cloud – Jack's server blog

CloudGateway 2 is available! Check out what’s new

CloudGateway meets these requirements and more by providing IT the assurance that corporate apps and data are isolated and secure while providing users the access to all of productivity tools they need to do their job … from any device. Specifically, CloudGateway is an enterprise mobility management solution that securely delivers mobile, web, SaaS and Windows apps and data to any device, anywhere. As part of the new release, here are a few of the key new features that we know will excite our customers:

1. Provide a rich, secure mobile device experience with MDX Technologies. Citrix MDX Technologies powers a next-gen mobile device experience that provides seamless separation between work and personal life with full user choice and IT control over all apps and data. These technologies give CloudGateway a rich set of mobile app technologies that enable centralized management, security and control over native iOS, Android and HTML 5 apps across more than two billion mobile devices. Specifically, we announced four new technologies:

MDX App Vault – the MDX App Vault is a secure native mobile app container technology that separates mobile enterprise apps and data from personal apps and data on any mobile device. This allows IT to remotely manage, control, lock and wipe the critical business apps and data they care about.

MDX Web Connect – MDX Web Connect is a secure mobile browser technology that makes it easy for IT to deliver internal corporate web apps, external SaaS apps, and HTML5 apps to mobile devices with a dedicated browser instance for each app.

MDX Micro VPN – the MDX Micro VPN is the industry’s first app-specific secure access technology that lets IT create a secure VPN tunnel for mobile and web apps accessing the company’s internal network from personal mobile devices. Using this technology, companies can instantly mobilize all their existing apps, including their corporate Intranet as well as native iOS and Android applications. This also means that businesses do not require a device-wide VPN that can compromise security.

MDX Policy Orchestration – MDX Policy Orchestration provides granular policy-based control over native mobile and HTML5 apps based on factors such as the type of device or network, device passcode, or upon detection of a jailbroken device.

2. Support more mobile devices with complete mobile application management. IT organizations can now internally develop or purchase native iOS, Android and HTML5 mobile apps, and securely manage and deliver them – just like they do for traditional Windows apps – through CloudGateway. Using the MDX Application Preparation Tool, administrators can wrap apps and import them into CloudGateway, where IT can set rules around how and when these applications can be used. Once these apps are delivered to users, users get the benefit single-click, single sign-on access to mobile apps in the same personalized workspace as Windows, web and SaaS apps. And, for the security minded, CloudGateway allows IT to instantly revoke application access and wipe all associated data when a user leaves the organization or other status change.

3. Increase productivity for mobile users with follow-me data (and apps). Workers want access to their data on all of their devices. Using CloudGateway with ShareFile Enterprise, IT now can manage and secure this data for workers wherever they are. To start with, IT can provision and de-provision ShareFile accounts automatically when an employee is added to or removed from Active Directory. Once the account is provisioned, workers can access all of their data on any device through Citrix Receiver, and that data will follow the employee across all devices. To increase productivity, CloudGateway enables data associated with mobile apps or Windows apps delivered by Citrix XenApp to be accessible with a single click. And finally, in the event a device is lost or an employee leaves the organization, IT can remotely wipe all of the data. The same principal for apps exists as well – once users have chosen their apps, these apps follow the employee across all devices for the ultimate productivity.

The past two and a half months have been a crazy time to be on the Receivers and Gateways team here at Citrix, but I speak for all of us when I say we are proud of the progress we have made. I can now truly say that Citrix is in the mobile market to stay. CloudGateway 2 delivers on customers top priorities around enabling mobility with a solution that secures and mobilizes corporate data and apps, allows IT to say “yes” to all the amazing new devices that workers bring into the workplace every day and supports mobile workers in their quest to work from anywhere on any device.

1. Source: Forrsights Networks And Telecommunications Survey, Q1 2012, Forrester Research, Inc., 2012

Read the entire blog here on the Citrix blogs.

Download CloudGateway Express 2.0 or the Virtual Appliance here from the Citrix Download page (requires a valid MyCitrix ID)

CloudStack 3.0.3 available

Citrix released version 3.0.3 of the ClouStack product. You can read here what’s new in 3.0.3 in this version.

Secure Console Access on XenServer

With the addition of Secure Console feature, users can now securely access the VM consoles on the XenServer hypervisor. You can either SSH or use the View Console option in the Management Server to securely connect to the VMs on the XenServer host. The Management Server uses the xapi API to stream the VM consoles. However, there is no change in the way you can access the console of a VM. This feature is supported on XenServer 5.6 and 6.0 versions.

Stopped VM

This release supports creating VMs without starting them on the backend. You can determine whether the VM needs to be started as part of the VM deployment. A VM can be deployed in two ways: create and start a VM (the default method); create a VM and leave it in the stopped state.

A new request parameter, startVM, is introduced in the deployVm API to support the stopped VM feature. The possible values are:

true – The VM starts as a part of the VM deployment.
false – The VM is left in stopped state at the end of the VM deployment.

The default value is true.

Uploading an Existing Volume to a Virtual Machine

Existing data can now be made accessible to a virtual machine. This is called uploading a volume to the VM. For example, this is useful to upload data from a local file system and attach it to a VM. Root administrators, domain administrators, and end users can all upload existing volumes to VMs. The upload is performed by using HTTP. The uploaded volume is placed in the zone’s secondary storage.

This functionality is supported for the following hypervisors:

Hypervisor : Disk Image Format
XenServer : VHD
VMware : OVA
KVM : QCOW2
OVM : RAW

Dedicated High-Availability Hosts

One or more hosts can now be designated for use only by high-availability (HA) enabled VMs that are restarted due to a host failure. Setting up a pool of such dedicated HA hosts as the recovery destination for all HA-enabled VMs make it easier to determine which VMs are restarted as part of the high-availability function. You can designate a host as a dedicated-HA restart node only if the Dedicated HA Hosts feature is enabled by setting the appropriate global configuration parameter.

Support for Amazon Web Services API

This release supports Amazon Web Services APIs, including Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) API. Fidelity with the EC2 API and the installation experience for this functionality are both enhanced. In prior releases, users were required to install a separate component called CloudBridge, in addition to installing the Management Server. For new installations of CloudPlatform 3.0.3, this software is installed automatically along with CloudPlatform and runs in a more closely integrated fashion. The feature is disabled by default, but can be easily enabled by setting the appropriate global configuration parameter and performing a few setup steps.

Support for Cisco Nexus 1000v Virtual Switch

In addition to standard vSwitch, Cisco Nexus 1000v is now supported for virtual network configuration in VMware vSphere deployments. With this, guest traffic isolation through VLANs is possible in VMware environment. Using Nexus virtual switch simplifies configuring and monitoring virtual networks that span across a large number of hosts, and facilitates live migration in VMWare-based cloud deployment.

You can download this version of CloudStack here with a valid MyCitrix ID.

MCSA/MCSE in a new version

Today (April 11th 2012) Microsoft has released a new and improved version of the old MCSA/MCSE certification.

I hear you thinking. Oh no, not again….

Well, MCSA and MCSE are NEW acronyms for Microsoft Certified (so far the same) Solutions Associate !!!! and Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert.

In stead of being associated with the OS certification this is now a sign of cloud skills.

MCSA is an entry level certification program for professionals who are looking for their first job in IT. So if you are a guru in the Microsoft field and have loads of certs, skip this status and go straight through to the MCSE version.

MCSE is the Expert level of the cloud certification. If you have years of experience and done lots of troubleshooting and maintaining servers with System Center and other MS products then you’d go for this.

Certification tracks: Continue reading “MCSA/MCSE in a new version”

Hyper-V cloud deployments documents

The Hyper-V Cloud Deployment Guides are a collection of best practices based on a Microsoft Consulting Services framework. They are designed to help you deploy a private cloud solution using Continue reading “Hyper-V cloud deployments documents”