For those people (or just their RSS readers) who are subscribed/following this blog…

I just wanted to drop a quick note that I have not abandoned writing this blog.  I’ve got lot of ideas for future subjects, but I’ve been swamped at work and have not had the time necessary to put in the writing I like to do.

So in short, happy holidays.  I hope to get started writing again soon.

Take care,
Alain

While there are a variety of products in the virtualization market place, Citrix has provided alerting and monitoring with Resource Manager since the early days of MetaFrame.   Despite moving over to EdgeSight and other tools in our environments, we still utilize RM for watching certain metrics and sending e-mail alerts on them.  Recently, I found a limitation with the Monitoring Profiles present in XenApp 4.5. 

We have a number of similar servers in our environment and a distinct monitoring profile for them.  As we added and built servers we added them to this profile.  What was unusual, is that if you right-clicked on the server in the AMC and selected set monitoring the correct profile would be selected.  However, if you went to the profile itself and listed the servers, it did not show all of them.

It appears that the monitoring profile is limited to only display 30 servers at a time.  To ensure that all servers are actually being monitored and reported on, I simply duplicated the monitoring profile and assigned the remaining servers to it.  It remains to be seen if we get more data/alerts as a result of this, but then again, I’m calling this series stupid Citrix tricks.

Thanks,
Alain

We are currently working on a project to move from published applications to published desktops.  With all the logistical issues and complications to make this experience as smooth as possible, one silly annoyance cropped up.  When you log into a Citrix desktop via ICA you may see this:

ICA Login to XenApp Server

Typically, you don’t want to have your users see this because then the seemless desktop experience is a little tarnished.  There are a variety of ways to solve this problem, but the eaisest is to demonstrate your mad MSPaint skills.

On your XenApp system, look for ica256.bmp and ica.bmp under C:\Program Files\Citrix\System32.  All you have to do is open these files up and color them one solid color.  Once you do this, your users will see this:

ICA Login to XenApp Server modified

Voilà, now your users hopefully won’t notice that something is different.  Of course, that Windows 2003 Login may be a dead give away.

Thanks,
Alain

Currently, in my XenApp environment, we maintain nearly 300 published applications and desktops.  We also are adding 2 or 3 new applications a month.  Managing this many resources  is cumbersome especially when you rely on Session Sharing.  Session Sharing is described in the Citrix knowledge base article CTX159159 and basically causes all application launches to occur on the same XenApp server or within the same user session.  This provides a better experience for the user (since he does not have to wait for a new login to complete for every new application launched), in user management (since a user’s session is only on one XenApp server) and in user profile stability (since the user isn’t logged into multiple servers).

The main requirement for Session Sharing is to have the same application installed on all your servers.  The secondary requirements are less obvious, but listed in CTX159159.

They are:

• Color depth
• Screen Size
• Access Control Filters (for SmartAccess)
• Sound
• Drive Mapping
• Printer Mapping

The issue then becomes how does one review all their applications to determine that the above settings are consistent.  Pouring over the application properties in the AMC is a recipe for insanity (in my opinion).  In this post, will explore a couple of ways to ensure your applications settings are consistent.

Brute Force

The site Citrixtools.net provides a terrific resource to the French and international  Citrix community.  They have provided several terrific tools one of which is called XenApp App Manager.

CitrixTools.Net XenApp App Manager

With this tool you can apply a variety of application properties to as many or as few applications as you want, but this tool will not report on the current settings of your applications.  Also, this tool does not address Access Control Filters, Drive Mapping, or Printer Mapping.  So how do you gather this information?

PowerShell to the rescue

Citrix has fully embraced PowerShell (thankfully) with the development of Workflow Studio (version 2.0 was released this week).  At Synergy 2009, they also released a tech preview for a variety of XenApp PowerShell cmdlets (download the preview from this page).  These commands, while simple are very powerful and we can utilize one of them to output all the important settings necessary for consistent Session Sharing (see Brandon Shell’s excellent site about PowerShell and his post about these commands).

The following cmdlet will display all the application properties we need to check.

PS R:\> get-help Get-XAApplicationReport

NAME
Get-XAApplicationReport

SYNOPSIS
Gets detailed information for published applications.

SYNTAX
Get-XAApplicationReport [-BrowserName] <String[]> [-WhatIf] [-Confirm] [<CommonParameters>]

Get-XAApplicationReport -InputObject <XAApplication[]> [-WhatIf] [-Confirm] [<CommonParameters>]

DETAILED DESCRIPTION
This cmdlet gets detailed information for published applications, including associations, such as servers, accounts, file types and icons.

RELATED LINKS
Get-XAApplication

REMARKS
For more information, type: “get-help Get-XAApplicationReport -detailed”.
For technical information, type: “get-help Get-XAApplicationReport -full”.

This command displays many properties, but to display the ones we are interested in for session sharing we’ll use the following command:

Get-XAApplicationReport * | select DisplayName, WindowType, ColorDepth, ConnectionsThroughAccessGatewayAllowed, OtherConnectionsAllowed, AccessSessionConditionsEnabled, AudioType, AudioRequired, SslConnectionEnabled, EncryptionLevel, EncryptionRequired, WaitOnPrinterCreation

Piping this command to format-table -wrap will ensure that all the data will display. After this, you can output to a text or spreadsheet file and compare all the properties to make sure they are consistent.

Thanks,
Alain

Looks like the Citrix marketing department is ramping up.  Check out these webinars if you have time.  Subjects cover Provisioning Services,  Server and Desktop Virtualization, and Netscaler.  Training is always the first cut made to budgets so take advantage.

Simplifying Implementation of Provisioning Services

Best TCO for Server Virtualization

Join the discussion and get the answers you need on virtualizing your servers and how Citrix® XenServer™ gives you…

NetScaler – Providing High Availability for XenApp

Strengthening your Application Virtualization Strategy

Moving Load Balancing Technology Forward

Exploit the Latest Load Balancing Technologies

Reduce Desktop Management Costs, Improve IT, Security & Agility

Join us for this Webinar and hear firsthand from experts at Citrix and CSC how you can cost-effectively implement a more secure and accessible enterprise desktop environment for your workforce. Find out how Citrix and CSC have joined together to deliver desktop virtualization as a managed service to their clients. Also, learn how this technology has transformed the operations of both commercial and public sector enterprises and provided quantifiable business value.

Server Virtualization and Storage Best Practices

Recently, Guy M Turner, Inc. consolidated their IT infrastructure with XenServer and NetApp and added disaster recovery for servers running everything from specialized trucking to crane management applications.

Successfully Migrating Users to Virtual Desktops

“Once organizations have determined to implement a virtual desktop solution, and the environment has been designed to align with business and user requirements, users must be seamlessly migrated from their physical endpoints to their new virtual desktop. Ideally, users should be unaware their desktop is now virtual. Without building a proper environment and migration plan, users will be forced to learn a new system, reconfigure their application settings, and re-build their personal environment.

Designing an Enterprise VDI Architecture with XenDesktop

“When an organization identifies the need for a VDI solution, infrastructure architecture must be carefully designed. Virtualizing a user’s physical desktop and migrating the image into the data center will provide a VDI solution, but requires different management, maintenance, and support from a local desktop to meet the needs of the users.

Virtual Desktops or Virtual Applications – Your Best Solution

“Everyone uses a desktop device, regardless if they are running virtualized applications on XenApp, web-based applications or locally installed applications. While virtual desktops are all the rage in IT, many organizations are trying to figure out where VDI fits within their infrastructure. Some organizations are following an all-or-nothing route where every user is converted to a virtual desktops but many others are trying to align the VDI solution to specific user requirements. When does a user need a full-blown virtual desktop vs. a desktop appliance vs. an offline desktop?

Storage Best Practices for Desktop Virtualization

Last night, I upgraded a couple of our XenApp administration servers to the latest version of the Access Management Console (v. 4.6.4).  Ah, the AMC, we didn’t know how good we had it with the old CMC.  Anyway, I did the upgrade to address the slowness of using this console in our environment.  Discovery and doing most functions took a long time.

So, the upgrade went without issue and in the morning my co-workers remarked that the AMC is a lot more usable.  Of course, within an hour I found the same issue that several have written about in the Citrix forums like here and here.  Looking at a published application list on any of the servers resulted in stopping the IMA service on the server used for discovery.

There is a private hotfix available here.  You will have to have a valid MyCitrix login to get this hotfix.  I’m trying to get it now to see if it resolves the issue.

We also found the same issue with AMC 5.0.1 for Windows Server 2008.

Thanks,
Alain

Out since late May of this year, Citrix XenApp Power and Capacity Management Technology is currently available as a tech preview here.  iForum 2009 in Melbourne just finished and they demonstrated this technology in the closing keynote.  The use of this technology can really make a difference in your bottom line in terms of power and cooling savings.  It is a rethinking of XenApp’s mature load balancing technology and is another way of looking at server utilization (which was much of the argument for moving towards server virtualization a few years ago).   This product, combined with Provisioning Server, is perfect for the environment I manage.  Our farm is over-built in anticipation of an event that would force most employees to telework, so our servers are typically underutilized.  Check out the video below.

Thanks,
Alain

In the first part of this series, we covered gathering data on external users and how to parse that data into a database.  To generate the data to show how your Citrix farm positively impacts the environment and quality of life for your teleworkers, you need to get the average statistics for them.  Governments gather this data as it pertains to their own telework programs.

The U.S. government site, telework.gov, provides a one-stop-shop for general information, but no hard data except for number of participants at the various agencies.  We need a site that will give us savings on money, fuel, and pollutants. 

The Telework Exchange has a lot of papers and studies, and it provides statisics for yourself, based on location and miles driven.

The most detailed information I’ve been able to find so far, is the Undress4Success site.  This site has quite of bit of information as well as links to job boards and details of “work at home” scams.  They also have done a lot of the work of analyzing many telework studies and making it available to visitors.

For this example dashboard, I’ll track gas saved and green house gas savings.

For gas saved in my geographic area, this is 2,847,724 gallons saved per year or approximately 177 gallons per teleworker (16,058) or roughly 0.50 gallons saved per person/per day teleworking.

Following the same method for greenhouse gases, 26,991 metric tons are saved annually.  Using Google to convert this to pounds, gives us 59,504,969 pounds saved.  This breaks down to 10 pounds saved per person/per day teleworking.

Using these amounts to start with we can show the amount of gas and greenhouse gas emissions someone is saving per day when they use our Citrix farm.   This is just a starting point, we could expand this to other cost savings for the teleworker and for the company as well which I’ll cover at the end of this series.

XenServer, while not as mature an enterprise product as VMWare’s offerings is bridging the gap quickly (competion is a good thing .)  Citrix has recently released XenServer 5.5 which we are looking at to virtualize our XenApp servers.  Today, Citrix has created XenServer Central to consolidate all the information available for this product.  I plan on installing the free version at home in my lab and will post my experience soon.

Do yourself a favor and read John Smith’s post on the new Citrix Netscaler VPX (currently available as a tech preview at Citrix.com).  John has written a great article detailing how the Netscaler VPX is a real game changer and how to set it up in your own lab via a UtipU video.

Netscaler VPX Beyond the Lab

Thanks,
Alain