VHD War Continues - Citrix Profile Management
Couple months back I wrote a post about the new VHD containers in EM 10.1 FR4. You can read about it here: DID IVANTI ADD “LAYERING” TO ENVIRONMENT MANAGER FR4?
In the post I call out the fact that everyone now days seems to have some type of VHD solution and these solutions are evolving. Citrix recently announced VHD based Outlook OST cache and search indexing within Citrix Profile Management at Synergy. This just one-upped the solution recently release by Ivanti by not only roaming the OST file but also the search index.
I came across a Citrix article (CTX235347) which details how all this works. This article by the way is extremely detailed which I applaud Citrix for. Apparently Citrix is hooking not just Outlook.exe but also the Windows Search service, SearchIndexer.exe. If anyone out there is familiar with Environment Manager Personalization I might have your attention.
So the search index is stored by the Windows Search service on a per machine basis. In order to extract this information and allow it to roam Citrix is hooking the service and redirecting the outlook indexes (EDB file) to a VHD. Sounds alot like EM Personalization!
So without going into too much other detail (its all in the CTX article) this is a huge win for Citrix customers. Not only does it allow you to run in cached mode but the outlook search is also handled properly. This is way cool and almost has me pulling personalization off my home lab and deploying UPM. Ok, maybe not that cool but it is definitely a blow to one of the latest features in Ivanti Environment Manager.
In the post I call out the fact that everyone now days seems to have some type of VHD solution and these solutions are evolving. Citrix recently announced VHD based Outlook OST cache and search indexing within Citrix Profile Management at Synergy. This just one-upped the solution recently release by Ivanti by not only roaming the OST file but also the search index.
I came across a Citrix article (CTX235347) which details how all this works. This article by the way is extremely detailed which I applaud Citrix for. Apparently Citrix is hooking not just Outlook.exe but also the Windows Search service, SearchIndexer.exe. If anyone out there is familiar with Environment Manager Personalization I might have your attention.
So the search index is stored by the Windows Search service on a per machine basis. In order to extract this information and allow it to roam Citrix is hooking the service and redirecting the outlook indexes (EDB file) to a VHD. Sounds alot like EM Personalization!
So without going into too much other detail (its all in the CTX article) this is a huge win for Citrix customers. Not only does it allow you to run in cached mode but the outlook search is also handled properly. This is way cool and almost has me pulling personalization off my home lab and deploying UPM. Ok, maybe not that cool but it is definitely a blow to one of the latest features in Ivanti Environment Manager.
