XenApp | Thin Client Computing, Server Based Computer Systems

In our consulting group we spend a lot of time discussing, dissecting and analyzing each project we do. This leads to long debates around what ultimately are the best practices in everything from app virtualization, to VDI vs SBC, to storage, networking, hypervisor and ‘physical versus virtual’. While this is personally and professionally very satisfying it pretty much means that we don’t do any “cookie cutter” solutions. Each new project gets the benefit of lessons learned and is uniquely tailored and shaped to be ideal for that particular client environment.

Over time, however, this process has been rapidly increasing in turn over time. It used to be measured in a few years and there was a relatively small set of technologies to master and keep up on. Then it accelerated to about a year or so, but with an order of magnitude more details to learn and integrate. Now, it seems to be happening in months and weeks and there is more and more complexity at each turn. There are even times when it seems that important elements of solutions are evolving and changing within a just matter of days! Oh, and once you figure it out, new version of the products get released and all new Best Practices are needed!

When you do this full time for a living, try really hard and have an “A” Team like we do at Thin Client Computing, we can just about keep up. However, most of our clients are not in the I.T. Business, their missions are in other important areas such as HealthCare, Education, Finance and Manufacturing. They do I.T. because it is necessary to run, support, enhance and grow their Core Mission.

In a recent group retreat, Brenda Tinius shared a concern and phrase that pretty much stopped us all in our tracks. She described with great concern was she sees as “The Impending IT Crisis”. The crisis is an inflection point in which the technology advances beyond what people can readily absorb and assimilate into their daily processes. IT Professionals are kept very busy with the day to day tasks of maintenance, repair, updates, and, responding to the daily needs of the Business and it’s Users- how can they possibly stay ahead of trends and innovate in a climate of change that is happening faster than human speeds!

One example is the fact that the technology industry has been pushing organizations to virtualize servers and desktops for years now. It is becoming generally accepted, and the stated policy of many organizations today, to virtualize every workload in their organization. Enter rapid change- that was a great idea when most of the workloads were running on legacy 32bit Operating Systems- servers had somehow sprawled out all over the data center in a mess of inefficient configurations and underutilized hardware. Hardware Virtualization, i.e. the hypervisor, emerged as a useful and effective tool. Over time it has become the central focus of so many IT initiatives, but, in the time it took to become mainstream, a lot has already changed!

Now there are well proven ways to virtualize at all layers of the stack- hardware, disk, operating system, application, user and presentation layers. Hardware virtualization is only one solution in a range of options and often strikes me at the technology equivalent of Monty Python’s classic skit “Mosquito Hunting with a Cannon”

Some would say that this is whole point of Cloud Computing, you no longer have to buy, build, and maintain Information Technology yourself, you simply consume the resources you need and let the provider worry about all the details. Thats a great thing and I agree that in time this is exactly how the world will work, but, this is clearly in the future. For now, I just don’t see comprehensive offerings in which organizations can completely outsource all their needs to a Cloud Provider and have them truly met.

Just like in the days of when the mainframes and minis ruled IT, I see users wanting, needing and expecting more than IT can often deliver. Today is it common for users to have better capabilites on their personal SmartPhone/Tablet and their home computer than they have at the office! Everyday now we are hearing about departments within our client companies skirting around the internal IT department to deploy technologies they need and want themselves. Meanwhile, IT is working harder than ever to provide what they can, and, with smaller and smaller budgets. There is a real Crisis brewing here, but what can we do about it?

In short, it is time for a new Era of Innovation and I see this as fueled by a taking a fresh look at the technology landscape and being willing to let go of old assumptions and ideas. We have to start over again in 2013, wipe the slate clean and take a fresh approach. While most people regard Cloud as hype and self serving marketing on the part of many industry players, it has taught the key to avoiding the Crisis:

Build Once and Leverage Infinitely

The hardware today is astoundingly powerful and software capabilities are at an all time high. Tools are readily available to create advanced systems, whether internally or externally hosted, that can deliver virtually any application to any user, device or location. There is no longer any need to hard-code the hardware to the OS, the OS the Apps, the Apps to the User or the User to a device.

The key is to rethink how to accomplish this in your own organization. Take a step back, learn what is possible, leverage what is available and flip this whole Crisis on it’s head. I.T. can become a valuable service to the organization once again by adopting these new ideas, rising to the challenge of the Cloud by rethinking and redesigning internal systems to provide seamless and ubiquitous services to all who need them. It is time to stop doing things the old way just because they are familiar and take a bold step forward into technologies and designs that let you get ahead of the curve by creating versatile platforms and not just point solutions.

[Please note, thinclient.net is under renovation- some content and links are in still in progress]

I.T. Professionals and Consultants who have worked for any period of time on hosting (or virtualizing) applications and desktops are acutely aware of the unstructured data that becomes part of a user’s environment. On a standalone PC it goes pretty much unnoticed as it “blends into the woodwork” of the overall system, spreading itself across the registry, file system and user profile. However, when you virtualize applications and desktops you become faced with trying to capture and re-apply this data as users move across diverse systems. Tim Mangan identified this issue in his 2008 Briforum Session “The Data Problem” which was an early recognition of the problem and a great explanation of the sources and impacts (PS-that’s the back of my bald head in the audience). He also has a more recent article on the subject “How to Describe Layering: the blob, cake, or 3D Tetris”.

Over many years of working with Roy Tokeshi, a leading Citrix SE, he would refer to this set of data in his technical/business presentations as “Crap”. In an effort to validate this concept, and to be able to actually use the word “Crap” in presentations, I came up with the following acronyon:

Computer Residue of Applications and Personalization (C.R.A.P)

I was pretty proud of this one and then Ron Oglesby pointed out on Twitter that “I love your acronym. But Users are like Hoarders. Some guy’s CRAP is their meaningful “stuff’ “

As a result I am releasing an alternate version:

Carefully Retained Applications and Personalization (C.R.A.P)

So now we can use “Crap” in any context , positive or negative, to refer to this same set of undefined data that attaches itself to users and applications.

This a strange problem because on the one hand our inclination is to simply retain all this data and carry it across whatever environment the user wants to run in. Whenever possible we like to have the settings that a user expects automagically appear (because then people are happy and we are heroes). Yet, large portions of this data may be irrelevant (at best) or even incompatible (at worst). This problems shows itself most acutely in mixed environments where applications are delivered across multiple operating systems, and, when using other tools such as App-V. For example, a user may have a local desktop OS (i.e. XP), a hosted VDI desktop OS (Win7) and apps or desktops hosted in Windows 2003 and 2008 R2. In these cases there will be corruptions of settings, locked sessions, broken profiles, etc. when indiscriminately mixing this data across platforms.

What is the solution? Well there is no simple answer that can be applied in all cases, but it comes down to knowing your applications and including/excluding the correct portions of the data for the target platform. The details will follow in a future entry, but for now we have identified and understand the challenge this presents….