Citrix Synergy has always been one of my favorite events; from technical sessions to networking with Citrites, customers and an overwhelming amount of community members.

While I typically enjoy the Citrix Synergy keynotes — getting some insights into overall company strategy, product strategy and localized plays is of great value — I really like the community-driven sessions. If we look at the Top 10 sessions Citrix Synergy 2017, we see 4 out of the top 10 sessions are community-based (these results are not incidental, we can see this year over year):

SYN303 — Independent Citrix experts’ deep dive on Remote Graphics, user experience and GPUs
SYN305 — Citrix provisioning survival guide
SYN306 — Solving PVS challenges with simple shell scripts
SYN330 — Optimize and scale your XenApp and XenDesktop platform the CTP way

With those stats, it’s safe to say I’m not the only one enjoying these community-driven presentations where knowledge sharing is key and based on real-world experiences. Let’s be honest here: the best way to learn is through mistakes that others have made before.

Keeping this in mind, I’ll be returning for my second year of presenting at Citrix Synergy. Together with Jarian Gibson, I’ll be presenting SYN237 — Citrix and Nutanix: the 2018 inside scoop. Our session abstract for this year will tell its story:

The last Synergy presentation on Citrix and Nutanix covered Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop running on Nutanix AHV. In this session, you will learn about updates and the exciting new things that can be done with the Citrix EUC stack when running on the Nutanix Acropolis platform. You’ll get details on automating Citrix with Nutanix Calm, using Acropolis File Services for file storage and multisite/disaster recovery, and other new features coming from Nutanix. This session will show attendees how they can use Nutanix Acropolis as their “Swiss army knife platform” for running Citrix services.

Besides the fact that Jarian is an excellent presenter, he’s very knowledgeable and I’m delighted that he took on my offer to get on stage again (I did bribe him with some stroopwafels).

When I reached out to Jarian, the subject was easily picked; this session combines the best of my worlds: The leading desktop and application delivery solution running on top of the world’s leading HCI (and beyond) solution. There’s so much to talk about when it comes down to how Citrix and Nutanix are ‘better together’. Did you know that XenServer support is actually based on mutual engineering effort? It’s not just a ‘bolt-on and certify’ solution. We had engineers from both sides working on the best performing solution, maximizing customer delight. And the same can be said about the PVS/MCS plugins for AHV or the Citrix Workspace Appliances. Apart from all the obvious reasons — linear scalability, performance, ease of use — we actually spend a lot of effort in reducing complexity and improving customer experience (either end-user experience or admin experience).

I’m excited tell you all about some of the news we’ll be addressing around micro-segmentation! NVIDIA GPUs, PVS, the Citrix Workspace Appliance Program, and last, but not least, Calm. Calm is Nutanix’s automation and orchestration solution and both Jarian and I could see the immediate value in this solution.

Today’s guest blog post comes from Kees Baggerman, a Senior Staff Architect for the Performance and Solutions Engineering R&D team at Nutanix, and a Citrix CTP. Based in the Netherlands, he is co-founder and member of the Board of the Dutch Citrix User Group (in addition to being an all-around good guy).