✅ I recently gained access to the new Bing AI Service – and decided to put it to the test for learning new skills, and testing out how it might impact some of the things I do regularly. What is Bing AI? Bing AI is the artificial intelligence technology that powers Bing search engine and its related products and services. […]
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Please note – Elastic SAN is a Preview Service – so expect changes and updates! As you may be aware, Azure Elastic SAN is now in Public Preview. Elastic SAN aims to solve the challenge of workload optimization and integration between large scale databases and performance-intensive mission-critical applications. The Elastic SAN Preview simplifies deployment, scaling, management, and configuration of a […]
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⚠ Please note – Chaos Studio is a Preview Service – so expect changes and updates! Introduction Chaos Engineering is the process of testing a solution and its ability to withstand problems and faults whilst maintaining the required level of service or uptime. Chaos Testing is carried out to provide a level of comfort that the solution undergoing testing will […]
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Recently, I have been playing around more and more with Microsoft Flow – which is a tool designed to Automate processes and tasks. In a previous post I used a tool called Stringify to automate a number of Smart Home actions. Microsoft Flow provides a similar environment and allows integration between processes and tasks. I was impressed from the first […]
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Azure Storage Sync provides the means to synchronise files from various locations into an Azure Storage account and to endpoints running the Azure Storage Sync agent. In this post I will give a quick overview of how it can be setup to service branch office requirements whereby VPN connectivity does not exist. For further information see here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/files/storage-sync-files-planning. Here’s my environment which I […]
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Azure Firewall was released for preview this week, so I thought I would give it a quick try and look at some of the features available. The firewall provides the following features at the current time: Built-in high availability – built into the Azure Platform, so no requirement to create load balanced configurations Unrestricted cloud scalability – the firewall can […]
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When using any environment that provides virtual desktops at scale, it makes sense to have only the required number of resources running at the right time – rather than all of the resources all of the time. The usual approach to this is to use power management – so unused virtual machines are shut down when not in use. With […]
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Azure Traffic Manager is designed to provide traffic routing to various locations based on a ruleset that you specify. It can be used for priority (failover), weighted distribution, performance, and geographic traffic distribution. The failover option is similar to GSLB – and works in a similar way, so I am going to demonstrate that in this post. I’ve started with […]
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I’ve been blogging a lot this year on the merits of Citrix Workspace Environment Management (WEM) and the various features it provides. Another feature is I/O Priority – which enables us to manage the priority of I/O operations for a specified process: To demonstrate this, I am going to run IOMeter (a storage testing tool – that consumes, but also […]
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After testing out the excellent CPU and Memory management features in Citrix Workspace Environment Management (WEM), I wanted to blog about how processes can be controlled using the software. Prior to starting this test, I have a basic Citrix XenDesktop environment configured, a WEM environment configured, and the relevant group policies in place to support this. To prevent processes from […]
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Recently I’ve been using the Atlantis USX Community Edition, which is a free edition of the Atlantis USX Software – specifically for the purposes of testing and learning how the USX can improve the performance of a virtual desktop. Atlantis provide a number of testing guides and videos on the USX Community Edition landing page – and also a testing […]
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I’ve been doing some work recently around Citrix Provisioning Services, and this has prompted me to investigate what new features are available in version 7.11. One that stood out to me was the support for Microsoft’s Resilient File System (ReFS) on Windows Server 2016. This file system is interesting for those with virtualized environments due to the extra speed enhancements […]
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