I could list all the reasons I think the iPad + Citrix are a great fit for healthcare, but it may be more meaningful coming directly from Physicians and IT Pros in the heathcare industry. This is a sample of what has been shared on the blogs when we asked what would Citrix Receiver for iPad be used for.
Dr. Paul Altmann says:
” Chris, the combination of Citrix and the iPad will, I am sure, be a huge success in the healthcare setting where the form factor of the iPad makes it the best all round device to access medical records in real time as clinicians care for their patients.Specifically, I am looking forward to showcase this for Cerner Millennium users who routinely access the application over Citrix.
There will be many other settings where the iPad, which is the first really decently sized, light, with good battery life “thin client”, will become very popular.
Dr Paul Altmann
Clinical Director – Health Informatics – NHS South Central & Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust
Consultant Nephrologist – Oxford Kidney Unit The Churchill – Oxford OX3 7 “

.. says:
“I would love to be able to use citrix on an iPad.  I currently use Citrix to log into our hospitals EMR, Epic, from home.  Being able to do so both at home and even in the hospital would be awesome. “

..says:
“So Are you saying that I would be able to use my GE Healthcare Centricity EMR Application from the Ipad? We connect to it using XenApp. This is really the only thing holding me back from getting an iPad is that whether I would be able to run my EMR for work.

..says:
“Please tell us you are working on a citrix client for the IPad.  It will be so “revolutionary” if you have one ready by the time the IPad is available. Physicians will love to use an IPad to handle their Electronic Medical Records at bedside, exam rooms.”

“Chris Smith says:
Yes, I think this would be fantastic. Many EHR (electronic health record) applications have developed stylus-driven interfaces for slate PCs (tablets with no keyboard option), so touch interface is a natural easy win for those already developed applications. Many of the EHR applications are also already deployed via Citrix, so this is a serious WIN WIN for Citrix to pursue… and as you mentioned, Citrix has already done quite a bit of work on the Citrix Receiver for the iPhone. This really does have so much more capability, now that you have the larger screen.
Also, multi-touch is supported in Windows 7, so it will be interesting to see how the XenReciever can interact with the Win7 host operating system environment, or even hosted application environment, but having the Receiver bridge that gap in the user experience via the iPad would be amazing!”

..says:
“I work for a health care provider and this could be huge. It turns the iPad from an interesting toy, to potentially powerful tool for business”

Todd Bruni says:
“Being in a large Healthcare environment I also see this device as having huge potential. First for ARRA/Hitech initiatives such as CPOE, BMV, Physician Documentation, etc physicians, clinicians, and/or nursing are going to want, need, demand mobile devices. As multiple people have pointed out one of those devices are tablets. The cost of those devices intended for Healthcare are extremely expensive (Motion Computing, etc).  Second, as people have pointed out protecting patient data is a requirement.  That is one of the beauties of desktop virtualization whether its hosted shared desktops or hosted dedicated desktops that data stays in the data center.  Finally organizations need to hit meaningful use in the not so distant future. Most of the large EMR vendors are not web-based today and organizations have to start taking steps now to meet the meaningful use timelines. That means these applications are client based today which is another reason to do desktop virtualization now until the ISVs solutions are ported to the web.
So how does this wrap back around to this device? Any device that is going to help healthcare organizations start taking steps now to adopt desktop virtualization, mobility, extend battery life, and move data into the datacenter without having to spend $2k on a tablet, $3k on cart solution is a great candidate. Being able to purchase 4 or 5 of these devices at the cost of one tablet makes it very intriguing. Add a docking station with keyboard and mouse for $40-50 in key locations and now you don’t have to worry about real estate on the floors (another huge healthcare issue) and the device becomes easy to stop and make updates to your EMR.
Finally, I don’t remember who said it but I completely agree with whoever said that we won’t know any of this until we get these devices into the clinicians hands we won’t know.”

..says:
“Already have XenDesktop environment pushing around 20 desktops using Nextgen out to several medical clinics in my area. Was able to get budget money for purchasing 5 iPads as a demo in less than 2 minutes. Will be an interesting demo as I have connections to several hospitals that are all looking into the EPIC Haiku Application also being developed with Keiser Medical Group in mind. A current rolling wireless cart with a WYSE Thin Client typically costs a Hospital in Oregon $20,000 after we did our full ROI 2 years ago. Interesting what happened in 2 years! “

Checkout the Heathcare IT Community site http://community.citrix.com/p/healthcare

Learn how to make the iPad work for your healthcare organization at Citrix Synergy. 

At Citrix Synergy back in May, Burton Group, a division of Gartner, introduced their “Server Hosted Virtual Desktop Evaluation Criteria” (this is a blog – you’ll need a client login to access the document). If you aren’t already familiar with it, it consists of over 100 detailed solution criteria broken into required, preferred and optional categories. In a session at Synergy, Burton compared XenDesktop 4 and View 4 against the criteria, and while Citrix came out ahead across all the board, there were still a couple items missing on the “required” list in order for Gartner to recommend XenDesktop for large enterprise deployment.

Before I go any further, I want to make something clear. Although Burton asked for our feedback, and were exceptional in providing a forum for discussion and debate about any and all of the criteria, at the end of the day, these were customer-driven. Believe me, we debated those items that we missed , but we recognized that customers needed them, and we needed to work on them. In fact, our engineering team was already hard at work in those areas.

So that brings us to some updates that Citrix released recently, and the blog that Chris Wolf of Burton posted yesterday, declaring “XenDesktop 4 SP1 is the First Enterprise-Ready SHVD Platform.” A big part of achieving this distinction was the release of XenDesktop 4 Service Pack 1

What’s in XenDesktop 4 Service Pack 1?
To be clear, we didn’t create SP1 just to meet the Burton criteria, and in fact, the primary component of SP1 has nothing to do with that at all. So here’s the breakdown:

• VDA update (strongly recommended for all customers to implement as soon as possible): this contains improvements to the VDA (Virtual Desktop Agent) and is focused on improving its reconnection stability. It also has the already-released hotfixes 1, 2 and 3, plus other improvements. The new VDA underwent some pretty extreme testing to ensure the reliability benefits. 64-bit and 32-bit downloads are available.
• Optional delegated administration and configuration logging features (intended for large enterprise IT organizations): If you are familiar with how these features work in XenApp – these are practically identical. We already had these in the works by customer request when Burton published the criteria and noted that XenDesktop was missing these features. We can’t thank Chris Wolf enough for taking the time to get hands on with these features – his feedback led to some last minute interface enhancements. Get it here.

Meeting the Burton criteria isn’t just a milestone for Citrix – it’s a big win for customers developing their desktop virtualization strategies. Now you have an industry-validated set of criteria, and a solution that fulfills the primary requirements for the enterprise.

Application Streaming – How to run local installed apps isolated

In fact it’s easy to run a local installed application isolated. The much more important question is why I should run applications isolated and last but not leased what is the impact of running a local application isolated.
Let’s start with an application Citrix is using that way: Internet Explorer. When Application Streaming is used to run an Internet Explorer Add-on, it does exactly what I want to do: Running a local installed Internet Explorer isolated to make the add-on available for the user.
So the question is now, are there other applications where you want to run an add-on isolated/streamed. Yes there are! The first time I run into that question, was the day I isolated 7-Zip. It is an easy task to profile 7-Zip, but because Explorer is not “aware” of the streamed “zip utility” the explorer context menu does not contain the 7-Zip Add-on.

But if you run Explorer isolated the context menu contains the 7-Zip extensions. Now there is the question. How can I run Explorer inside an isolation environment of a streamed application?
Simply by “calling” Explorer or any other installed executable from inside the isolation. There are many ways to do so: I like to do everything possible inside the Citrix Profiler, so I created a run_Explorer.cmd file, but you can also define a start script starting explorer (with option /e,). With the Profiler I added the cmd script to the target and also defined it as an application shortcut.
When now running the CMD file as an streamed application on the client, 7-Zip is shown in the context menu of Explorer.

As a side effect now the 7-Zip installation files are “visible” to Explorer. If you need details on how to do it step by step look here: Blog from Joseph Nord: AIE on Desktop and AIE via App Streaming

Now it looks like everything is done. Isn’t it? No it is not. Running Explorer locally has a lot more impact: When using Explorer you change settings, you create files, copy files and all this tasks are running isolated, controlled by the Isolation rules.
So the last thing you have to do is consider in which way the isolation rules impacts the application behavior and how to change them.

This document will answer all the questions on Demo (Previously known as NFR) License

Q: How do I get NFR/demo license for XenApp?

A: XenDesktop Platinum Edition includes XenApp Platinum Edition plus significant additional functionality and benefits. Please download and use the XenDesktop Platinum edition licenses

The Screenshot shows the Citrix Products which are included under XenDesktop License.

(XenDesktop License)

Q: How do I get a Demo (Previously known as NFR) License copy of XenDesktop 4?

A: Demo (Previously known as NFR) License copies of XenDesktop 4 are only available to authorized Citrix partners. Access to media and licenses is managed through the secure My Citrix portal.

Below are the links which would help you in downloading the Demo (Previously known as NFR) License.

http://community.citrix.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=63177331
http://www.citrix.com/tv/#videos/1436

Q: I have a Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 Environment and I would like to have Demo (Previously known as NFR) License for Enterprise Edition?

A: Licenses are available as Platinum edition only, we recommend you to upgrade your Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 to Feature Pack 1 and set your server edition as Platinum to utilize Platinum Edition Demo (Previously known as NFR) License.

Please follow the link attached if you are upgrading your Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 to Feature Pack 1.

Upgrade to CPS 4.5 and How to change Server Editon

Q: How many Licenses do I get for XenDesktop if I am a Citrix Ready Technology Partner?

A: You get 100 User Demo (Previously known as NFR) License.

Q: How many Licenses do I get for XenApp if I am a Citrix Ready Technology Partner?

A: You get 100 User Demo (Previously known as NFR) License. You will need to use XenDesktop platinum in order to use XenApp licenses.

(XenDesktop License)

Q: if I allocate 10 users License for one time, what happens to rest 90 Users Demo (Previously known as NFR) License?

A: With the same License Code, you can allocate the rest 90 User Demo (Previously known as NFR) License.

You can follow the links below to allocate the rest of 90 User Demo (Previously known as NFR) License.

http://community.citrix.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=63177331
http://www.citrix.com/tv/#videos/1436

Please see screenshot

Important note on Licenses
Please note that XenDesktop license key contains 100 user licenses. You should only activate required number of user license (3-5 users in most of the cases). You will be able to reuse and activate the remaining users for a different test scenario or product.

Q: I am unable to retrieve new Serial numbers; I am getting an error “You have already reached the maximum number of license for this product”?

A: The error generally means that you have generated the License Code, However you can still use the same License Code to generate User Demo (Previously known as NFR) License unless if you have allocated all of it.

Q: I want to upgrade my License Server; could you provide us a link to download the Latest License Server?

A: The Latest License Server available for download is Version 11.6.1; you can download it from the Link below.

Download License Server

Q: I have changed the Hostname of the License Server; do I have to generate a new License File?

A: No, You can reallocate the License file you had for your previous Hostname to the New Hostname. Please follow CTX115870

If you have any questions which are not anwered in this FAQ Document, Please feel free to write to us @ citrixready@citrix.com

In another blog, I discussed Windows 7 services that you might wish to disable when going down the path of desktop virtualization. In this article, I’m now focusing on registry modification you will want to make to optimize Windows 7 for virtual desktops. I’ve broken it down into Recommended configurations, Standard Mode configurations (for Provisioning services), and Optional configurations.

As I learn more from upcoming Windows 7 implementations, I’ll be updating the following tables, so it might be worthwhile to stay updated with RSS or subscribe via Email. Now, for the good stuff…

Recommended Configurations

The following registry changes are recommended for all deployment scenarios and would almost always be desirable in a Windows 7 hosted VM-based VDI desktop implementation:

Note: The Optimizer column indicates whether this registry change is included in the XenConvert Optimizer tool that is installed with the Provisioning Services target device software.

Standard Mode Recommended Configurations

The next set of registry changes are recommended for images deployed using standard mode vDisk images with Citrix Provisioning services. Standard mode images are unique in that they are restored to the original state at each reboot, deleting any newly written or modified data. In this scenario, certain processes are no longer efficient. These configurations may also apply when deploying persistent images and in many cases should be implemented in addition to the changes recommended in the preceding section.

Optional Configurations

This last set of machine-based registry changes is optional regardless of whether the image is deployed as a persistent or standard image. In many cases, the following configurations should be implemented; however, these configurations should be analyzed for suitability to each unique environment.

Note: These are only recommendations. You should implement these at your own risk

Remember, you can stay current with this and other Windows 7 virtual desktop recommendations via the Virtualize My Desktop – Windows 7 site.

Daniel
Lead Architect – Worldwide Consulting Solutions
Follow Me on twitter: @djfeller
My Blog: Virtualize My Desktop
Questions, then email Ask The Architect

There is a cry to the IT industry today to provide succinct information about Cloud Computing… especially among Small and Medium Businesses (SMB).  According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, over 52% of all small businesses are actually Small Office-Home Office or SOHO businesses.  The need for these companies to keep their operational costs down is tantamount to their success.  Because IT is a huge part of these businesses (everything from web site marketing to CRM applications) utilizing services online are a natural way for these companies to keep their costs down.

But in order for the small business owner to understand that online “Cloud” based services are available for reducing operational costs, they first have to know where to find them.  Awareness is key to the entire eco-system and making it easy for businesses to access these services can only happen if the SMB knows where to shop.  There are a variety of web sites that cater strictly to the SMB market, such as SMB Nation or the Small Business Administration in the U.S.  I recently saw a national TV ad for a site called the American Express Open Forum and was excited to check it out.  Unfortunately they are limiting the ability to post information to a “invited list only” at this point which radically reduces the idea of an “open” forum.

One additional way to find out more about available technology in this space is through the university systems both in the U.S. and abroad.  Many universities have teamed up with local (and sometimes worldwide) businesses to provide forums for emerging technologies.  The business school at Stanford for instance runs a program called the Social Innovation Review which educates the community about emerging business technologies.  Stanford, known for its tremendous ability to produce entrepreneurs is a great source for budding Cloud companies.  There are also technical colleges who are attempting to bridge the gap between small business and technology forerunners such as Cloud Hosting providers.  The business school within Georgia Institute of Technology has an Economic Development program to tie business and technology together.  Working with Industry the University of Cambridge also has a program dubbed the Cambridge Enterprise to develop community based influence of technology enhancements.

Search Engine Optimization is playing a huge part in these millions of businesses worldwide getting access to Cloud based hosted solutions.  Do a Google search on “Cloud Computing” and you will see a hit list of 31 million.  In the top 10 you can find salesforce.com and Amazon.  Which is ironic as what most SMBs are looking for has more to do with business productivity including email and some kind of web hosting than taking care of their sales leads or putting together VMs from Amazon.  Tweak the search to “hosted email” and Microsoft Exchange pops up all over the place.  Tweak the search again to “hosted applications” and you’ll receive back the most mixed up bag of information you’ve ever seen.

The SMB is not about technorati or the latest buzz words.  They just want to know how to get hosted applications that cost them less per month than setting up an IT group.  Citrix Service Providers meet the needs of these SMBs but must use the proper techniques to be found.  That is exposure through media mentioned in this BLOG as well as SEO nomenclature that will take you to the top of the Google Search Engines.  An SMB should be able to type in “Internet Applications”, “Hosted Applications” or “Windows Applications Online” and find you.  If they can’t, then Cloud computing for the SMB will remain a mystery.

IT has a number of options to enable remote access for employees wanting mobile access to email and work applications from their iPads. There are however pros and cons for each option as well as some prerequisite questions to consider.

Considerations

Company iPads - For company owned iPads a likely scenario is to treat iPads similar to mobile phones. If company apps or email are allowed to run native on the iPad then Mobile Device Management ( MDM ) software may be necessary to assure corporate security policy is enforced. BES servers may be in place already for Blackberry’s, this type of control may be need to be duplicated for company iPads as well. The forth coming improvements in iOS4 will help with email however additional applications will still require management. If however company data is not allowed to reach the iPad as discussed below, then the management costs and administration could be significantly reduced.

Personal iPads - Many early adopter employees and specifically executives are now bringing their new iPad to work and asking IT for access to company apps. One problem is most companies have policies against storing company data on anything but company owned equipment. While the iPad does include a great email app including support for Exchange, the decision needs to be made to change the company policy or allow exceptions for iPad users. Beyond email, corporate calendars are also supported by the iPad, however most users complain of conflicts and errors compared to Outlook Calendar. The best solution for most companies dealing with personal iPads is to not allow apps or data to run locally. IT can provide safe remote access to hosted email and apps or virtual desktops.

Applications - Beyond Email, determining what apps are required by users and if they are available on the iPad is a big consideration. Many company web apps require specific browsers and are not compatible with mobile Safari on the iPad. Windows apps will obviously not work locally and although iWork and a few Office clones are available, most users will find these limiting.

Other Tablets - Since the iPad was announced it seems like there is a new Tablet announced or rumored every week. Some like the Dell Streak or Cisco Cius run Android but others will run Windows or WebOS or MeeGo or other yet to be named OS. The iPad has a head start but it will not be the only Tablet that needs access to company apps. So solving the problem only for iPads will be another point solution for a growing challenge.

Options

Native iPad Apps - If every app required is available on the iPad, then this may be the right answer for company iPads provided they can be managed through MDM software and administration. The pros for native apps are user experience and offline operation ( app dependent ) For personal iPads however assuring corporate security compliance is a challenge with native apps. Also future support for non iPad Tablets should be considered.

VPN with Web Apps - The iPad does have limited native VPN capability in the OS and can support some web apps. These apps need to be tested and expect many not to be compatible. Again consideration for data left behind on personal iPads needs to be taken into account.

Hosted Virtual Applications - Applications running on Windows servers such as Windows XenApp ( or Terminal Services/RDS ) can be an ideal solution for secure iPad app delivery. In addition to Windows apps, Web Apps that require IE or specific browser plug-ins can easily be delivered to iPads. With XenApp IT can dictate what user gets what app and can easily turn on or off access to applications without managing the iPad itself. Only a single app, the Citrix Receiver is required on the iPad and the configuration can be done via emailed or clicking a link on an intranet web wage. No MDM software is required or concern about company data on personal iPads. A con of this method is that a WiFi or 3G connection is required and apps will not work offline.
Over 200,000 companies already have Citrix XenApp infrastructure that can support the iPad although some may need to configuration changes to enable access. A Citrix Access Gateway is also recommended for secure access, again already in place at many companies. For companies without Citrix, the implementation can be small as a single Windows server with XenApp Fundamentals which is good for between 5 and 75 users.

Virtual Desktops - Hosted Virtual Desktops or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure ( VDI ) such as XenDesktop provides a full Windows 7 environment for each user running on a server in a company datacenter or service provider. Again only the Citrix Receiver is required on the iPad and IT has complete control to turn on or off access. Applications can be installed in the Windows 7 images or be streamed to the image via Application Virtualization. Citrix XenDesktop is required for this solution along with servers supporting the Virtual Desktop images. A free starter edition is available for up to 10 users called XenDesktop Express .

So now that the iPad has topped 3 million units with no slow down in sight, it’s obvious that the tablet form factor has been legitimized and also has a place in business ( or at least remote access to the business ). If you are in IT and considering how to support the iPad let us know your challenges.

If you are in the Healthcare business and rely on IT to improve patient care you may want to check out the Citrix community site for Healthcare IT. The site includes video tips with examples of what IT Pros like Nick Volosin have come up with using the Citrix SDK to speed access for providers. There are forums to ask questions of others in the industry and share feedback. Currently we are looking for feedback on pilots regarding the use of iPads in healthcare as well as requested new features.

Also Florian Becker, Director of Citrix Consulting Solutions and our resident Healthcare IT expert will answer questions and share his thoughts on the blogs. So if your looking for ideas, have questions, or can share what you have done to improve patient care with IT check out the site.

http://Community.Citrix.com/Healthcare

Windows 7 64-bit recently declined to run one of my old DOS based utility programs; it politely said “I’m not running this, its 2010 and time for you to upgrade”.  I make a living running applications via means that weren’t really intended, so I did a bit of research.

Came across DOSBox on the internet and promptly installed it onto my USB Thumb drive using PortableApps.com.  Fired up a DOS Box, then ran my utility and poof!  Everything works. 

For more interesting worlds and better demos, I also ran Turbo Pascal from Borland.  Here’s a snapshot of DOSBox running from removable media, with Turbo Pascal integrated development environment run off of my local C: volume, with source code typed in from memory and an output window visible DOS style that proves it runs.

Oh, happy memories of a good friend.

I write this post more for asking questions than to provide too much useful advice.

Questions

1. Does the license for DOSBox permit corporate usage?
2. Is DOSBox a CPU pig or a good citizen?
3. Has anyone actually used this for anything important?
4. Is this a valid solution to DOS application needs on 64-bit Windows?
5. Why would any sane person do this when they can use Med-V?
6. Has Borland posted Turbo Pascal 6?  I seem to have lost my copy

Enjoy

Joe Nord Product Architect – Citrix Systems XenApp Product Group

App Streaming, Profile Manager, Encrypted Data Plug-in

Speed.  More speed. And to get more speed with desktop virtualization, we hear more and more about how important IOPS are to being able to support the virtual desktop. Not enough IOPS means slowness. No speed. I’ve had a few blogs about it and plan to have a few more. What I wanted to talk about was an interesting discussion I recently had with 3 Senior Architects within Citrix Consulting(Doug Demskis, Dan Allen and Nick Rintalan).  There are 3 smart guys who I talk to fairly regularly and the discussions get quite interesting.

This particular discussion was no different.  We were talking about the importance of IOPS, RAID configs, spindle speeds with regards to an enterprise’s SAN infrastructure. (Deciding if you are going to use a SAN for your virtual desktops is a completely different discussion that I’ve had before and Brian Madden had more recently). But for the sake of this article, let’s say you’ve decided “Yes, I will use my SAN.” If your organization already has an enterprise SAN solution, chances are that the solution has controllers with plenty of cache. Does this make the IOPS discussion a moot point? If we simply use an IOPS calculator (at least the ones I’ve seen) and do not take into account the caching capabilities of the SAN controllers, won’t we over-provision our virtual desktop environment and end up wasting more money/resources?

Many of us who are familiar with XenDesktop knows that changes made to the golden disk image, when delivered via Provisioning services, is stored in a PVS Write Cache.  From numerous tests and implementations, we know that 80-90% of the IO activity from a virtual desktop will be writes.  If we configure the SAN Controllers to be 75% write (assuming we have battery-backed write cache controllers), we allow the controllers to allocate more cache for write operations, thus helping to offload the write IO to the disk, which raises the number of effective IOPS the storage infrastructure can support. Think of the controller’s caching capabilities as a large buffer for our disks.  If our disks can only support so many write operations, the controller cache stores the writes until the disk is able to write it to the platter. This cache allows the infrastructure to keep moving forward with new operations even though the previous operations were not written to the disk yet.  They are all buffered. Just remember, we aren’t reducing the total number of IO operations, we are just buffering them with the controller cache.

Think about it another way. If we encounter a storm where each user will require 10MB of write operations and the storage controller has a 4GB cache, that one controller can support 400+ simultaneous users for this particular storm, and we haven’t even talked about the disk IOPS yet!!!  With this scenario, wouldn’t a single disk spindle be able to support this particular storm because the controller is buffering everything? And what’s also interesting is those write operations are being flushed to disk continuously so the number of users the controller will be able to support would be much, much higher.

So if we have cache on our controllers, which most SAN controllers I’ve seen lately have, are we over designing the storage infrastructure by only focusing on IOPS?  (this is assuming you are using SAN and not local disks on your hypervisor which I talk about a lot as well).  Just remember that those write operations must eventually get written to disk. So if we know what our controller cache is capable of, and we know the amount of storage required for a particular storm (logon, boot, logoff, etc), can’t we support more users (and I mean a lot more users) on the SAN?

What do you think?

Daniel – Lead Architect – Worldwide Consulting Solutions
Follow Me on twitter: @djfeller
My Blog: Virtualize My Desktop
Questions, then email Ask The Architect