Wanted to update all of you as to some of the presenters taking part in the upcoming LA Tech Exchange to be held March 1st.

Register for the LA Q1 2012 Tech Exchange Here

Cloud Gateway Express: Jeff Brown

Jeff Brown, a thirteen year veteran of Citrix, cut his teeth as a founding member of the Fort Lauderdale engineering team responsible for the release of Project Charlotte, which shipped as NFuse and evolved into Web Interface.  Following the transition of WI development to the UK offices, he contributed to NFuse Elite, MetaFrame Secure Access Manager, Advanced Access Control and Secure Gateway (not necessarily in that order) in a variety of engineering roles.  In 2005, no longer able to withstand the constant barrage of hurricanes in Florida, he migrated to Silicon Valley, assisting in the integration of the Net6 and NetScaler acquisitions as a QA Manager before moving on to a more customer-facing role in Americas Readiness.  Some say that he can debug the ICA Proxy Callback using telekinesis and that he once explained TCP Flow Control to a horse.  All we know is he’s a Technology Specialist for Receivers and Gateways.

Cloud.com: Sheng Liang

Sheng Liang was the lead developer on the original Java Virtual Machine (JVM) team at Sun Microsystems, Inc.. He is currently the chief technology officer of the Cloud Platforms groups at Citrix Systems after their acquisition of Cloud.com^[1], where he was co-founder and chief executive officer and founder of Cloud.com in July 2011.  Sheng also was co-founder and chief technology officer of Teros, a provider of perimeter and network security solutions for enterprises and service providers, acquired by Citrix Systems, Inc. in 2005. He also served as vice president of engineering at SEVEN Networks, and as director of software engineering at Openwave Systems.

NetScaler SDX/SQL Load Balancing:  Rajiv Mirani

Rajiv Mirani is a leading expert in the areas of application delivery  and security. As vice president of engineering at Citrix, he leads research and development on the NetScaler product line. Prior to joining Citrix, Mr. Mirani was a co-founder and vice president of engineering at Teros which was acquired by Citrix in 2005. Mr. Mirani holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and a BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Citrix Personal vDisk (aka RingCube):  David Wagner

David Wagner specializes in the user personalization aspects of Citrix’s XenApp and XenDesktop solutions. During his time at Citrix he has driven numerous projects and technologies such as XenApp, Password Manager, Conferencing Manager, XenApp for SMB market, Profile Management and XenDesktop.

Tap & Go Logon:  Dustin Segura

Dustin Segura is a Lead SE focusing on virtualization, mobility and cloud solution in the healthcare vertical.  Dustin’s focus is on designing innovative solutions with Citrix’s strategic ISVs (Epic, Cerner, McKesson, etc.), engaging with joint, high-profile healthcare customers, and developing relationships with healthcare-focused vendors (Nuance, Imprivata, Aventura, Cisco, etc.).  Prior to joining Citrix 3½ years ago, Dustin worked with Citrix technologies in enterprise datacenters at a university medical center and market research firm in Chicago.

Citrix Solutions Lab 5000+ XenDesktop Deployments:  Chris Richey

Chris Richey Product manager for the Citrix solutions lab. Chris has been active in IT since 1998 active in all facets of technology management from administrator to architect.  Chris joined Citrix in 2008 as a Sr. Sales Engineer covering accounts in the Chicago area. Chris recently transitioned to the Solutions lab team to drive requirements for large scale interoperability testing and data output through the Citrix Blueprint.

Citrix Solutions Lab 5000+ XenDesktop Deployments:  Drew Tipton

Drew Tipton, CISSP is the Solutions Architect for the Citrix Solutions Lab.  He is responsible for defining ‘real world’ architecture for large-scale environments that result in Citrix “Blueprints.”  He has been involved with IT and technology since 1993, and was most recently with Symantec, where he was responsible for high availability, disaster recovery, and virtualization solutions for Public Sector, including projects for the US Army, the FBI, the US Department of the Interior, and the California State University system.

On Thursday March 1st we will be hosting a full day Citrix Tech Exchange at the Sheraton Universal City, Los Angeles.  Following up on the feedback from our December 1st event of last year, we have doubled the technical breakout sessions to 24!  These sessions will focus on Citrix Virtualization and Networking Technology solutions.  Onsite registration for the event will begin at 7am.  For those of you wishing to avoid AM traffic and stay overnite at the Sheraton, please see info below for room rate access.

Thank you to our Platinum Sponsors, RES Software and eG Innovations, our afternoon keynote speaker for this event will be Independent Industry Analyst Brian Madden.  Our morning keynote will be offered by Motorola Enterprise Mobility CTO Mamoun Abu-Samaha.

As always our events are free.  Breakfast and Lunch will be served as well as Happy Hour & Networking with peers after the event.  Parking validations will be provided.  Be aware space is limited, so book your RSVP asap.

Click Here to Register Now!

Thank you to our Gold Synergy Sponsors, WhipTail, Appsense, and Wyse, we will be raffling off  three Citrix Synergy San Francisco 2012 passes

Additionally we will raffle 3 Citrix Online Training Vouchers, 2 iPad2′s, and Motorola Atrix.

All attendees of the event will receive a $500 discount toward the purchase of  Citrix Synergy San Franciso 2012 passes.  As well all attendees of the event will receive 15% discounts on the purchase of Citrix Training Vouchers, with no limit on the amount of training to be purchased.

Scheduled Breakout Sessions:

We are starting the day early (as we always do), registration will be open at 7am.

Morning Keynote:

Motorola Enterprise Mobility CTO Mamoun Abu-Samaha will kick things off at 8am.

Afternoon Keynote:

Independent Industry Analyst Brian Madden will keynote the event at 12pm.

Technical Breakouts Citrix Virtualization & Networking:

Jeff Brown: Cloud Gateway Express

Raghu Nandan: Cloud Gateway Enterprise

Eric Serno:  AppDNA

Shaun Smith: VDI-in-a-Box, formerly known as Kaviza

Chris Richey & Drew Tipton:  Citrix Solutions Lab 5,000+ XenDesktop Deployments

Dustin Segura:  Tap and Go Solutions for Healthcare

David Wagner:  Personal vDisk, formerly known as RingCube

Raul Planus:  Project Phaser, the Evolution of Citrix Printing Technology

Steve Shah:  Netscaler SDX and Netscaler SQL Server Load Balancing

Sheng Liang:  Cloud.com and the future of Citrix Cloud Computing technology

Rick Eilenberger & Alex Danilychev:  Desktop Transformation

Citrix Online:  Speakers TBD

Citrix ShareFile:  Speakers TBD

Vendor Technical Sessions:

RES Software, Wyse, WhipTail, Akamai, AppSense, eG Innovations, Lakeside Software, SoftLayer, Atlantis Computing

Additional Vendors in Attendance with Demos:

Liquidware Labs, NetApp, Quantum, Tricerat, Splunk, SEP, Motorola Mobility, DataCore, Lenovo, Rightscale

Additional Note:

Many of you traveled some distance to take part in the December 1st event.  In response to this feedback we have secured a room rate for the Sheraton Universal City.  For those of you staying overnight on Wednesday there will be a networking reception hosted during the evening.  Please contact Nathaniel Chadbourne for details regarding room rate access for the Sheraton.

We look forward to seeing you at the March 1st event!

We had the opportunity to host our best LA CUG yet, with 250+ attendees taking in 13 sessions throughout the day at the Hilton Universal City, Los Angeles on Dec. 1st.  Special thanks to our Platinum Sponsor RES Software.

In addition to technical breakouts throughout the day we were also supported by eleven additional sponsors.  This event is just not possible without the support of these sponsors: Liquidware Labs, NetApp, Wyse, WhipTail, Cisco, Akamai, Quantum, Tricerat, Appsense, eG Innovations, Splunk, SEP, Aruba Networks, and Motorola Mobility.

As prize drawing for attending CUG members RES Software offered three Citrix Synergy San Francisco 2012 passes for raffle.  These tickets are valued at $1500 each

Additional raffle items included:

• All registered attendees recieve a $500 discount on Citrix Synergy San Franciso 2012 ticket purchases.
• Citrix Training voucher for week-long classroom session, valued at $5000
• Citrix Training also offered two online training vouchers, valued at $3000@
• Citrix Training 15% discount on one time training purchase, with no limit imposed on purchase.
• Two iPads were also raffled, at the usual iPad price.
• Someone also won a backpack.  Priceless!

Below find links to the PPT content provided during the event.

Tweaking the $#!% our of XS – Nick Rintalan

XenAppEscalation_TroubleShooting – Rick Berry

Pizza-Box VDI Write Cache Storage Alternatives – Alex Danilychev

Citrix and Cisco UCS – Bhumik Patel

Wyse Keynote – Mike Rice

Architecting for Change – Rick Dehlinger

Liquidware Labs: Transform the Desktop Story

Whiptail LA CUG Dec. 2012

It is a busy time this last month of the year.  I wanted to post the PPT from the event as folks are requesting the content.  I will update this post as feedback comes my way.

To everyone who attended we thank you very much.  We had heavy wind storms in LA the evening before the event, and this did present challenges to attendees whether they be traffic or power outage at the data center.  We truly appreciate all of you weathering the storm.

The goal of these events is to offer technical content that is meaningful to the work our CUG members do each day for businesses here in the LA/SoCal area (yes, members did attend from as far away as San Diego!).  If you have feedback to contribute toward improving the quality of our event, of course pass this along, we are not the types to turn away a good idea!

Happy Holidays Everyone!  We will see you in Q1!

RTE

As we meet with customers here in the Los Angeles area we are sure to point out free Citrix Training opportunities available online at http://www.citrix.com/freetraining.  These courses are self paced online products that allow customers to become more familiar with technical details and framework conventions for Citrix products.  The opportunity to better inform customers is really the opportunity to better assure the success of our customers as they work to leverage Citrix XenDesktop technologies to meet use case requirements for business.

We are excited to announce that Citrix Education is offering during the upcoming Los Angeles Citrix Technology Exchange event on Dec. 1st (see below) a single $5000 classroom training voucher, and two online training vouchers as door prizes to be awarded to attendees of the event!  The $5000 classroom voucher will allow the winner to choose from a number of training courses available from Citrix CALC training centers across the U.S.  The online training voucher will allow the winner to choose a single self-paced online training course for completion.

Going forward throughout 2012, every Citrix Technology Exchange event taking place throughout the Southern California region will raffle off a single online training voucher to winning attendees!

As well, all Citrix Technology Exchange attendees will receive 15% off of any single purchase of Citrix Training.  This 15% discount is available for 90 days after the event (fortunately we hold Technology Exchange events every quarter!).  The one time purchase has no limit on the amount of training purchased.  An organization can purchase onsite training for up to 10 employees, classroom training sessions, or online training sessions for as much of the service they feel necessary to consume!

So, in summary Citrix Training has offered up three door prizes to the Los Angeles Citrix Technology Event on Dec 1st (details and registration link can be found here), a single $5000 voucher for classroom training, and two self-paced online training vouchers.  Throughout 2012 all Citrix Technology Exchange attendees in Southern California will receive 15% off of one time purchases of Citrix Training service, with no limit on the amount of purchase.

Kenny Queen, Citrix Education Field Manager – Western and Central US will be on hand at the event answer any of your questions.

Not bad huh!  See you at the CTE!

When I was a kid listening to the radio I would hear the announcer come on the air and shout Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! NHRA Drag Racing with Big Daddy Don Garlitz!  I have that same feeling in my mind as I post this information about our next round of user groups in Los Angeles.  We will be hosting our largest event to date, and we will be changing the name a bit, which we are prone to do at Citrix!

On Thursday December 1st, 2011 we will be hosting a full day Citrix Technology Exchange event at the Hilton Universal City, Los Angeles.  There will be 12 technical sessions focused on Citrix Virtualization and Networking technologies.

Thanks to our Platinum Sponsor for the event, RES Software, three attendees of the LA Citrix Technology Exchange will receive full access passes to Synergy San Francisco 2012!  This is $1500 ticket to one of the great technology events taking place in the world today.  We are absolutely stoked to offer this opportunity to our attendees!  Thank you RES Software!  All attendees of the event will receive a $500 discount toward purchase of Synergy San Francisco 2012 passes.  We will also be raffling off two iPad 2 devices.  We expect there will be more prizes offered by the additional event sponsors.

Rick Dehlinger will be presenting and hosting a Geek Speak session to close out our event.  Bring your questions and opinions for feedback!  Take the LA Technology Exchange Q4 Survey, tell us what you want more information on for this event!

We will be starting the day early, registration opens 7:30am!  Stay tuned for updates as to RSVP for the event.  We look forward to seeing you there.

Scheduled Break Out Sessions (so far) are referenced below.

Technical Breakouts Citrix Virtualization:

RES Software: Workspace Manager

RES Software:  Automation Manager

Rick Dehlinger:  Architecting for Change

Alex Danilychev:  VDI in a Pizza Box

Rick Berry:  Troubleshooting XA6 – XA6.5 and Flash Redirection

Jonathan Eugenio:  Citrix Edgesight Update

Technical Breakouts Citrix Networking:

Secure Remote Access for XenDesktop and XenApp with Global Server Load Balancing

MS SQL, MySQL Load Balancing with Netscaler

Netscaler Cloud Bridge, Connecting Your Datacenter to Cloud Delivery Environments

Netscaler SDX, Single Platform for All Datacenter Service Requirements

Additional Vendor Technical Sessions:

Liquidware Labs:  Distributed Compute Monitoring for VDI Implementation

Whiptail:  Solid State Drive Revolution for VDI!

Morning Keynote:

Wyse Technology:  Morning Keynote Zero Client Presentation

Afternoon Keynote:

Trevor Mansell:  Cisco Citrix Partnership Lunch Keynote

Closing Geek Speak Session:

Geek Speak:  Hosted by Rick Dehlinger

Registration:

Please be aware that space will be limited.  You can register for the event here.

See you there!

I will list this post within the Tools and Links categories for the site.  There have been a number of CTX articles released recently which may well offer value to your administrative efforts.  Please see the links below, and tell me what you think.  I have been reading up on latest product releases and will have more links and reading material to follow up as we move into the new year!

Citrix Consulting:  Desktop Virtualization Best Practices Webinar Series

The Best XD 5.5 Technical Deck of ALL TIME!

Technical Guide for Updating to XenApp 6.5

How to Configure Application Pre-Launch in XenApp 6.5

Provisioning Services Live Site Database Migration

Installation of Access Management Console based on XenApp versions (.Net can getcha!)

CAG 5 Advanced Controller and iPad/iPhone Access

Citrix Quick Launch (longing for the days of PN, this will take you back!)

Thanks to all of you who took time to attend the latest round of Citrix User Groups here in the Los Angeles area.

We covered a range of topics during these sessions: VDI Compute Resource Assessment by Liquidware Labs, Task Automation by RES Software, Updates on XD 5.5 and XA 6.5.  You can download the PowerPoint presentations from Citrix and Liquidware Labs below.  I will have the RES PPT posted as soon as I receive another copy….

LiquidWare Labs LA CUG PPT

RES Software Automation Manager

Citrix What’s New in XA 6.5 XD 5.5

The LWL presentation focused on the technical considerations we should keep in mind as we look to migrate application services into the data center.  LWL offers the opportunity to project CPU, RAM, NIC, and Disk requirements for central hosting from the data center.  What we are finding in the field is that users in the office setting rarely tax the physical compute resource available from their physical desktops.  As we aggregate these physical devices into the data center however, it is important to have insight into the compute requirements needed to get this work done.  The purpose of this work is to “right size” the investment required based on analysis of current compute requirements.  Customers will find that guessing as to these requirements can be a very expensive proposition for the business.  Look before you leap with LWL!

The RES Software presentation focused on their Automation Manager product.  RES Automation Manager leverages a database repository to automate common tasks for the network administrator.  An example of this would be the “thin provisioning” of a gold image based not on the retention of a images in storage, but instead the exact build process maintained within the DB which can be delivered to any Windows OS workload to match production readiness.

The Citrix presentation focused on new features to be found in XA 6.5 and XD 5.5.  Desktop Director 2.0 offers delegated administration via common browser, while combining both XA and XD session visibility into a single admin console.  Fast App Launch was demonstrated, this is the ability to leverage the initial user logon to an endpoint with Receiver 3.0 installed, to simultaneously launch an application from the XA 6.5 farm environment.  Fast App Launch takes advantage of session sharing from your XA farm to allow for the immediate launch of applications, no more Citrix splash screen, just an immediate application launch for the user, pretty slick!  We also discussed the new multi-stream ICA protocol, details can be found in the slide deck.  If you have additional questions, and would like to follow up with local Citrix Sales Team for LA, contact Nathaniel Chadbourne.

We would also like to thank additional sponsors for the event: NetApp, Wyse, Tricerat,  and WhipTail

We are planning the next round of LA CUGs to take place the 1st week of December 2011.  Stay tuned for details!