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The BriForum Blackout

Thursday, 11 October 2007 by Michel Roth

Today I returned from my visit to BriForum 2007 Amsterdam. This BriForum was a very good one. Loads of interesting content and great conversations with the other attendees. Unfortunately Briforum took up so much of my time that there was no time to keep you guys up to speed as to the news in our industry so here's a recap of the last few days.

Presentation Server 4.0 Hotfix Rollup Pack 4
Indeed, Citrix last Sunday released Presentation Server 4.0 Hotfix Rollup Pack 4 for Windows 2000 and Windows 2003. It includes a lot of fixes, so get testing.

VMware Announces The New Vi3 Features
Al though the press release contained no surprises, it is still worth to note the new features in the upcoming ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center features (courtesy of Mike Laverick)

128GB of RAM for ESX 3.5
64GB of RAM for Virtual Machines
Suport for Transparent Paravirtualization support for paravirtualizated enabled Linux 2.6.21 kernels
Support for MMU - Memory Management Unit - support for memory page tables handled by the new CPUs
Support for NPIV - N-Port ID Virtualization - presenting a WWN to a VM
Support for TCP Segment Offload and jumbo frames
Suport for local SATA Drives
Support for 10GigE
Storage VMotion - Moving VMs files around whilst the VM is running
Protect against operating system failures with virtual machine failure monitoring (experimental) in VMware HA.
One-step restore of VMs using VMware Convertor/VirtualCenter
Distributed Power Management (Power down ESX hosts when you dont need them - scarey or what!)
VMware Update Manager - Windows Update for ESX Hosts & the Vi Client and integrated with DRS
Consolidation Management - Mini-Capcity Planner and VMware Convertor integrated with VirtualCenter Site Recovery Manager
ESX3i

How To Create a Redundant Citrix License Server
This question comes up a lot a customers looking for redundancy in their Citrix environments: how do I make my Citrix License server highly available? There's multiple ways you can do it and my colleague Wilco van Bragt has written an article on that exact subject. I suggest you take a look.

New Health Packs in CPS 4.5 FP1 Explained
As disclosed in my sneak peak at Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 Feature Pack 1, Feature Pack 1 includes 6 new health packs to further enhance the "Health Monitoring and Recovery" feature of Citrix Presentation Server 4.5. These are the six new tests:

Microsoft Print Spooler test
Citrix Print Manager Service test
Check DNS test
ICA Listener test
Check XML Thread
Check Local Host Cache test

This article on the Presentation Server blog explains it all.