July 19, 2015

Kenneth is Speaking at BriForum Denver

I sat down with one of my coworkers, Kenneth Fingerlos, to discuss his upcoming speaking engagement at the BriForum conference in Denver, Colorado on July 20th.  Our brief conversation covered the details of his session, "vSGA, vDGA, vGPU, and Software - When and Why", his background in the industry, and what gets him excited in the technology space right now.




"BriForum excites me because it is everybody" - Kenneth


Me: Kenneth, can you tell me a little bit about your industry experience?

Kenneth: So, after college I took a left turn in my career path and went into corporate IT for ten years.  Various positions: desktop management, server management, data center.  Various kinds of things.  After ten years of that I decided I didn't care for IT management and tried to correct the course change and landed in consulting.  I've been doing IT consulting for about the last ten years around storage, data management, virtualization of various types, and building up my skill sets trying to help customers solve problems.

Me: Great, great.  So have you been to BriForum before? 

Kenneth: I have not been to BriForum.  This will be my first year.

Me: What attracted you to BriForum? 

Kenneth: I'm excited.  The whole idea of a conference that has some size to it and is established that is not tied to a specific vendor is just exciting, right?  You go to a Cisco conference and it is all about what is the latest widget from Cisco.  Cisco can do no wrong.  You find the same thing if you go to, you know, Dell World.  Dell is perfect.  Whatever Dell has got going is awesome and whatever everyone else has is garbage.  BriForum excites me because it is everybody. It is a marketing company--a media company that puts on the conference as opposed to a product manufacturer. insert kennth photo here

Me: So what will you be discussing at BriForum? 

Kenneth: I'm discussing a topic that is near and dear to my heart which is the idea of virtualized graphics.  Taking things we do everyday in the physical world with physical PCs and trying to bring this into this virtualized environment.  Things like disaster recovery, security, flexibility.  You know, the physical world is pretty restricted.  Graphics have always been one of these things that is hard and is difficult.  Technology is evolving and has advanced dramatically over the last couple of years in terms of what we can do.  But there is also a lot of complexity and a lot of information and I find my customers have a lot of confusion about what they can and can't do.  What works, what doesn't work.  My session is all about trying to bring some clarity to that area.



Me: Ok, so I am going to open this up a little bit and say maybe don't limit this to just the enterprise world but what is the technology you are most excited about right now? 

Kenneth: The technology I am most excited about right now....I think the stuff that is most exciting is really this idea of graphics virtualization.  I mean, so many things go into a user experience, right?  And all of the traditional things that you think about: servers, storage, memory, CPUs--graphics is part of that.  Remoting protocols, right?  What's going on with actually getting that content delivered to a user.  Networking, right? 3G, 4G networks and starting to think about what's next, what's beyond 4G.  These are huge enablers to let people consume and develop content in ways that have never been envisioned before.  Letting you take that stuff to the cloud, to the remote data center, and access it from anywhere.  I've been sitting on top of a mountain in my 4x4 holding a virtual desktop, just because I'm a geek and into this stuff, but yes--I can access that app, whatever it is, from a mountain top in the middle of nowhere.  That's cool stuff. And it's all about enabling people to work and function in ways they've never been able to before.  That excites me.

Me: Very cool.  Well, looking forward to seeing your session at BriForum!  Until next time.

As I wrote about earlier, BriForum Comes to Denver, and I am excited to have such a great event in my backyard.  If you are going to be at BriForum or just have general questions about Denver, reach out to either @kfingerlos or myself (@sagelikebrian) and let's catch up.


Brian @sagelikebrian

July 14, 2015

Citrix Default Printer Won't Retain

The Windows default printer is a magical thing. This is the printer that is selected by default when you print in an application. Depending on your particular printing workflow this may be the only printer you ever use. Some applications have a quick print functionality that sends a print job to the default printer using default settings and no prompts (for example, portrait orientation and a single copy). To make a printer your default, simply right-click it and select default printer.




When you use Citrix, a Windows default printer is still a Windows default printer. The difference is that Citrix has administrative policies to help you decide what will be the default.

I recently ran into an issue with a new XenDesktop v7.6 environment where users could select a new default printer using the method above but the next day when they logged on to their desktop it was set back to Microsoft XPS Document Writer. A quick note on Microsoft XPS Document Writer, as you may have noticed it installed on your computer, it is really a print-to-file driver Microsoft created to allow you to save print output in the Microsoft XML Paper Specification.  If you have never used it, do not feel bad, it is more likely you have used the immensely popular PDF format made popular by Adobe before becoming an open standard in 2008.

By default, the user's current printer is used as the default printer for the session. For example, my laptop's default printer is HP Deskjet 3520 series (Network).  When I logon to my Citrix desktop it will redirect the laptop printers into the session including my default printer.  That is ideal for a laptop user.




For my next example, I am using a thin client that does not have a default printer because it does not have an OS. It can only connect to a Citrix desktop. When I logon from the thin client it will not see a default printer so it will make the first printer on the Citrix desktop the default. Often times this ends up being the Microsoft XPS Document Writer instead of the HP Deskjet 3520 series (Network). At first, the issue seemed related to a Windows user profile issue since everyone lost their setting from one logon to the next.  After verifying that other Windows user settings were being retained (i.e. wallpaper, Office settings, and the printer mappings themselves), I moved on to Citrix print policies.

There is a specific policy I found interesting:

Default printer




Looking closer at the policy it defaults to "Set default printer to the client's main printer".  Most of the time this will result in using the default printer on the user's endpoint (e.g. laptop or desktop).  If that endpoint is a thin client or even an iPad it will not have a default printer to redirect so you will end up with the first printer in the session.

I made a new policy and set it to "Do not adjust the user's default printer" and gave it a higher priority then the others and assigned it to my test user account.




I then ran a gpupdate on each test worker to verify it had the new policy.  To test, I logged on with the test user, changed my default printer to a network printer.  I then logged out and put that test server in maintenance mode ensuring my next logon would go to the other test server.  Success, my new default printer was retained.  To be extra sure there was not anything cached locally, I rebooted both non-persistent workers and logged in again.  Success.  The final steps were to make the policy apply to more users and have them test before rolling it out to everyone on both the test and production workers.

Printing is rarely thought of as complicated but it always is.  If you are running into a similar issue then this policy change could be your answer.

Brian Olsen @sagelikebrian


SageLike Post ID: SL0010

Applies to:
Citrix XenApp
Citrix XenDesktop
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
Maybe others

July 7, 2015

BriForum Comes to Denver

IT conferences are a great way to catch up on what is new, take classes, and network with peers in the industry. I have been lucky enough to attend great shows like Citrix Summit and Synergy as well as VMware VMworld over the years. The conference for me that always fell just out of reach was BriForum. This year it is all going to change. I am more than a little excited that one of the world's premier IT conferences has chosen Denver, Colorado for this year's US location. BriForum is an independent conference that provides vendor-neutral perspective on current and emerging technologies and services.


 
Check out this year's list of sessions: http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/gabeknuth/archive/2015/03/09/check-out-the-list-of-sessions-for-briforum-denver-2015-july-20-22.aspx

If you have a keen eye, you may have noticed a third of the way down the list a special session, "vSGA, vDGA, vGPU, and Software - When and Why", being presented by our very own expert speaker Kenneth Fingerlos (@kfingerlos).


Kenneth will be talking about the new graphics intensive workloads that are possible in VDI thanks to highend GPUs from NVIDIA. He will specifically be digging into the different methods you can use to virtualize the GPU and when and why you would want to choose each method. I promise you this will be a deep technical dive preparing you for your next graphics intensive virtual desktop project.  Come join us at BriForum 2015 if you would like to learn more about solutions from Citrix, VMware, Microsoft and much more.

Brian Olsen (@sagelikebrian)