{"id":196,"date":"2014-01-28T17:02:37","date_gmt":"2014-01-28T17:02:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lakesidesoftware.com\/2014\/01\/28\/xendesktop-75-its-all-about-user\/"},"modified":"2023-12-14T23:48:16","modified_gmt":"2023-12-14T23:48:16","slug":"xendesktop-75-its-all-about-user","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lakesidesoftware.com\/blog\/xendesktop-75-its-all-about-user\/","title":{"rendered":"XenDesktop 7.5 – It’s all about the user"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Lakeside Software, we are very excited that XenDesktop 7.5 is being released – the third 7.x\u00a0iteration in a few months puts customers on a great footing with the first unified architecture for both application and desktop virtualization.<\/p>\n

Citrix has been doing a great job integrating design principles into the products for a couple of years now. Back in 2009 and 2010, we worked closely with the Citrix Consulting Services organization and took a “design thinking” approach to the implementation of XenDesktop and help determine organizations what their users need and expect from the solution. Those thoughts eventually led to the Desktop Transformation Methodology and the Desktop Transformation Assessment service offering from Citrix Consulting Services, which uses Lakeside SysTrack to gather the requisite data. I\u00a0wrote about the methodology<\/a>\u00a0about two years ago on\u00a0citrix.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A few years ago,\u00a0 I wrote another brief blog post about observing end-user behavior. I felt that IT owed it to the end-user community to try and understand their business, their work, their desires, their frustrations etc. in order to provide the best possible experience.\u00a0 This is obviously difficult to do in person and on a large scale and IT leaders who are willing to apply this type of approach either have to select a small sample size or try to automate the task. That’s where Lakeside Software’s SysTrack comes into play. It has been around for 17 years and is a Citrix Ready<\/a>\u00a0certified product. It\u00a0is primarily used for on-going and in-depth, non-intrusive end-user experience monitoring in cloud-hosted or traditional Desktop environments, but also plays a vital role in any transformational project such as the virtualization of desktops with XenDesktop 7.5 – whether in an on premise fashion, cloud hosted, or in a hybrid cloud architecture.<\/p>\n

SysTrack can easily be deployed to existing XenApp servers and desktops (no matter if physical or virtual) and it seamlessly records and summarizes key usage patterns. What are the applications in use (and which ones\u00a0are not used and thus consuming expensive licenses)? How often are they used? What resources do they consume (CPU, memory, network, graphics (including detailed NVIDIA GPU \/ GRID consumption))? How do end-users connect? What are the network and surrounding parameters?\u00a0 All these are questions that must be answered before architects can meaningfully design and size the infrastructure, the application landscape, and the master golden images.<\/p>\n

Within SysTrack, there are several modules that complement XenDesktop\u00a0 7.5 wonderfully:<\/p>\n