As you probably already know App-V was originally scheduled to end in January this year (2023). Recently Microsoft announced they pushed the EOL date to April 14th, 2026 so you have still have some air left. But you have to think about a new strategy to deliver the apps. A great alternative is VMware AppVolumes! Little is known you can also use this when you use Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. Even better you can use this with the new amazing AppVolumes on Demand feature!

Recently I got involved in multiple projects implementing and resolving issues relating FSlogix. At the same time I noticed that as of Login Enterprise 5.4 session metrics can be displayed in load and continuous tests. This doesn’t sound big but is actually filling a big gap for IT consultants using this tool! With session metrics you can capture performance counters from within the session during the test and take that with you in the test results without an additional agen

Ran into a little bug yesterday while implementing VMware Horizon and Imprivata. Appliances rolled out, configured the site, policy's etc. etc. On the regular Windows endpoints this worked as expected. Login went fine, tabbed a badge, entering additional credentials if required by policy and the session would beautifully start, locking, roaming, smooth as silk.. Pushed the Imprivata agent to the Thin Clients (Dell Wyse based on Windows 10 IoT, although the brand does not matt

Recently I had a little challenge with an on Prem VMware Horizon VDI environment and the implementation with FSLogix Office and Profile Containers. Due to restrictions there was only one file server available based on Microsoft. In case of an outage the server is replicated to another datacenter but it would take a short time to be available. This and the fact of course the server needs Windows Patches with their respective reboots gave me a bit of a puzzle. Why? Well if an F

On a recent project I had to deploy multiple VMware UAG’s for external access. The UAGS are hosted at a cloud provider and the only access I had was the vCloud director. So no PowerShell deployment or the default OVA deployment trough vCenter. Unfortunately the deployment did not work, the backend team was not available at the time (bigger priorities and Ok fair enough Friday late in the afternoon) so no escape to a regular deployment and of course I gave myself a deadline fo

Last year I wrote a little blog about power consumptions and created a little dashboard to see if we can save some power. Link: Monitor Performance while reducing power usage/ C02 Emission ? Yes we can! (debruinonline.net) In the past many best practices preached: disable power management features! Policy to High Performance. No delay is acceptable! Electricity is cheap...but the world has changed. I noticed that when I talk about saving power 90% of the time the discussion i

A while ago me and my friend and colleague JP Ruitenbeek were “flown in” to investigate performance issues at a customer. We found multiple issues but in this one we focus on a specific one: “The After-reboot jobs.” The Start: Lately a lot of complaints received the IT department of this customer about performance, latencies and login issues. The users were simply losing trust in the environment. Sum up some of the complaints: · Login times very high · Slown

VMware Horizon Instant Clones and Active Directory Computer GPO’s.. There is just a little caveat with Instant Clones where the GPO's don't always seem to apply.. I’ve seen a couple of times people struggling with this especially when they are used work with Citrix PVS, MCS, VMware Linked Clones, persistent VDI's or anything that has a regular boot process.. So in this blog I will explain why this happens with Instant Clones and a way to cope with this. We seem to always need

As mentioned in my previous blog I was discussing a valid migration scenario between an existing Citrix Deployment to VMware Horizon with my buddy Henry Heres. One of the steps is to migrate the external portal from Citrix (Unified) Gateway to VMware WS One Access. This will be a divided in to two blogs describing the 2 steps. This blog is Step 2! In this step we will switch the portal to VMware WS One Access. Same as the previous one, I will show the flow, Henry will show t

A while ago I was discussing a valid migration scenario between an existing Citrix Deployment to VMware Horizon with my buddy Henry Heres. One of the steps is to migrate the external portal from Citrix (Unified) Gateway to VMware WS One Access. As seen before, discussing these kind of scenarios with Henry is like planting a seed and pouring a gallon of Pokon on top of it. So, we decided to do a Cross reference Blog. I will show the flow, the blog(s) made by Henry will show h

Regularly I get questions about the flow when a user is getting external access and the relationship between the Unified Access Gateways, load balancers and the Connection servers. Especially because we sometimes need to deviate from the VMware Reference Architecture. This deviation could generate an error on the connection server. Most engineers cannot stand an error... they just want to eliminate it! (And of course, I praise them for it!) NuBut like many things in life, som

On a recent project a customer is moving it’s on-premises Exchange to Exchange Online. We decided VMware Access is the IDP for Microsoft 365. Well federated the Microsoft tenant with VMware Access and to get single sign on from the Horizon Instant Clones we are going to use the VMware Kerberos connector. So created and installed the necessary components configured the Conditional Access policies... and we have single sign on! Awesome! While explaining the flow to some people

First of all happy new year everyone! On 31 december 2022 New Years Eve I got a message from a colleague of mine while eating "oliebollen" with the family at friends of ours. One customer is having issues with external login's to their VMware Horizon environment. They get stuck on the Imprivata login screen. Alltough the user can login by re-entering their credentials it is annoying. The fact Imprivata selected the default domain to be the local machine and the user has to sw

A while ago I got asked by a customer how they can auto turn off the monitor when they move away from the workstation. These workstations are located on an Intensive Care unit so when they need to access these machines at night, they want the monitors "on time" limited to a minimum to not wake up the patient too much. First thought: Manually turning off these monitors with the power button? (Smile and wave. No, we can do better!) Second thought: Power settings and the monitor

Last week I had the privilege to attend to VMware Explore in Barcelona! A lot of awesome sessions, meeting friends, acquaintances and getting a beer (or two…or...) During the trip one of the customers who accompanied us pointed out to me if we ever looked at power consumption and the possibility to reduce it. Personally it did cross my mind but to be honest most of the time we put everything in high performance to get the best performance possible. The world has changed, pric

Buffer Overflow: [a] condition at an interface under which more input can be placed into a buffer or data holding area than the capacity allocated, With al little creativity and bending we also see this in a VDI environment, I name this a User Overflow: [a] condition at an environment under which more users try to be placed into a pool than the capacity allocated, Of course with VMware Horizon you can make the pools dynamic in size but you will be limited by the available har

Lately a lot has been written about the EOL of VMware Verify. But… what if you are already used to Imprivata and maybe have the Confirm ID for remote access licenses around? Can we use this instead? Yes you can! How? By connecting to Imprivata with RADIUS. Is this new? Nope… they even call this the legacy experience. But sometimes legacy is just what you might need so he ho, let’s go! Of course: As an alternative to this you can use the VMware Authenticator or Intelligent HU

When using VMware Horizon, VMware Workspace One Access, TrueSSO and Imprivata you need to enable Kerberos Authentication within Imprivata. For this to work you also need to create a keytab file. In this blog I will explain how to create one and as a bonus.. can we use a custom account for this instead of the default created by the tool? Imprivata has a built in utility to facilitate this: ISXKerbUtil.exe. Normally you can find this utility in the OneSign Agent install directo

Let’s do one about Citrix Provisioning, Windows Performance Counters, Telegraf and InfluxDB Cloud! In previous blogs I have shown before the power of visualizing data. Of course there are awesome tools out there. Sometimes there is an issue in a customer environment and you just want to start measuring a.s.a.p. At my current employer we do a lot of Citrix Provisioning. Normally this performs really well but when there are issues its kind of hard to get the full picture espec

Let’s play around with the Citrix Hypervisor and Citrix Provisioning Services. It’s been a while since I used Citrix Hypervisor in a production or even in my lab environment so let’s see if we can still run this nested on a VMware ESXi 7 host and stream a virtual desktop on it😊 I tried log all my steps and create screenshots.. Remark that I all ready had a running Citrix environment in place (Delivery Controller, License server, Provisioning Server(s), Storefront, ADC etc.)