The Citrix Session: Pure PVS Provisioning for Pacesetting Public Sector Purposes!

Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) is one of the two image management technologies available in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and Citrix DaaS.  Historically PVS has been used to deliver Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop workloads (VDA's) to servers and virtual machines from a single image over the network.  However, it can also be used without CVAD/DaaS as a standalone product, physically streaming the OS disk to an endpoint device. These endpoint devices can be “dummy terminals” with no hard drives at all, zero/thin clients, high-end compute and graphics devices, and everything in between.  This can include additional use cases for Security and locations with devices without hard drives.

 In this episode we discuss the history of PVS and some of its applicable use cases.  We also cover some technical aspects of PVS and the benefits enabled by the roll-forward and roll-back of images. 

Host:  Bill Sutton

Co-Host:  Geremy Myers

Co-Host:  Todd Smith

Transcript

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Bill Sutton: Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 167 of the Citrix session. I'm your host today. Bill Sutton, with Zintegra. Also with me today are 2 folks from Citrix, Jeremy Myers and Todd Smith. They're regulars on this on this podcast Todd, you want to say hello to everyone. And then following that, Jeremy.

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Todd Smith: Sure. Hey, there, Bill, hey, Jeremy, it's been a while since I've been able to join this podcast. But

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Todd Smith: looking absolutely forward to this topic. As

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Todd Smith: as you know, I'm a former ardents se, and

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Todd Smith: Pbs is always going to hold a special place in my heart.

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Todd Smith: Yep.

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Bill Sutton: Understood.

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Geremy Meyers: Oh, you know, when we 1st talked about this Todd, it did not occur to me that you were a Pbs. Og.

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Geremy Meyers: And now it's all making sense. Is it too late to switch? You know what? It's too late? I guess we're gonna roll with this one.

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Bill Sutton: We're stuck with it, Jeremy. So

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Bill Sutton: it's all good. It's all good. Yeah. The the title of the blog we're we're going to be discussing is pure Pvs. Provisioning

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Bill Sutton: for pace, setting public sector purposes. That's a lot of the letter P, so, nevertheless, pure Pvs. Provisioning for pace, setting public sector purposes by Jill and Shane Smith.

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Bill Sutton: So that's the article that we're that we're going to be talking about. It's pretty short, but I'm sure we'll have a good a good conversation among the 3 of us here. What Jeremy Myers was alluding to is the

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Bill Sutton: technology provisioning services that is part of the Citrix stack these days. Or has been for a while, was

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Bill Sutton: was created or obtained through an acquisition a number of years ago, from a company

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Bill Sutton: in Massachusetts called Ardents and Our. The illustrious Todd Smith on this call was a part of that. I I remember this. You know. Remember this from way back because I was flown up. I was with another partner at the time, and I was flown up to Massachusetts to learn this technology. And I think, Todd, you were one of the instructors. Is that.

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Todd Smith: I I was. I remember that day, and then and soon afterwards my sales rep, and I went down, and we did a

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Todd Smith: tour of Virginia with with Bill and his other.

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Todd Smith: his prior employer.

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Bill Sutton: Right.

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Todd Smith: yeah, I look back at it and think, you know, 18 years ago

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Todd Smith: I got a phone call from a former

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Todd Smith: manager, mentor, and friend that said, Hey?

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Todd Smith: And he said in his best

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Todd Smith: Texas

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Todd Smith: twang, he said, Hey, Tanny.

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Todd Smith: I got a job opportunity for you. Why don't you come over and have dinner with me.

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Todd Smith: and he was at. He happened to be up in Massachusetts, and I said, Sure, Ru.

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Todd Smith: we'll

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Todd Smith: got a chance to see some of the technology and see how it could solve a lot of problems. You remember, back in the day you used to have to ghost machines.

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Bill Sutton: Oh, yeah.

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Todd Smith: And do manual. CD, ROM. Based installs of operating systems. And in some cases you have to also do like diskette installs

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Todd Smith: of

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Todd Smith: you know everything from windows 3, 5, 1, and windows 4 all the way up to

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Todd Smith: windows. Server, you know, early 2,000 versions.

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Todd Smith: but great technology. And you know, I think the this blog and we'll get into it. It's really kind of it's to the

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Todd Smith: the root and the foundation of what provisioning services can do. And it's also kind of a mistaken or or under appreciated use case that we can certainly talk about.

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Geremy Meyers: Hey? Real quick fun. Fact, Todd. How many floppies

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Geremy Meyers: did it take to stand up windows nt. 3.1.

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Todd Smith: They sent like a hundred 20 of them in a box, and.

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Geremy Meyers: The.

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Todd Smith: Ironic thing is is that you had

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Todd Smith: there. There was a timeout that occurred, so you have to pretty much have them in order when you're flopping, when you're doing the the the disk shuffle.

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Todd Smith: And then they came out with portable

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Todd Smith: CD-ROM drives that you could plug in

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Todd Smith: it didn't give you any much more

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Todd Smith: help. But it eliminated having to do the Diskette Shuffles.

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Geremy Meyers: So nt 3 dot one came out in 1,993. I'm gonna date everyone here, and I'm gonna say, that was the year

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Geremy Meyers: that I graduated know that I started high school. That was my 10th grade year. There we go, 31 years ago. So there we go. 22 floppies.

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Geremy Meyers: 22, 3, and a

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Geremy Meyers: what do we call them? Back? Then? 3.

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Bill Sutton: Quarter and a quarter 1.4, Meg, the little plastic ones.

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Geremy Meyers: The little plastic ones. Yeah, yeah. Hope they all worked. Hope they all work. So listen, you know what's interesting about Ardens? Much like Citrix, and the fact that if you go under the hood you go into the registry, you start looking at files. You can see just remnants of old Citrix technologies that have gone away, but still stick around. Dazzle

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Geremy Meyers: is the one that we like to talk about, because

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Geremy Meyers: such a fun name and.

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Bill Sutton: Wf ica dot sis.

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Geremy Meyers: Oh, yeah, yeah. And the boot file Pvs is still to this day. What is it? Todd.

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Todd Smith: A, RDBP. 32

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Todd Smith: dot Ben.

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Bill Sutton: And.

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Geremy Meyers: Yeah. And that's right. So it's still that orange. 32 boot file. That's wild.

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Bill Sutton: So this trip down Memory Lane is making me smile, of course, but for those on the call who have no reference point to this. Let's talk a little bit about what the what ardent slash provisioning services

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Bill Sutton: can do. And I'll start by reading the 1st sentence of the blog that we're covering, which is, did you know you can stream a desktop to an endpoint using Pvs alone?

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Bill Sutton: The answer. That's yes. Obviously so well, it may not be. Yes, in the sense that the reader knows that. But it is a true statement that you can do this, Todd. You want to talk a little bit about, like the foundations of Pbs and ardents, what it actually did, and kind of a general general idea of how it worked.

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Todd Smith: Sure. So so this all started. This all started with one of our Us. National laboratories.

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Todd Smith: had a problem where they needed to get rid of local hard drives on endpoint

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Todd Smith: devices right? So

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Todd Smith: they did everything from looking at, you know, pluggable drives and having the drives taken out every once in a while. And they, they needed a way to basically boot

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Todd Smith: the machine without having the risk of a local hard drive that can be either corrupted, stolen, or whatever but needed to be updated. So provisioning service was really built out of that that specific use case of How do I boot something off of a network.

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Todd Smith: right? So

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Todd Smith: leveraging a tool that's built into the into every chipset called pxe, which is a pre executed environment. Basically, what you can do

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Todd Smith: is

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Todd Smith: instead of pointing to a local hard drive, you actually point to a network location.

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Todd Smith: that holds the disc

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Todd Smith: content

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Todd Smith: and then drops it down over the network connection

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Todd Smith: as needed. Right? So it long it loads the

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Todd Smith: the network driver loads

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Todd Smith: the connector out to the boot sequence, and every time the operating system goes to read from the disk.

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Todd Smith: instead of reading from a local drive, it actually goes out to this network location.

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Todd Smith: Very simple way to to describe it.

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Todd Smith: but it's very effective and very efficient

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Todd Smith: reason for that is because

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Todd Smith: it leverages a lot of

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Todd Smith: the way the operating system would normally read from the disk drive

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Todd Smith: locally right. It reads a block at a time.

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Geremy Meyers: And.

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Todd Smith: And

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Todd Smith: loads that into memory as needed. And then, when it's not needed anymore, it pulls it out of memory and goes, gets the next

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Todd Smith: block. So

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Todd Smith: very efficient, very, it really works well over over a local, near local area network, oftentimes works well in a data center environment.

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Todd Smith: So it can be used for that. That same technology can be used for both desktop operating systems, such as the windows, 11 windows, Xp windows, vista but it can also be used on server based operating systems.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah. And that was one of the key reasons that Citrix acquired it. Right, the the ability, because, historically, if you go back to the to. When what was it? 2,000

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Bill Sutton: 6.

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Todd Smith: So, so Citrix acquired Ardens in 2,008.

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Bill Sutton: Hey? Okay.

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Bill Sutton: okay, yeah, it was. Looks like it was announced. The agreement was announced, and according to Wikipedia, was the. It was announced in December of 6, but I think it took a little while for them to get everything done.

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Bill Sutton: But back in those in those back in those days in the 2,007, 2,008, if you wanted to. If you had a large PA large what was then called probably what presentation server maybe might have been called Zen. I I don't know.

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Todd Smith: Yes, so so a lot of the lot of the reason for this was

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Todd Smith: we had a lot of customers Citrix had a lot of customers that were running into

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Todd Smith: consistency problems across their server farms. Right? And

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Todd Smith: a server, you know, if you had 4 servers in your farm, the likelihood of all 4 servers being identical in terms of drivers, workloads, applications being installed, configuration settings, and things like that.

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Todd Smith: they could be all different, and that created a lot of havoc when you started doing things like application load balancing because you expected the servers

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Todd Smith: to be at the same level right? And that not only caused problems from an operational perspective, but it also caused a lot of problems from

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Todd Smith: a audit perspective, an audit and compliance perspective. And you got to remember that this is right around the same time that Sarbanes Oxley

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Todd Smith: and Section 402 came out where you needed to make sure one of your controls was that you have consistency across your application stack and your hardware stack and things like that.

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Todd Smith: So it was really kind of the perfect storm being able to say, we need the technology because we've got requirements that are that are forcing us to go this direction. And then we also have a technology that can actually help improve off, improve the operational aspect of it, and make it easier on administrators.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, I mean, I can remember at at this in this time. Time. Frame around 6 or O 7 in particular. We had a couple of large healthcare customers that had pretty significant presentation server farms, I mean hundreds of physical servers. This was before virtualization had started to really take off

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Bill Sutton: or right around the time it was gonna take off, and they would use either something like ghost. There was a product called Plate Spin, where you could you could build out a DVD. Or a CD. And just pop it into each one of the servers, turn it on, and it would immediately load an an image you had created, and generalize it and make it available. The problem with with that was once you'd done 100 servers with plate spin and had them already, and and allowed users to get on them.

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Bill Sutton: They were immediately going to start drifting like Todd said they wouldn't be consistent and with the ardent slash provisioning server product, you have the ability to create a single image

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Bill Sutton: and then stream that over the network to RAM, if you will across the network to these devices. And then, if you needed like, Todd was saying, if you needed to stand up 10 new servers, you literally just added the objects in the provisioning services. Console set the servers to boot off the appropriate bootloader file, turn them on, and they would all boot up, and have the exact same image

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Bill Sutton: that the rest of the servers did when they booted. So it was a pretty. It was a pretty significant advance in delivering consistent workloads to your

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Bill Sutton: your your Zen app or your presentation servers and app Cbad users, because you could create a single image and deliver it to many servers, and obviously, once virtualization came along, we could do this on something like Zen server or vmware. It obviously made it even better, because you no longer had to worry about the same exact hardware being in all of your physical devices.

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Geremy Meyers: Actually, you bring up a really good point, Bill. So when Citrix acquired this technology like we weren't talking about virtual machines, we were talking about

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Geremy Meyers: physical servers. In fact.

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Geremy Meyers: you know we did a we did a synergy, probably that year of the acquisition. So 2,008, 2,009, maybe, where you know, the used case on stage was, you know, we had an Ardens farm. We had a provisioning server farm, and we were streaming the OS. To some pizza boxes, so some rack Mount Servers running, probably web servers. I can't remember. I don't think it was sequel that wouldn't have made sense. But either way, in the in the

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Geremy Meyers: the demo was, Watch this. I'm going to start yanking the hard drives out of these servers just to prove the point that we weren't using the hard drives

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Geremy Meyers: right on the servers, which were, which was kind of interesting. But

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Geremy Meyers: one of the use cases. I haven't seen this in a while, which is what I love about this blog post is

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Geremy Meyers: you know, typically. And we've got some very large deployments. Like thousands of users where we're using Pvs to stream the OS to virtual machines. But this use case that I haven't seen in a while, which is awesome. In fact, you know, I've got a handful of

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Geremy Meyers: customers of different types that are spinning and streaming the OS to a physical endpoint. Yeah, going back to what Todd said. You know this is a security play here. The idea that there is no, you know, physical disk on an endpoint that I need to be concerned about. I am just streaming the OS.

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Geremy Meyers: And when I turn it off there's nothing left behind.

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Bill Sutton: Exactly. Somebody somebody steals that device, or, you know, gets in the gets in the building and starts running off with them. There's no data on them. Yeah, you'd lose the device. But there's no data on them, because it's all stored back on back in the data center, on the master image.

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Todd Smith: Yeah. And and I think there's there's a couple of really key use cases for this delivering a

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Todd Smith: leveraging Pvs to to deliver to an endpoint. 1st was a secure endpoint where you didn't have to have anything locally installed.

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Todd Smith: as far as hardware goes.

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Todd Smith: you you literally had a network card that was connected to.

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Todd Smith: you know, some type of

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Todd Smith: that PC that was rendered a a thin client because of this.

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Todd Smith: so we had secure environments. But we also had education and healthcare

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Todd Smith: in that mix as well, because education, especially because oftentimes those computers in the labs were constantly being rebooted.

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Todd Smith: or you'd have to have a lab specific for a math class or a

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Todd Smith: science class. In

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Todd Smith: with this you could actually consolidate and basically have different images or different workloads

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Todd Smith: that could be streamed down based on a reboot

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Todd Smith: and then the other big big use case was around call centers

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Todd Smith: where you had to have consistency across all of the different devices, and you needed to be able to have that quick turnover time.

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Todd Smith: You didn't have to go and reimage or re ghost a machine

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Todd Smith: to be able to do that effectively and efficiently.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, we we had a I won't say what state but a I had a customer

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Bill Sutton: many years ago, not long after this technology came out. It was a dmv, a division of motor vehicles, the Motor vehicles department, a place we loved all love to go every once every 10 years, or whatever

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Bill Sutton: we had a used case. We know they had the the state we were in had had these spread all over the state, of course. So the customer decided to put a provisioning server in each one of the branches and then make all of the teller or the kiosk, the machines at the front desk, as well as some of the back machines, all

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Bill Sutton: all boot off the same image. That way. Everybody had the same thing to access the same way. And and they would update the images across the network off the wide area network. It was a really good use case for it, and they used it for a number of years. I don't think they still are. They might be in some places, but they used it for a great number of years, and it was a huge advantage to them to be able to centralize the management of the images. There was a problem that the user just rebooted and that meant something.

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Bill Sutton: Cause. Literally, it would go back to a known good functional state, and then they could manage the delivery of updates overnight or during a maintenance window. You know, if there was a problem, they literally just flip it back from one image to another, and they write back to a known good state very quickly, so definitely

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Bill Sutton: a a huge advantage for for the division of motor vehicles. What I think a lot of folks don't realize. And part of why we wanted to do this blog is that if you're a licensed and I'm keep me honest, guys, if you've got licenses for you know the universal license or the universal hybrid multi cloud license. You have licenses for Pvs. You can leverage them

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Bill Sutton: for your Zen app environment. And what this blog is essentially saying is that, Kate. They can also be used as a standalone product to stream to a physical OS or a thin client, which is really what we're focusing on here. So, Jeremy, keep me honest. Here. Is that still the case?

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Geremy Meyers: So yes, and no

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Bill Sutton: Okay.

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Geremy Meyers: Every addition

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Geremy Meyers: of the Citrix licensing now includes Pbs, so whether it's the private cloud, whether it's the universal hybrid multi-cloud, or whether it's the Citrix platform license. So you're included.

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Geremy Meyers: You know, Pbs is included across the board. Now, what is only a part of the platform license is the ability to stream to a physical endpoint or and here's the other thing we haven't talked about yet. So this technology has also been ported

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Geremy Meyers: into the cloud. So if you're running in Azure or Gcp, you can also stand up and run Pbs, and either of those infrastructure platforms. So again, those 3 features azure Gcp. Or even the physical endpoints requires the platform license, however.

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Geremy Meyers: All 3 versions do include.

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Geremy Meyers: you know, Pbs, for your virtual desktops.

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Bill Sutton: Okay.

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Geremy Meyers: Yep. But but listen, you hit on something. I think. We kind of forget. It's all almost the secret sauce behind. Pbs. It's the versioning the idea that I mean listen, I, who I can't remember if Todd mentioned it earlier. But ghosting holy smokes, how long did that take to like reimage like a laptop in the past. I mean, that was, I build the image. I push it out. I mean, that could take

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Geremy Meyers: easily an hour

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Geremy Meyers: unless I, you know, had it down to a science right? But the idea here is, you know, I could create a there's a pretty amazing versioning system within Pbs to where.

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Geremy Meyers: you know, I've got my production version of a disk that I'm using across all these endpoints at the same time that I have created a snapshot of that guy. And I'm making changes to what I'm considering a version 2, if you will.

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Geremy Meyers: And I'm testing that out. Maybe that's my test. Dev. It's really easy for me to flip and say, Hey, start using this new one.

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Geremy Meyers: And if, for whatever reason this is just happens, you think Patch, Tuesday. Think crowd strike Tuesday, Tuesday for that, maybe. But you know you got a scenario where you can roll back to either a previous version or known good state like you mentioned, you know, I think that's the that's really the secret sauce cause. It's it's instant, in fact.

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Geremy Meyers: one of the other really slick Demos that we used to do outside of the ones we did on stage was.

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Geremy Meyers: You know, there would be granted, this is Windows Xp, so this is kind of dates a little bit. But you know we had a room full of what 100 150

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Geremy Meyers: windows. Xp.

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Geremy Meyers: Of course all you could see was the screens, but you know running windows Xp and we rebooted into. I want to say it was Linux.

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Geremy Meyers: and then we rebooted back into windows. Xp, so I think

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Geremy Meyers: the video is probably floating around on the interweb somewhere.

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Bill Sutton: If you I actually already looked it up while because I was thinking about that. Yeah, it's it's done to the to to the tune of Sweet Georgia Brown. And if you

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Bill Sutton: ardents video you will find it on Youtube.

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Todd Smith: Yes, so so a little history behind a little quick story on that one that was 255 machines booting simultaneously, because we wanted to be able to show that you could do an entire class C subnet

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Todd Smith: booting them up. And you started with basically booting up the machine into a windows, Xp.

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Todd Smith: upgrading them to a windows 7 or windows vista at the time.

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Todd Smith: and then be able to flip them over to

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Todd Smith: a portion of them went over to

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Todd Smith: a

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Todd Smith: windows, 7 or windows, 8 environment and a portion of them went over to a red hat Linux distribution, and then we also were able to boot up SQL. Servers and exchange server and a couple of Iis servers, just to kind of round out the demo

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Todd Smith: and that was done really

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Todd Smith: by one of our interns who who took advantage of

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Todd Smith: of that video.

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Todd Smith: replaced a 50 page paper that he was supposed to write

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Todd Smith: to get credit for his internship.

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Bill Sutton: So that's true. Huh?

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Bill Sutton: That's actually I'd heard that story. I just I I wondered if that was truth or legend. So.

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Todd Smith: Truth, we we built that lab

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Todd Smith: and it was interesting.

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Todd Smith: that was kind of what

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Todd Smith: what got us sold the citrix? Yeah.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah.

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Todd Smith: Because I think Mark Templeton and Chris Fleck and a couple of other folks saw the saw the future

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Todd Smith: in some of that technology in like we said earlier, that was originally

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Todd Smith: used to do what's what was called the jump program, which was the just upgrade me, please

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Todd Smith: program, which was a

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Todd Smith: how do we get off of presentation server and up to 4, 5, and eventually, up to what's now referred to as an app

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Todd Smith: right.

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Geremy Meyers: I love that. You guys did this for a class CI mean, that's so, nerdy. It's fantastic.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah. Yeah. Just again, Google, just Google ardents A, RDEN, CE, video, and you'll find the. It'll be the first.st It should be the 1st hit. There ardents 4 dot one demo. Just play that, and that if if nothing, if if the listener gets nothing out of this article other than go look at that video. You will have a good understanding of what you can do with. With pbs,

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Todd Smith: So that's.

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Bill Sutton: What's in that video can still be done today.

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Todd Smith: Yes. So so, Bill, I I think one of the things also in that video that you'll be able to see

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Todd Smith: is it breaks up and creates a giant wall that be basically becomes the ardent logo. Yeah. And the way we did that

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Todd Smith: is very critical to what sets us apart, what sets provisioning services apart from the other technologies like ghosting.

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Todd Smith: Ghosting at. If you remember ghosting required you to do a Cis prep.

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Todd Smith: After you've done the ghost

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Todd Smith: which then joins the machine into the domain gives it all its unique ids, and it sets the guid it sets all of the parameters that are yet now unique to that machine itself.

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Todd Smith: We actually included that in our streaming service, right? So built into the streaming service, was what we refer to as personality which could be machine name.

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Todd Smith: It could be any Mac address or client name information that we needed to put in there. So think of it from a from all of those.

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Todd Smith: all of the applications that require that information

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Todd Smith: to be present for the machine to register properly into the domain, and to get connected, and do all of those those admin type of functions. We were doing that as part of the stream. So we eliminated a major

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Todd Smith: time.

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Todd Smith: time capture or or

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Todd Smith: times time hog that would actually be able to do that. So

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Todd Smith: so, having that ability built into it was absolutely critical for us to be successful in streaming the operating systems, whether it be on a desktop OS. Or a server based OS.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, that was, I remember when we were learning the technology, we we all of us were like, Well, how are you gonna how's this gonna work with a domain where you've got all these machines, and they all have this. If you're booting up to say 10,

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Bill Sutton: aren't they all? Gonna if they're coming off a single image, aren't they all gonna have the same name and the same Mac address? And and I remember saying, No of you guys saying, No, that's not the way it works. We built the intelligence into it to to name the machine the name that you gave it in the console. And then there's some magic that that happens with the machine account password between the provisioning server and the domain controller. There's lots of back end communication that handled the joining of the domain. And all those things so truly, once you've

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Bill Sutton: once you've built out your image and set those parameters in the console, it just goes off and streams them down to the Vm. Or the endpoint.

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Bill Sutton: and all the domain challenges that we would expect in doing that without Sysprep are gone

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Bill Sutton: alright. So it looks like we've covered the article pretty well. I I just want to give you guys a chance to make any additional comments or any other clarity that we didn't maybe didn't quite cover Todd. Anything you want to. You want to cover here before we

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Bill Sutton: round it round this out.

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Todd Smith: Yeah. So so one other thing that provisioning services keeps getting compared to is machine creation services which are very similar image management

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Todd Smith: capabilities that Citrix has.

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Todd Smith: and customers are entitled to use. Either they're entitled to use both Mcs and Pbs.

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Todd Smith: One of the big things that we've now released is the ability to manage

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Todd Smith: Pvs

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Todd Smith: images within the Mcs consoles and the Mcs management.

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Bill Sutton: Oh, yeah, that's relatively new, isn't it?

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Todd Smith: It. It's very new. It's 1 of the newer releases capabilities. That's out. The and the benefit there is.

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Todd Smith: We understand that that Mcs may have a use case and Pvs. As a use case as well.

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Todd Smith: It used to be a choice that you would have to make early on in your design, your infrastructure design of your deployment. Now

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Todd Smith: you're going to be able to use both in there

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Todd Smith: and the other capabilities you'll hear. An awful lot is image portability

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Todd Smith: which is being able to take that those images and migrate them up to

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Todd Smith: azure or Gcp or other infrastructure components. Right? So there's a there's a huge benefit there. And this is something that has taken a little while to to kind of pull together.

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Todd Smith: But thanks to

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Todd Smith: our product management team kind of rethinking the way.

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Todd Smith: Some of these things can be done.

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Todd Smith: you know, in looking at it from an administrator's perspective and an architect's perspective, how to be able to make it more efficient and optimize that experience for not only the user but also for the administrative team.

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Bill Sutton: Absolutely

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Bill Sutton: Jeremy any other final thoughts.

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Geremy Meyers: No, no! Todd stole my thunder. I was thinking through how the integration points in the studio.

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Geremy Meyers: You know, starting to happen just to make it easier to manage. Also being able to use

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Geremy Meyers: studio as well to create the target devices right? So there's always been a separate console for Pbs, and

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Geremy Meyers: a lot of this is making it almost invisible, like there's still a streaming service, and there's those sorts of things. But listen! At the end of the day. It's you know. How easy can you make this to manage?

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Geremy Meyers: Yeah. You know. Given that you get 2 different approaches to image management like Todd, said Mcs. And and Pv. Pvs.

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Bill Sutton: Exactly. Yeah. So one thing I should point out, the art for the listeners is, if you read this article, you'll see it. It's very heavily mentions public sector workloads which are absolutely critical to use this type of technology, but it it is available to and works perfectly in commercial organizations. We have customers, integra have customers that are using Pds today to stream to stream the the vdas or the the workloads that users connect to. So it's

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Bill Sutton: 100% relevant to the commercial sector as well as the public sector, and certainly bears a look if you're not using it, or or you have a large environment that could benefit from it. The blog article does reference a tech brief that goes into more detail. So I encourage listeners to to head to that.

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Bill Sutton: Alright. So anything else, folks, Jeremy Todd, you guys have anything fun, any final final thoughts.

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Geremy Meyers: Yeah, it's good. It's good to see. Todd haven't seen.

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Bill Sutton: It is good.

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Geremy Meyers: So.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah.

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Geremy Meyers: Thanks for hopping on time.

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Todd Smith: It has been, and and you know, and I think the I think you brought us up, Bill, is that, you know, instead of saying, it's it's only applicable towards public sector accounts.

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Bill Sutton: Right. It's.

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Todd Smith: Really anyone who has a higher level of security requirement out there.

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Bill Sutton: True.

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Todd Smith: Or that we need the speed and efficiency and the protection of not having local hardware. I mean, this fits in

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Todd Smith: local hardware devices, such as you know, hard drives and the ability to lock down those endpoints. So really, you know, if you're looking at thin client as a

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Todd Smith: as an option. This is a great.

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Bill Sutton: Nothing.

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Todd Smith: Complementary technology towards a thin client. Approach.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, we had a client at 1 point that streamed

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Bill Sutton: the the thin client OS to the endpoint, and also stream the the Pv. Or the actual

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Bill Sutton: server workload. So they were using it for both in the same environment that really gave them a solid lockdown environment. They could manage from a single point. So, and security from a security perspective, it certainly enhanced that so definitely a lot of benefits here.

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Bill Sutton: Alright, gentlemen, thank you for participating. Today. We'll do it again next week.

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Todd Smith: Thank you.

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Geremy Meyers: Excellent thanks, Bill. Thanks Todd.

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Todd Smith: Thanks, Jeremy. See you, Bill.

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Bill Sutton: So, yeah.