Citrix have released a new version of Citrix XenDesktop 7.11 and XenApp 7.11 and is now available for download.
Citrix raises the bar of for user experience and new product release of following technologies
Virtual Delivery Agents 7.11 for ServerOS and ClientOS
AppDNA 7.11
Storefront 3.7
Provisioning Services 7.11
Profile Management 5.5
License Server 11.14
Citrix Receiver 15.0 for Windows
HDX RealTime Optimization Pack 2.1.1 for Microsoft Skype® for Busines
Citrix SCOM Management Bundle for XenApp and XenDesktop (2016_08_24)
Linux Virtual Delivery Agent 1.4
Tech preview for HTML5 redirection
This release is an important release no matter if you are working daily with Office application such as Excel, Word or Browsers and even highend applications such as CAD. The features in 7.11 have important improved user experience from the VDA to the Receiver that improves dramtically the user experience. NVIDIA NVENC technology is now part of VDA and supports even multiple monitors. The admin can now monitor RTT within Director this feature have been something I have asked for very long time and now finally its in the product, customer will love this new feature so its fast to see where the issue is in a infrastructure with which users that have latency issues. Version 7.11 is the release that fully supports Microsoft Windows Server 2016 that is soon GA, this means you can install Delivery components on Windows Server 2016, VDA on Server 2016, use Azure N-series with support for Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V Discrete Device Assignment (DDA) or you can use it onpremises with Hyper-V. Support for UWP is HUGE and I am very excited about this technology and this also used in Microsoft Hololens so cant wait to a Receiver for hololens so you can publish UWP apps to Hololens 😉 Imagine that. I can keep going on with all these new features lets dig in below and learn whats new, its incredible that Citrix raises the bar and comes with huge improvements and they this each 3 months 🙂 yes each 3months, you read it correct. If you dont have a plan for this in your company I highly recommend you build a strategy on how you upgrade you Citrix environment frequently to get these awesome new features.
This is a video blog post series I am creating to show you as an audience how powerful remote graphics is from Citrix & NVIDIA.
You are now able to work from anywhere, any time, any device. You just need an internet connection (Satellit, Edge/3G)
This video shows the user experience with Citrix XenDesktop 7.6 VDI workload (virtualized Windows 8.1 64bit) The workload have a NVIDIA GRID K2 vGPU K220Q GPU profile assigned.
The workload is running in a datacenter in EMEA and secured by Citrix Netscaler and SMS Passcode.
The end device that is used to connect to the Citrix workload is a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 using Windows 10 and Citrix Receiver 14.3
Video is recorded by Apple iPhone 6+
Microsoft Surface Pro 3 is connected using my Phones internet connetion which was at that time switching between “EDGE” and “3G”. Bandwidth was 300KB-5Mbit and latency is from 500MS-7000MS, jitter is not meassured.
Please notice this video is recorded on a boat sailing between Denmark and Sweden in Europe, this trip took place July 2015.
Purpose of this video:
Show the audience how powerful Citrix HDX 3D Pro is using NVIDIA GRID in extreme conditions with latency I have never tried it on and I was still able to interact realtime with computer graphics thats running securely in a datacenter in EMEA.
This technology is so powerful and can be used in critical conditions where an employee can access graphics, (2D, 3D) or even rich graphics such as browsers, viewers, office productivity, erp systems. Imagine an engineer on an Oil rig requires to see a critical component that requires to be changed and the data can be accesable connected to a datacenter thousands of kilometers away securely and remotely. This is the future of working, making you work on any device, any where, any place.
More about Citrix HDX 3D Pro
https://www.citrix.dk/products/xendes…
I am very excited to share this great news with you all. I did a webinar with fellow CTP Trond Eirik Håvarstein from XenAppBlog.com, and we had a special guest surprise Jeroen Van De Kamp CTP and CTO, LoginVSI announcing ground breaking stuff in the webinar. We had over 700 people signed up for the Webinar, if you was among the crowd that missed the opportunity to see the webinar here is your chance, the webinar is now available for everyone for free. There was a lot of Q/A and I will the next couple of days reply to all the Q/A and make them available in this article.
The webinar has been re-mastered and the audio & graphical demo videos is even better now than in the actual webinar, make sure to check it out now:
Summary of webinar product announcements from LoginVSI, Lakeside Software, Uberagent for Splunk.
LoginVSI upcoming new version support’s GPU benchmark…
LoginVSI is working on next version that will support benchmark, capacity planning, stress testing the “missing component in virtualization” GPU. If you are interested you can write to get access to the beta version of LoginVSI.
Here are some screen shots from the session…. watch it to here what Jeroen tells about the upcoming version
Note if you want to get more info on the next version of LoginVSI that supports GPU, write to info@loginvsi.com subject GFX
Another groundbreaking product announcement was from Lakeside Software, they are about to release version 7 of Systrack that will support NVIDIA GPU Monitoring/assessing.
Application Graphics Benchmarking
The transformation of an existing software portfolio first begins with the identification of all of the actively used software packages in the environment. The added complication in the case of a project to begin advanced application delivery is the need to understand multiple facets of usage: resource consumption, graphics utilization, frequency of use, user access habits, and mobility needs. Because the state of IT is already so complex it only becomes possible to fully understand and plan with a complete set of descriptive information that really characterizes the unique aspects of every environment. Of particular interest is the ability to first identify applications that have GPU demands, and then begin to segment them into tiers of utilization. SysTrack continually collects information about software packages as they’re used and normalizes all data points for cross platform comparison. One of the key performance parameters that’s identified in this process is a graphical intensity measure (Graphics Index) that provides a way to identify those applications in the portfolio that have higher GPU demands than others. With this critical information it becomes possible to segment the portfolio into groupings based on their requirements for specific resources. By tying a general sense of which applications have peak demand to total length of usage it becomes easier to start developing a portfolio made up of different combinations of usage styles. This includes separating applications that may be used by a small set of the population with intense requirements versus widely used applications with a smaller footprint. Of course, this also allows for much deeper analytics centering on the behaviors of users that is quite important in planning the GPU profiles in use in provisioning. Figure 1 displays this relationship in a bubble chart format, this format groups applications based on their similar characteristics presenting clusters of similar applications in larger bubbles. The vast majority of applications exist in the “low graphics demand – Low Time Active” area in the bottom left, while only a select few have either high graphics demand or high time active.
SysTrackTracks graphics usage frequency across on physical clients and allows you to group users based on graphics usage & frequency
A natural expansion of this is grouping users into distinct workload types to understand how best to configure the profile types and GPU assignments for users. Once the target applications and users have been characterized and a plan has been developed it’s critical to begin the process of sizing the environment. This includes determining the architecture, sizing the desktops and servers that will be worked with, and identifying resources that will be required to support the needs of the planned deployment.
Resource Modeling & Capacity Planning
NVIDIA Marketplace report from Systrack’sVirtual Machine Planner (VMP) outlines the number of users that fall into different use cases making it easier to forecast how many users per board can be allocated
With a complete portfolio plan it now becomes possible to move into the next phase and start creating a model for what resources will be required for a complete environment. Because each of the users have been fully characterized throughout the assessment data collection interval it’s possible to use SysTrack’s Virtual Machine Planner (VMP) for powerful mathematical analysis to provide deep insight into infrastructure provisioning. The first component of this involves using the profile information above to help develop a plan for what kind of solution will be provided to the end-users. By segmenting the population into different delivery strategies using Citrix FlexCast options as a guideline, a more complete and accurate picture of how the net new environment will operate can be created. An additional benefit of segmentation is the ability to take advantage of grouping by general graphics consumption to identify the number of GPUs required for the environment based on the user density information for each profile type
The NVIDIA MarketPlace report from VMP outlines the number of users that fall into the various use cases (e.g. “high” for a designer or higher end power user), making it much easier to forecast how many users per board can be allocated and in turn how many total boards may be needed
This information creates an easy to use design for a set of user profiles, both for the actual desktop delivery and for the vGPU assignment. By ensuring the best possible analysis of the environment prior to the actual deployment the end-user experience is much simpler to forecast and control. This results in higher end-user satisfaction and a shorter transition time.
User Experience Optimization
After the successful implementation of the solution the environment still requires observation to prevent interruption of service and the potential for productivity impact. The best way to ensure optimal end-user service quality is to have a real-time alerting and analytical engine to collect and report instantly on degradation of any aspect of the systems the users interact with. SysTrack provides this in the form of proactive alerting, detailed system analysis in Resolve, and aggregate trending through Enterprise and Site Visualizer. An even more interesting feature is vScape, a tool designed to examine utilization across multiple virtual machines and correlate resource consumption to concurrency of application utilization. vScape provides real-time updates of all of the application usage across all virtual platforms in an enterprise, including information about what applications are currently demanding GPU resources. It also provides insight into other resource demands as well, such as CPU, memory, and I/O. This can help automate the discovery of co-scheduled or highly concurrent applications to pinpoint the root cause of oversubscription issues much more quickly. It also provides key insight into guest health characteristics with trending to correlate precisely which events may lead to service degradation
Another key feature introduced in SysTrack version 7.0 is the result of close collaboration with NVIDIA to leverage APIs presented in the guest operating system. This allows the capture of detailed GPU performance metrics to correlate vGPU consumption to end-user service quality. Specifically, with NVIDIA drivers present in the guest OS or on a physical system, the GPU utilization and key metrics (see table 2 for a sample of selected metrics) from the graphics card can be captured and analyzed in the same way as CPU or other system metrics are currently in SysTrack.
In Systrack 7 after provisioning users in VDI environment the IT admins can monitors performance, which enables to optimize density over time.
This completes the set of KPIs used in SysTrack to calculate the end-user experience score, including categories like resource limitation, network configuration, latency, guest configuration, protocol specific data for ICA, and virtual infrastructure. With a complete set of relevant information the proactive and trending health analysis provided in SysTrack yields a thorough analysis in an easy to understand, quantitative score that summarizes performance on an environmental, group based, or individual system level.
NVIDIA GPU Monitoring/Assessing: (Works with all NVIDIA GPU) Quadro, Kepler, GRID
You will be able to look at following parameters:
Device ID
Power State
GPU Usage
Frame Buffer Usage
Video Usage
Bus Usage
Memory Usage (Bytes and Percent)
# of Apps
Temperatures and Fan RPMS
Use this data to accurately plan and size GRID and HDX 3D Pro deployments based on actually observed usage and utilization.
Monitor users post-deployment to provide the best user experience
UberAgent 1.8 for Splunk adds GPU performance monitoring
Helge Klein have developed a new version of Splunk that now supports monitoring of GPU, this was a feature request I talked with Helge Klein about in 2013, and I am so happy to see the results what he have done with UberAgent for Splunk, lets dig in what it can do.
uberAgent measures:
GPU compute usage per machine
GPU memory usage per machine
GPU compute usage per process
GPU memory usage per process
uberAgent shows memory usage separately for shared and dedicated memory (dedicated = on the GPU, shared = main system RAM)
uberAgent shows compute usage per GPU engine. The various GPU engines serve different functions, e.g. 2D acceleration, 3D acceleration, video decoding, etc.
I am very excited to share my findings of some of the things I do in poppelgaard professional services. Feel welcome to contact me at thomas@poppelgaard.com if you are interested in using my professional services and you need help with GPU solutions.
You will see more upcoming blogs from me covering this topic. End User experience, assessments of GPU workload, scaling/sizing, benchmarking, hardware supported, GPU side by side experience, Hypervisor vs Bare metal with a GPU. Watch out for cool things….
I am proud to announce that I am speaking again at E2EVC (experts to experts virtualization conference) in 31th May – 2th June 2013.
This time it will be held in the beautiful Copenhagen in Denmark, so this is a good chance too meet some of the super geeks that works with Citrix, Microsoft or Vmware technologies. Alot of CTP (citrix technology professional), MVP (Microsoft value professional) VCP (Vmware certified professional) will attend and share their knowledge with the croud.
Join us for the independent E2EVC Virtualization Conference in Copenhagen May 31-June 2, 2013 in Scandic Sydhavnen Hotel Copenhagen. The conference, which had 18 successful past events all over Europe, is 3 days – from Friday to Sunday and cover multiple Citrix, VMware, Microsoft and virtualization products from other vendors. It is a great opportunity to meet with the peers from virtualization industry and to share know how in a nice, relaxing atmosphere. More than 20 break-out sessions and 3 Master Classes await your participation. To have a glimpse at the Agenda click here. We look forward to meet you all in Copenhagen!
My session Saturday 1th June 2013 at E2EVC in Copenhagen:
Session – Which 3D remoting technologies are available today from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft
Short description:
Protocol advantages disadvantages
Hypervisors, what’s available and how do you configure this + advantages / disadvantages
Use cases from real world examples.
People will learn how it’s possible to centralize the apps that requires GPU and how they can deliver this
Hands experience on worlds first GPU that can be virtualized, how does it work with Citrix, Microsoft, Vmware
Visit www.e2evc.com/home for the conference agenda and registration information (special 1st May offer till 2013-05-03 only; more here).
Citrix have released a new version of Citrix Receiver 5.7 for iOS
What’s New in Version 5.7
In addition to general usability and performance improvements, this release adds these features:
· On iOS 6 operating systems, support for the Bluetooth keyboard, as well as fixes for rotation issues and Access Gateway timeout issues.
· On iPhone 5 devices, support for the new screen size.
· First-time use updates, including support for Access Gateway URL input.
· Improved performance when logging on, including reduced time for enumeration of applications.
· Support for multiple stores. Log into multiple accounts at one time, including both a PNA or Web Interface account and a StoreFront account with App Controller running simultaneously within Receiver. A new icon enables you to switch between accounts.
· SAN SSL certificate support.
· Enhanced client-side logging. Enable “Advanced Logs” in the Advanced Settings to help troubleshoot problems.
· New options for sending feedback, including the option to request for help from Support and to send feature requests to Citrix.
· Enhancements in the extended keyboard ribbon. Add and view extended keys more easily, including “sticky” keys for multi-key combinations.
· Support for Citrix @WorkMail™ and @WorkWeb™ for iOS-based devices that let users easily access their email, calendar, and contacts, as well as intranet web sites. You upload the mobile apps to AppController and users subscribe to these two apps from Receiver.
· Support for CloudGateway AppController 2.5, including:
· Policies for MDX-enabled mobile apps. Enable policies while wrapping apps, including policies that support device security, networks, and the ways apps interact with documents and web sites. You can also limit or block device functions, such as copy and paste, the camera, and GPS location services. These policies provide support for iOS apps, including @WorkWeb and @WorkMail.
· Ability to manage the your device inventory, including locking user devices, erasing application data and documents from user devices, and removing devices from the inventory list in AppController.
· Ability to configure workflows, including multiple workflows before you add applications. When you configure applications, you can select the appropriate workflow.
· Policies for Web and SaaS apps, including policies that support blocking of compromised devices, wireless network settings, the requirement for users to connect to an internal network to access apps, and the ability for users to have network access.
