with on-die GPU (GT3e: Iris Pro P6300)
4 core, 8 thread, 2.9 GHz (3.8GHz Turbo), GPU, 128MB DRAM |
MEMORY | 32GiB of ECC-protected memory, dual-memory channels
4 x 8GB LV SO-DIMMs at 1600MT/s |
NETWORK | Integrated NIC: dual port 10GbE Mellanox CX3 PRO
Supported Switch(s): 45 port 10GbE Downlinks, 4 x 40GbE QSFP uplinks |
STORAGE | Local SSD boot and data: 120GB, 240GB, 480GB or 960GB
m.2 (2280) form factor |
POWER | Cartridge: 83W peak, 50W typical |
OS | Ubuntu 15.05 w/KVM, RHEL 6.5,7.0 w/KVM, SLES 11.4/12,
Windows Server 2012 R2, 2008R2, CentOS 6.7, 7.2 |
I hope the above gives you a pretty good idea on where Moonshot is going – and this is just for Citrix. HPE Moonshot is much more though -it’s a huge eco system build for enterprises and cloud providers, so check it out https://www.hpe.com/us/en/servers/moonshot.html
More informations about HPE Moonshot M710p – The Trader Workstation:
Bringing the Benefits of a Hosted Desktop Solution to Traders
Book at demo and try HP Moonshot M700/M710/M710p here – http://discoverylab-hpe.com/book-a-demo/
HPE Discover 2015 blew my mind – and it looks like we are going to have an amazing year in 2016.
I would like to say thank you to Kristen Reyes from HPE for making this happen. Each time I didn’t know what to do, she and her team took great care of me and made sure I meet the correct people at HPE – and there was always “open doors” (which isn’t always the case when techies sees a guy with a “blogger” sign around his neck).
Citrix have released a new version of Citrix XenDesktop 7.7 and XenApp 7.7
My first impressions of this release is, this is the release you should update to if you are running Citrix XenDesktop 7.x, the speed improvements in the GUI is incredible, its snappy realiable and makes you work without waiting it for loading when you click around the catalogs and the delivery groups. The 7.7 release is an important release from Citrix where Citrix is now fully supporting Microsoft Azure, so you can provisioning VDI or XenApp machines on Microsoft Azure with MCS technology. Another long waited feature is “Zones” this feature will be loved by customers that have branch offices where there is a requirement to install local Citrix infrastructure components such as Studio, Director, Site database, Zones was very common used in IMA architecture and now its finally implemented in FMA, great job Citrix. These are just some of the all the new huge improvements and this is the best release of XenApp/XenDesktop. Other new product release that is included in the XenDesktop/XenApp 7.7 media is HDX RealTime Optimization Pack 2.0, License Server 11.13.1, Profile Management 5.4, Citrix Provisioning 7.7, Citrix Receiver 4.4 is not in the iso, but you have to download this seperated, which i highly recommends.
What a great year to finish with and happy updating and I wish you all a Happy New Year.
Citrix XenDesktop 7.7 & Citrix XenDesktop 7.7 contains following software updates and new features and enhancements, this blog post covers all whats new in the architecture and components. Citrix Provisioning 7.7 is covered in a seperated article here.
This product release includes the following new and enhanced features.
Deployments that span widely-dispersed locations connected by a WAN can face challenges due to network latency and reliability. Configuring zones can help users in remote regions connect to local resources without forcing connections to traverse large segments of the WAN. Using zones allows effective Site management from a single Citrix Studio console, Citrix Director, and the Site database. This saves the costs of deploying, staffing, licensing, and maintaining additional Sites containing separate databases in remote locations.
Zones can be helpful in deployments of all sizes. You can use zones to keep applications and desktops closer to end users, which improves performance.
For more information, see the Zones article.
When you configure the databases during Site creation, you can now specify separate locations for the Site, Logging, and Monitoring databases. Later, you can specify different locations for all three databases. In previous releases, all three databases were created at the same address, and you could not specify a different address for the Site database later.
You can now add more Delivery Controllers when you create a Site, as well as later. In previous releases, you could add more Controllers only after you created the Site.
For more information, see the Databases and Controllers articles.
Configure application limits to help manage application use. For example, you can use application limits to manage the number of users accessing an application simultaneously. Similarly, application limits can be used to manage the number of simultaneous instances of resource-intensive applications, this can help maintain server performance and prevent deterioration in service.
For more information, see the Manage applications article.
You can now choose to repeat a notification message that is sent to affected machines before the following types of actions begin:
Updating machines in a Machine Catalog using a new master image
Restarting machines in a Delivery Group according to a configured schedule
If you indicate that the first message should be sent to each affected machine 15 minutes before the update or restart begins, you can also specify that the message be repeated every five minutes until the update/restart begins.
For more information, see the Manage Machine Catalogs and Manage machines in Delivery Groups articles.
By default, sessions roam between client devices with the user. When the user launches a session and then moves to another device, the same session is used and applications are available on both devices. The applications follow, regardless of the device or whether current sessions exist. Similarly, printers and other resources assigned to the application follow.
You can now use the PowerShell SDK to tailor session roaming. This was an experimental feature in the previous release.
For more information, see the Sessions article.
When using the PowerShell SDK to create or update a Machine Catalog, you can now select a template from other hypervisor connections. This is in addition to the currently-available choices of VM images and snapshots.
See the System requirements article for full support information. Information about support for third-party product versions is updated periodically.
By default, SQL Server 2012 Express SP2 is installed when you install the Delivery Controller. SP1 is no longer installed.
The component installers now automatically deploy 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Visual C++ 2012 runtimes, as well as 2008 and 2010 runtimes. Visual C++ 2005 is no longer deployed.
You can install Studio or VDAs for Windows Desktop OS on machines running Windows 10.
You can create connections to Microsoft Azure virtualization resources.
The product ISO no longer includes versions of the Citrix Receiver for Mac and the Citrix Receiver for Linux. You (or your users) can download and install the Citrix Receivers from the Citrix website. Alternatively, you can make those Citrix Receivers available from your StoreFront server (see the Make Citrix Receiver installation files available on the server section in the StoreFront 3.0.x documentation, or the equivalent documentation for the StoreFront version you are using).
The Citrix Director version provided with this release contains the following new and enhanced features:
You can now configure proactive alerting and notifications when thresholds are reached. This enables quicker responses even when you are not viewing the monitoring console.
For more information, see Alerts and notifications.
Deployments that use Microsoft System Center 2012 – Operations Manager to monitor deployments can now view alerts provided by the Operations Manager on the Dashboard and in other high level views in Citrix Director. For example, if connections to supported hypervisors fail, the administrator can check Citrix Director for Operations Manager alerts. After reviewing alert details in Citrix Director, the administrator can then switch to the Operations Manager console for additional troubleshooting, if needed.
For more information, see SCOM alerts.
Citrix Director now supports Integrated Windows Authentication. For single sign-on, a user’s Windows credentials are automatically used to access Citrix Director. This support allows users to log on to their machines using any credential provider and supporting hardware, and use that logged-on identity to access Citrix Director.
For more information, see Use Citrix Director with Integrated Windows Authentication.
The Trends view now shows the usage of Desktop OS by Site and by Delivery group, and it shows the usage of Server OS by site, by Delivery group, and by Machine. This gives you a real-time view of your OS usage, enabling you to quickly assess your site’s capacity needs.
For more information, see Monitor historical trends across a Site.
Application limits configured in Studio are shown in existing views and counts in Citrix Director. For example, the User Connection Failures on the Dashboard will indicate when a connection attempt fails because it would exceed an application limit.
For more information, see Application limits.
Citrix Licensing Manager – Enables downloading and allocation of license files from the License Server on which the Citrix Licensing Manager is installed. You can specify a date range for the historical usage and export it to a CSV file. The CSV file provides daily usage information including the number of licenses in overdraft. License Server VPX does not support the Citrix Licensing Manager.
When upgrading Profile management, the installer removes the old version along with the WMI Provider, and then installs the new version. If you perform the upgrade after separating the two components, the WMI Provider is not upgraded. In this case, install it separately to ensure the two components remain compatible with each other and your VDAs. You must provide the standalone WMI MSI file or installer for Versions 7.5 and 7.6 of the VDA so that the correct version of the WMI Provider installs after upgrading Profile management.
If you upgrade to Profile management 5.4 on a VDA earlier than version 7.7, use profilemgt_x64/x86.msi to do so. If you upgrade on a Version 7.7 VDA, Profile management 5.4 and WMI Provider 5.4 are automatically installed (by profilemgt_x64/x86.msi and UpmVDAPlugin_x64/x86.msi).
Download Citrix XenDesktop 7.7 here (Require MyCitrix ID)
Download Citrix XenApp 7.7 here (Require MyCitrix ID)
Download Citrix Profile Management 5.4 here
Download Citrix HDX Optimization Pack 2.0 here
Download Citrix License Server 11.13.1 here (For Windows or VPX appliance)
Citrix have released a limited hotfix for Citrix XenDesktop 7.6 and XenApp 7.6 that fixes an issue with Autodesk AutoCAD & AutoCAD Civil 3D where the mouse pointer permanently displays as an hour glass. By applying this hotfix this fixes the issue for AutoCAD.