Today was day one of Citrix Synergy 2013 in Anaheim, CA. There was lots of energy to be found here today and it kicked off with the Citrix Keynote by CEO of Citrix systems, Mark Templeton. Mark Templeton is an excellent speaker and with help from his Chief Demo officer Brad Peterson really kept the show going.
Some of the highlights for me from the keynote are below, but by no means complete, for a more complete synopsis of the Citrix keynote, please reference the blog of Dave Lawrence aka @TheVMguy.
- Desktop Player for Mac – This announcement really got the crowd engaged with vocal approval, the ability to run offline XenDesktop VMs on the Apple Mac platform (As a Mac user I am definitely looking forward to testing this, expect a detailed blog post)
- Cisco Partnership – Cisco and Citrix’s partnership really seem to be progressing strongly and expanding through the use of Netscaler as the next gen ADC platform. Integration points with Cisco ISE, Nexus and Cisco ONE were highlighted also that XenApp was the Number One workload on Cisco UCS. It was alluded that more was coming and in development, looking forward to this continuing relationship.
- Microsoft Partnership – Citrix and Microsoft go back a long way and have a strong mutual relationship together and that will continue as the Citrix platform moves forward onto Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 desktop delivering Windows Desktops as a service (DaaS) and Windows Applications to end users.
- XenDesktop 7 – This deserves (and will get) its own blog post with full details. XenDesktop 7 was announced and will ship in June of this year.
- nVidia and intensive graphical application support – This is next generation support for advanced graphical applications and the results are mind blowing. Smooth high quality rendering and graphics are now truly possible thanks to the innovations between Citrix and nVidia
- XenMobile – Mobility is a big theme of Citrix Synergy this year.
One thing I always enjoy about these conferences is the ability to network with great people, be it customers, partners, other vendors. Networking is one of the best reasons to attend any conference and to listen and have great conversations around technology and innovation.
I did not blog for Citrix Summit as a lot of the things discussed were still under NDA and I was busy all day and all night and did not get much of a chance to take a breath and write any blog posts so I am going to highlight a few sessions now.
This was probably my favorite session of Citrix Synergy thus far and a must attend for anyone remotely interested in the next edition of XenDesktop. You will not be disappointed.
- SUM 223 Excalibur and the FlexCast management architecture for XenDesktop and XenApp
- Presented by Simon Plant, Chris Lau and Jarian Gibson
- This session will give you real world information and best practices around Project Excalibur (XenDesktop 7) and FMA (FlexCast management architecture) and the move from IMA
- This session will be repeated on Friday May 24th at 1 PM PST – ATTEND THIS SESSION
One of the must attend labs
- SUM614 – Implementing Excalibur on Microsoft Hyper-V
- Instructor driven lab, one of the most well put together labs I have ever done
Another session that was worth attending is Hands off my Gold Image by Aaron Parker aka Stealthpuppy on twitter.
- SYN504 – Hands off my gold image! Automate XenDesktop and XenApp images using free tool
It has been a great couple of days thus far and still two more days left. I will have more updates and details over the new releases coming so keep an eye out and if you have any comments or questions, please comment below.
