CSC Dynamic Desktop – Citrix XenDesktop & AppSense

I have just returned from a successful 2 day IPexpo event in London, and was extremely excited to see the many Google Alerts for ‘XenDesktop’, ‘AppSense’, and ‘User Environment Management’ in my inbox.  Upon clicking on the alert I was taken to Daniel Fellers ‘Ask the Architect’ pages within the Citrix Community site.

In this instance, Daniel (a Lead Architect for the WorldWide Consulting Services at Citrix) interviews Sandy Kingdon (a Dynamic Desktop Architect at CSC) on how CSC has designed and is well into the implementation of Citrix XenDesktop, VMware ESX and AppSense User Environment Management to support a 40,000 user environment.

Sandy explains how CSC were able to overcome some notable challenges, including:

• Supporting multiple users across different sites using different language and MUI packs from just 2 vDisks
• Controlling Application Access
• Persisting User Personalization Settings between sessions
• Current and future plans for supporting User Installed Applications in a non-persistent environment

As AppSense are a core component of CSC’s standard offering for Dynamic Desktop, Sandy covers how by virtualizing the user and controlling Policy and Personalization separate from the underlying OS and App components that CSC were able to overcome the above challenges.

The podcast can be found here

Thanks to both Daniel and Sandy for the great podcast and an insight into a real world large scale XenDesktop deployments.