BriForum Day 3
I’m finally back in NJ after another superb BriForum! I’ve gone this far so here is my rundown on day 3 of BriForum…
I was about 20 minutes late for my first morning session which was “Maximizing your SBC OS and Hardware Investments During Difficult Times” by Ian Parker. I attended Ian’s first session “Quick and Dirty Performance Analysis” which was very good so I figured I couldn’t go wrong attending another one. The was a very intense session, with some of it being a little over my head. Ian went into great detail on using windbg.exe to find and debug kernel errors with the Windows OS running terminal services. Fun things like Paged Pools and Page Table Entries, etc. While it was a little over the top for me, it made me realize that there is much to the SBC world I need to look into and this was one of those topics. Ian was a first time BriForum presenter and he did a fantastic job, hopefully Ian will return next year with some more killer sessions.
After the demo lab break I attended “XenApp Fringe Benefits” with Jason Conger and special guest Brandon Shell. I’m a big fan of Jason’s sessions because he always takes XenApp to the next level. I’ve been using his Web Interface for Resource Manager since about 15 minutes after I saw his presentation on it at BriForum 2007. Jason went into some functionality of the Access Management Console that is often overlooked by Citrix admins (myself included). Things like My Views and overlaying maps, Health and Resource Monitoring custom scripts and Configuration logging. However the last 10 minutes of the session was Brandon Shell discussing Powershell for XenApp. I’m not taking anything away from Jason, but Brandon’s “Fire ‘um” approach to Powershell was fantastic. He could of easily made an entire session on using Powershell to manage and administer XenApp.
After lunch I attended Joe Shonk and Steve Greenberg’s “XenDesktop Design and Best Practices” Did you know that the number one best practice for XenDesktop is to not use XenDesktop? After we all had a laugh, the point was made (and something I’ve always strongly believed) that not only XenDesktop but VDI in general really only has targeted use cases and still is not a full replacement for desktop computing or server based computing. This was a great session for anyone using XenDesktop and PVS as the discussion was geared towards sizing your infrastructure, desktop P2V’ing vs. clean images, storage considerations for PVS, network considerations for PVS and a couple of pointers on easing the introduction of VDI to your organization. The last 10 minutes was supposed to be Steve and Joe sparring but I believe they’re holding out for BriForum 2010 and more endorsement money 
I caught up with Steve and Joe after the closing keynote and we had a good discussion on how there are really no best practices around XenDesktop/PVS and the idea of making it more of a community effort to get best practices more mainstream. I hope to have an opportunity to participate!
My final session of the day and BriForum was Jeroen Van de Kamp’s “Performing Benchmarks with Login VSI Indexer” For those of you who don’t know….VSI is a free tool created by Login Consultants as a means to benchmark user capacities of Terminal Server and VDI across different hypervisors and bare metal. There are some limitations of the tool but the limitations make a lot of sense. They’re so you can get repeatable results every times based off the same specifications. This way you can truly see how different hardware or system specs, even a service pack can affect density in an SBC environment. It also went over the best practices of using VSI to make sure your results are indeed accurate. VSI 2.0 will be released soon with some new features like Mandatory Profiles and additional tuning to get even better results.
BriForum 2009 was wrapped up with Brian Madden’s closing keynote that is available at Rich Crusco’s blog here. I don’t know what the final attendee numbers were this year. Last year BriForum had a little over 400 attendees and I heard grumblings that this years was a little over 300 attendees which is great considering the economy and most companies cutting back on traveling. Brian confirmed BriForum 2010 as well as possibly bringing BriForum back to Europe. While BriForum is mainly focused around application and desktop virtualization, it still is hands down my favorite conference to attend. Marketing hype doesn’t fly at BriForum and the caliber of sessions and attendees at BriForum is what makes it so unique. I’m already looking forward to next year!!!
