Tag: MVP

Microsoft Windows Server 2016 TP4

Microsoft have released Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4.

I am really excited about this release cause now Microsoft RemoteFX have added support for OpenGL and OpenCL with Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) previously Microsoft RemoteFX only supported DirectX.

RemoteFX technology works with GPU vendors such as NVIDIA, INTEL and AMD

Whats new in Windows Server 2016 TP4

What’s New in Microsoft Nano Server. Microsoft Nano Server now supports the DNS Server and IIS server roles, as well as MPIO, VMM, SCOM, DSC push mode, DCB, Windows Server Installer, and the WMI provider for Windows Update. Its Recovery Console supports editing and repairing the network configuration. A Windows PowerShell module is now available to simplify building Microsoft Nano Server images.

Windows Containers: Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview now includes containers, which allow many isolated applications to run on one computer system. They build fast and are highly scalable and portable. Two different types of container runtime are included with the feature, each with a different degree of application isolation. Windows Server Containers achieve isolation through namespace and process isolation. Hyper-V Containers encapsulates each container in a light weight virtual machine. For some additional information on containers, see Containers: Docker, Windows and Trends.
What’s new in Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) in Windows Server Technical Preview. Active Directory Domain Services includes improvements to help organizations secure Active Directory environments and provide better identity management experiences for both corporate and personal devices.
What’s New in Active Directory Federation Services. Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview includes new features that enable you to configure AD FS to authenticate users stored in Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directories. For more information, see Active Directory Federation Services Overview [Role/Tech Overview].
What’s New in Failover Clustering in Windows Server Technical Preview. This topic explains the new and changed functionality of Failover Clustering. A Hyper-V or Scale-out File Server failover cluster can now easily be upgraded without any downtime or need to build a new cluster with nodes that are running Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview.
What’s new in Hyper-V on Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview. This topic explains the new and changed functionality of the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview, Client Hyper-V running on Windows 10, and Microsoft Hyper-V Server Technical Preview.
Windows Defender Overview for Windows Server Technical Preview. Windows Server Antimalware is installed and enabled by default in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview, but the user interface for Windows Server Antimalware is not installed. However, Windows Server Antimalware will update antimalware definitions and protect the computer without the user interface. If you need the user interface for Windows Server Antimalware, you can install it after the operating system installation by using the Add Roles and Features Wizard.
What’s New in Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2016. For the Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview, the Remote Desktop Services team focused on improvements based on customer requests. We added support for OpenGL and OpenCL applications, and added MultiPoint Services as a new role in Windows Server.
What’s New in File and Storage Services in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview. This topic explains the new and changed functionality of Storage Services. An update in storage quality of service now enables you to create storage QoS policies on a Scale-Out File Server and assign them to one or more virtual disks on Hyper-V virtual machines. Storage Replica is a new feature that enables synchronous replication between servers for disaster recovery, as well as stretching of a failover cluster for high availability..
What’s New in Web Application Proxy in Windows Server Technical Preview. The latest version of Web Application Proxy focuses on new features that enable publishing and preauthentication for more applications and improved user experience. Check out the full list of new features that includes preauthentication for rich client apps such as Exchange ActiveSync and wildcard domains for easier publishing of SharePoint apps.
What’s new in the Windows console. The underlying console host (Conhost.exe) has been updated in several ways, adding new and different functionality to the Windows command prompt, the Windows PowerShell prompt, and any other character-mode applications. For details, see What’s New in the Windows Console in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview and Console Improvements in the Windows 10 Technical Preview , but you should take note of these important changes:
- The new console functionality is enabled by default. If an existing application doesn’t work properly with the new console, you can select Use legacy console on the Options tab and then restart your application. You can also control individual aspects of the new functionality with registry keys; see details at the linked topics.
- Console windows can be resized dynamically with the mouse. This could cause issues with some console applications.
- Quick Edit mode is enabled by default. If this conflicts with your application, you can disable it on the Options tab.
- There are new keyboard shortcuts for copy, paste, and history navigation. If these conflict with your application, you can disable them on the Options tab (look for Enable CTRL key shortcuts and Extended test selection keys).
- The default font type for new console windows is TrueType. You can still use raster fonts, but they won’t scale properly on some displays.
- Text wraps and reflows by default when you resize a window. If necessary, you can disable this on the Layouts tab.
- In some cases, after upgrade installation, fonts in the console window might be very small. To adjust this, use the Fonts tab.
What’s New in Windows PowerShell 5.0. Windows PowerShell 5.0 includes significant new features—including support for developing with classes, and new security features—that extend its use, improve its usability, and allow you to control and manage Windows-based environments more easily and comprehensively. Multiple new features in Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) are also described in this topic.
What’s New in Networking in Windows Server Technical Preview. The majority of what you’ll find for networking is new in TP3. We bring a scalable network controller for programming policies, an L4 load balancer for high availability and performance, enhanced gateways for hybrid connectivity, and an underlying network fabric that converges RDMA traffic together with tenant traffic, DNS policies that control how your DNS servers respond to incoming requests, and better integration of DNS and IPAM.

Source

https://technet.microsoft.com/library/dn765472.aspx

Download Microsoft Windows Server 2016 TP4

Professional Services:

Citrix technology professional – CTP, and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional MVP, Thomas Poppelgaard provides professional services. Write to me on my email thomas@poppelgaard.com or call on my cell +45 53540356

Microsoft Most valuable professional MVP award

Hi all

I am very proud to be awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) by Microsoft.

This is my first award from Microsoft and I am now part of a fine bunch of geeks. Expect many great things coming from me around Microsoft 🙂

Thank you all for your support and believing in the values I do, I will make sure to bring lots of knowledge into the MVP program.

/Thomas Poppelgaard

Lakeside Case Study – sizing NVIDIA GRID vGPU

Hi all

I am very proud to share the results of the work I did with my friend and coworker Magnar Johnsen from FirstPoint. We have been developing for a long time a smart new way of analyzing data (iOPS, CPU, Memory, GPU, Latency..) and different pieces of software was evaluated and Lakeside Software was the product we decided to go with and both our companies Poppelgaard.com and Firstpoint who are a Lakeside partner so we are legit to make assessments for clients using Lakeside Software. Below article helps you if you are about to size a NVIDIA GRID vGPU solution using either Citrix XenServer or VMware vSphere. If you have been at NVIDIA GTC, Citrix Synergy, BriForum, E2EVC or seen me talking at a Citrix User Group you might have seen the results of the work we did, thats changing on how we think applications are impacting that requires a GPU.

Magnar and I go way back.

Magnar and I have a long past with remote graphics and when we put our minds together we create something that is beautiful. Last year at Citrix Synergy audience could see how people could virtualize 3d remote graphics from Virtual Reality solution using Oculus Rift “Facebook” from the cloud. This was showed for the first time for audience and Citrix loved the idea and redesigned their exhibit about HDX 3D Pro next to FrameHawk, and sorry FrameHawk we stole all the attention with everybody wants to try the VR solution. The cool thing was VR was cool, but me and Magnar worked months “hard” to analyze the data we find at Aibel and we did very successful assessment and we shared the findings at Brian Madden BriForum in May 2014, just after Citrix Synergy, and the audience could for the first time learn the lessons we experienced and we could see applications behavior is not “just” what you might think or expect it to be. Analytics is the key to understand your app. Lets talk about why…

Lets dig into the case study we did at Aibel

Aibel is an industrial pioneer with a history dating back more than a century. With around 5,500 employees worldwide the company is a leading supplier of engineering services related to oil, gas and renewable energy.

Aibel is a huge user of desktop virtualisation technology and is currently delivering virtual desktops to around 4,500 users. The challenge was to work out what to do with the remaining 1500 CAD/CAM workstations where graphics intensive modelling of 3D designs tied them to powerful physical workstations.

With projects occurring at the eight Aibel locations in Norway as well as at the Aibel offices in Thailand and Singapore the amount of data flowing across the WAN was increasing and becoming unwieldy. Large engineering models needed to be accessed on location and shared with engineers and designers in all Aibel office locations.

Virtualisation was seen as the solution to these issues but the challenge was how to virtualise graphics intensive workloads without impacting user experience or drive uneconomic datacentre specifications.

Partner Expertise

Firstpoint AS, a trusted Citrix Gold partner and virtualisation specialists, were brought in to advise Aibel on how to best virtualise this tricky user group.

They teamed up with Thomas Poppelgaard, an independent expert in virtualisation and GPU technologies and together they started an initial survey of Aibel’s situation.

GPU Acceleration Approach

It became quickly clear that the only way to successfully virtualise the 3D graphics workstations in an economically viable fashion was to deploy GPU acceleration technology in the datacentre. NVIDIA’s GRID cards would allow dedicated and shared GPU accelerators to be placed in the datacentre to be used by virtual desktops offloading server CPUs and removing user experience impact for other virtual desktop users.

The Challenge

Having identified the technology approach the challenge now was to work out how to size the workload of these 1500 users and design a solution that would deliver user experience at least as good as their current physical desktop experience. In order to do that the team needed to work out:

What graphics applications are in use today
Who is using which applications and workstations
What GPU processor power is being consumed today by application, user and workstationPoppelgaard.com and FirstPoint brought in Lakeside Software’s SysTrack to do this job. Using SysTrack’s granular data collection model they could model a complete picture of application and GPU workload across all the users and workstations in use at Aibel today.

The Outcome

Using SysTrack the team has been able to build a complete inventory of the existing application and workstation estate and user behaviour. Using these analytics and SysTrack technologies a detailed specification and design for the future NVIDIA GRID based desktop virtualisation infrastructure has been created. Aibel is able to trust this design

as it is completely based on observed data captured from their existing estate and modelled using industry leading technologies from Lakeside and NVIDIA to create the optimal solution for Aibel’s situation. Key in any design is to not over provision the solution and thereby inflate the cost of the solution. On the other hand under provisioning will lead to a poor user experience and potential project failure. SysTrack ensures the right data is used to make the right decision for the future estate.

The assessment was primarily executed to understand Aibel engineers CAD applications such as Aveva PDMS, Bentley Microstation, etc. Shown below is a summary of average GPU usage for 1500 physical machines which revealed surprisingly that internet browsers are very GPU intensive compared to other applications.

Another benefit of leveraging SysTrack was the SysTrack MarketPlace report that had been co-authored by Lakeside and NVIDIA which allowed the team to convert all the data collected into accurate sizing of the number of NVIDIA GRID cards by model number required to offload the GPU workload.

The output from SysTrack also showed how GPUs were being used across the existing estate and how hard they were being utilised. Using jointly authored Lakeside/NVIDIA reports this data was then used to calculate estimated vGPU profiles.

Source

Best of NVIDIA GTC 2015

NVIDIA GTC 2015

Hi All

After a succesfull NVIDIA GTC (gpu technology conference) in San Jose, March 2015. It was amazing all the brain gathered in one place, at NVIDIA GTC 2015, I had so many great conversations with friends, partners and there was one sentence I thought through “try to imagine what could you do for the world if we tried to build 1 thing with all this brain power in joined forces” . NVIDIA is doing amazing things and this year it was all about “Deep Learning” and “NVIDIA GRID”. Google was part of the keynote and it was very interesting seeing how far AI is evolving, Elon Musk the guy behind Tesla, Space-X was also on stage.

NVIDIA GRID was big this year and all the vendors, Lenovo, HP, Dell, Cisco, Supermicro, Citrix, Vmware and such was there. There was tonz of success stories and best practices. So amazing to learn all the best on GPU enabled application/desktop using either Citrix or VMware, this is the conference to learn from people that are early adapters, the best of the best. If you feel missed out come next year and you understand what I mean. This conference is very different compared to other conferences. This is here it all happens, all industries meet and make a fusion across GPU’s. If you missed this year GTC, I highly recommend you go to the next year GTC which takes place in April 4-8th, 2016 in Silicon Valley

I have captured some of the best moments

Great meeting Lakeside Software and seeing they had the “print” of the case study I did with Magnar Johnsen we did for Firstpoint client AIBEL.

I meet for the first time the CEO and founder of NVIDIA Jen-Hsun Huang, he is a very inspiring person.

Another great friend was Fred Devoir from Textron “the man in the middle” and another great friend and fellow CTP, Dane Young.

Fred Devoir had two sessions at GTC, I highly recommend you watch them both.

If you attended and could see all the sessions or you couldn’t join GTC, now all 500 sessions are available for the public. #AMAZING, thank you NVIDIA for this.

I have in this blogpost made it easy to find all the great sessions about NVIDIA GRID

Learn the best of the best about NVIDIA GRID implementations:

If you want to Watch the session I did at NVIDIA GTC click here

Click the sessions with the “blue” link and the recorded session will start.

Citrix sessions

Gunnar Berger, CTO from Citrix
S5872 – Worlds Collide: What Happens When VDI Meets GPU?

Derek Thorslund, Director of Product Management, HDX, Citrix Systems
Mayunk Jain, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, Citrix Systems
S5390 – Citrix HDX 3D Virtualization: Six Years of Remoting 3D Apps

Roland Wartenberg Director Global SAP Alliance, Citrix
David Cruickshank Sr. Director, Strategy and Operations, SAP Co-Innovation Lab, SAP Labs
S5377 – Running SAP 3D Visual Enterprise Using Citrix and NVIDIA – What about Performance?

Erik Bohnhorst, SR. GRID Solution Architect from NVIDIA
Ronald Grass, SR. Systems Engineer from Citrix

S5393 – Evolution of an NVIDIA GRID™ Deployment

Citrix customer success stories:

Success story – Ford Motor Company

Chip Charnley, Technical Expert from Ford Motor Company
S5206 – So You Want to Deploy High Resolution Graphics Desktop Virtualization

Success story – Roger Williams University

George Thornton, VP of Engineering from Logical Front
Jim Galib IT Director from Roger Williams University
Ryan Tiebout, System Operations Manager from Rogers Williams University

S5225 – University’s Desktop Virtualization Delivers Graphics-Intense Apps on Any Device

Success story – Duke University

G Allan Johnson Charles E Putman Professor of Radiology,Physics, and Engineering from Duke University

S5558 – Publishing Medical Image Studies with NVIDIA GRID™

Success story – Georgia Institute of Technology College of Engineering

Florian Becker Sr. Director, Strategic Alliances, Lakeside Software

Didier Contis Director Technology Services, Georgia Institute of Technology College of Engineering

S5128 – Case Study: Georgia Tech Uses Citrix XenApp with NVIDIA® GRID™ to Deliver Engineering Applications

Success story – Textron

Fred Devoir Sr. Architect, Textron Inc.
Randall Siggers Solutions Architect, Textron Inc.

S5485 – Exploring Design Considerations: CAD/CAM Experiences from the Experts Using Citrix and VMware

Success story – The Kanavel Group

Garrett Taylor CIO, The Kanavel Group

S5620 – Implementing NVIDIA GRID with XenDesktop: A Technical Deep Dive

VMware sessions

Mark Margevicius Director, EUC Strategy, VMWare

S5533 – Dedicating GPUs for VDI and SBC Workloads: How the ROI and Business Value More Than Justifies the Expense

Banit Agrawal Senior Performance Engineer, VMware
Luke Wignall GRID Performance Engineering Manager, NVIDIA
Lan Vu Performance Engineer, VMware

S5385 – Benchmarking 3D workloads at scale on NVIDIA GRID with Horizon View 6 using View Planner

Jeff Weiss NVIDIA GRID SA Manager, NVIDIA
Luke Wignall GRID Performance Engineering Manager, NVIDIA

S5405 – VMware Horizon 6 and NVIDIA vGPU: Installation and Configuration Best Practices

VMware customer success stories

Success story – Jacobs Engineering

Jeff Weiss NVIDIA GRID SA Manager, NVIDIA
Randall Siggers Solutions Architect, Textron Inc.
Ali Rizvi PLM Support Analyst, Bell Helicopter

S5345 – VMware Horizon 6 View with NVIDIA GRID: A Practical Discussion of a Real-World Deployment

Success story – USC Information Sciences Institute

John Paul Walters Project Leader, USC Information Sciences Institute

S5323 – Achieving Near-Native GPU Performance in the Cloud
Download PDF of presentation

Success story – HDR Inc

Clint Pearson IT Infrastructure Systems Lead, HDR, Inc.
Jeremy Korell IT Infrastructure Systems Lead, HDR, Inc.

S5414 – GPU-Enabled VDI and Rendering at Architecture and Engineering Firm HDR

Vendors (HP, Cisco, Lakeside Software)

System Integrators of NVIDIA GRID

System Integrators success stories of NVIDIA GRID

Success story – Poppelgaard.com

Thomas Poppelgaard, Technology Evangelist from Poppelgaard.com

S5445 – Building the Best User Experience with Citrix XenApp & NVIDIA® GRID™

Success story – PQR

Jits Langedijk, Senior Consultant from PQR

S5265 – Customer Success Story: Desktop Virtualization with NVIDIA GRID for a Large Construction Company

Success story – IMSCAD

Adam Jull CEO, IMSCAD

S5219 – Delivering Production Deployments Using Virtualization and NVIDIA GRID™

Success story – Wipro

Michael Harwood Citrix Architect, Wipro Limited

S5283 – Remote Visualization in Healthcare

Panel discussions

Aivars Apsite, Technology Strategist, Metro Health
Cedric Courteix, Partner Alliance Architect, VMware
Clint Pearson, IT Systems Lead, HDR Inc.
John Meza, Performance Engineering Team Lead, Esri

S5542 – Scaling Out Virtual GPU with NVIDIA GRID and VMware Horizon

NVIDIA sessions about Citrix & VMware

Jason Southern Senior Solution Architect, NVIDIA

S5213 – Effective Planning for Density and Performance in a Virtual Desktop Deployment with NVIDIA GRID™

Manvender Rawat GRID Applied Engineer, NVIDIA
Jason K Lee GRID Applied Engineer, NVIDIA

S5560 – Scalability Testing for Virtualized GPU Environments

End user computing EUC Podcast Episode #1

The End User Computing Podcast (www.eucpodcast.com) is a community driven podcast for IT Professionals, and the first EUC Podcast is officially “in the bag”. Thanks to all those who hung around while the roadies tapped the mic, looked at the mic, tapped the mic again – got the manual out, realised it was in Danish written in a Manga syle, then essentially turned it off and on again.. but we got there in the end.