Stupid Citrix Tricks – 2

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

Stupid Citrix Tricks – 1

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

Published Application Consistency

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

Citrix Webinars aplenty

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

In this session, we’ll discuss Best Practices for Simplifying Implementation of Provisioning Services using new features of Provisioning Services 5.1.

You’ll learn about:

• Read-only vDisk Storage
• Multi-Partitioning Imaging
• Offline Database Support
• User Assigned vDisks

Register Below:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/232926936

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Best TCO for Server Virtualization

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

• Server Virtualization enterprise-class features at no cost for XenApp customers
• 70% more users per Citrix XenApp™ server than any other server virtualization solution
• Centralized multi-server management with the intuitive XenCenter console
• Live migration with XenMotion

Register Below:
http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/events/event.asp?eventID=1855869

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NetScaler – Providing High Availability for XenApp

Learn how to provide maximum availability, automatic disaster recovery and secure remote access to your Citrix XenApp™ environment with the seamless addition of Citrix® NetScaler™ and Citrix XenServer™.

Register now for this informative seminar — you’ll discover how
NetScaler and XenServer can make your XenApp environment
even more robust by providing:

• Fast, proactive XenApp server recovery — even at remote sites
• Continuous app availability across multi-site environments with Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB)
• Secure remote access to applications
• Zero-downtime XenApp server maintenance

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to make your XenApp
environment more dependable than ever. Sign up for this
complimentary seminar today!

Register Below:
http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/events/event.asp?eventID=1856259

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Strengthening your Application Virtualization Strategy

If you are seeking to learn more about the most effective way of delivering Windows applications as a service then you don’t want to miss this. Join us as we chat about what makes XenApp a logical choice for application management and virtualization. You will learn about functionality that enables you to centrally manage a single instance of each application and deliver it to users for online and offline use, while providing a better than installed user experience. Attend this webinar and get the answers and insight you need about purchasing or upgrading to XenApp 5.0. Grab your coffee and be part of the discussion!

• Discuss application and functionality
• See how it works
• Learn about XenApp Fundamentals for small business
• Gain insight on other technologies that make XenApp 5 a logical choice

Attendees will receive a Starbuck’s gift card valued at $5.00

Register Below:
http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/events/event.asp?eventID=1856255

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Moving Load Balancing Technology Forward

If you are seeking to learn more about advanced application delivery controllers that improve upon Load balancing and help ensure application availability, increased security, and reduced TCO for web application delivery and cloud computing environments, then you don’t want to miss this. Attend this webinar and get the answers and insight you need about network load balancing technologies. Grab your coffee and be part of the discussion!

• Leveraging multi-core processing to improve performance
• Advanced web-application delivery with easy to use virtual appliances
• Ensuring High Availability and security
• Gaining High Availability and ensure 100% uptime for all users

Attendees will receive a Starbuck’s gift card valued at $5.00

Register Below:
http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/events/event.asp?eventID=1856254

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Exploit the Latest Load Balancing Technologies

Don’t let your basic load balancer hold back your network infrastructure any longer. Join us for this webinar and find out how you can get a smarter, more efficient application delivery network to ensure app availability, increase security and reduce TCO for web applications and cloud computing environments.

Learn how Citrix® NetScaler® delivers more applications to more users including advanced Web 2.0 apps without increasing network & server costs.

In this webinar learn how Citrix NetScaler:

• Delivers 7x increased in performance and scalability with new nCore™ technology
• Ensures 100% app availability with L4-7 load balancin
• Slashes server costs by up to 60%

Register Below:
http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/events/event.asp?eventID=1856101

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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.

Register now to learn how CSC & Citrix:

• Reduce desktop management, hardware, and support costs
• Ensure greater data and system security
• Achieve increased organizational and workforce flexibility
• Simplify IT Management

Register Below:
http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/events/event.asp?eventID=1856100

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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.

Join us for a live Webcast to learn how they used NetApp with Citrix XenServer and XenApp to address their challenges.

Specifically, you will learn how Guy M Turner was able to:

• Virtualize XenApp server farms, reducing support calls and improving user experience
• Save over 60% on future storage system maintenance and support
• Gain faster “rollback” capability for application update testing and deployment
• Disaster-proof the company’s IT systems and operations
• Consolidate and better manage existing XenApp, server and storage infrastructure

Register Below:
http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/events/event.asp?eventID=1856107

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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.

This TechTalk focuses on the process, options and recommendations for successfully migrating users from their physical endpoints to virtual desktops.”

Register Below:
http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/events/event.asp?eventID=1855107

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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.

This TechTalk focuses on the core design decisions that impacts the overall virtual desktop design. These decision areas include understanding the users, organizational layout, current organizational infrastructure.”

Register Below:
http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/events/event.asp?eventID=1855106

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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?

This TechTalk, which is part 1 in a 3-part series, will look at understanding and identifying how organizations should align their users with the correct desktop solution.”

Register Below:
http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/events/event.asp?eventID=1855105

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Storage Best Practices for Desktop Virtualization

Do you have questions about the best way to rapidly and efficiently deploy virtual desktops; how to handle VDI boot storms; or how to meet demanding recovery requirements necessary to make desktops continuously available? Get answers in real time and watch a brief VDI demo.

Join us for a live online Q&A/chat session with a panel of NetApp and Citrix experts who can answer basic and expert-level questions. You’ll have the opportunity to ask specific questions, as well as see the answers to questions asked by your peers.

Register Below:
http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/events/event.asp?eventID=1855038

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Thanks,
Alain

Citrix Admin Do’h Moment – AMC 4.6.4

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

XenApp Power and Capacity Management (Project Litoria) Technology

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

Creating a Green Dashboard – Part 2

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 Central

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.

XenServer Central – The One Place to Go

The release of the free enterprise-ready XenServer virtualization infrastructure in February lowered the adoption barriers for a full managed platform, and the subsequent release of XenServer 5.5 last week has kicked the excitement up a notch.

One of the things we have noticed, though, is that some new XenServer users have had a difficult time navigating our web presence and finding all of the XenServer-specific information. The fact that we offer the compete Citrix Delivery Center solution, with powerful end-to-end delivery of all types of applications, offers a powerful set of capabilities — but all that information can make it difficult when what you’re trying to do is find all of the product information, news, and support resources for one product.

So we are now launching XenServer Central – a home on the web for all things XenServer.

You’ll find everything there from pointers to product information and documentation to the latest press releases and articles to white papers to informational videos… even an easy way to follow our XenServer Army feed on Twitter (as well as other Twitter posts about XenServer).

You’ll even find some surprises, like our “How I Found Xen” contest rules.

Check it out, bookmark it, and stop back often.  It’s the quickest and easiest way to stay up-to-date on all things XenServer.

Read the entire article here.

The Virtual Netscaler – VPX

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

Creating a Green Dashboard – Part 1

Using tools to gather external logins to the Citrix Farm

There are a variety of ways to distinguish internal and external users of your Citrix farm.  The method we employ is to utilize the logging that’s part of any Citrix Secure Ticket Authority (STA) in your Citrix Farm.  You can turn logging on your designated STA’s by following the information in this Citrix article: CTX101997.  Turning this on gives us the following data in logs (located at %PROGRAMFILES%\Citrix\Logs\)

…
INFORMATION 2009/05/20:00:13:22 CSG1305 Request Ticket - Successful. A995AD36B87524A208BB23A804AC3110 V1 CSGTestData Thisistheextendeddata
INFORMATION 2009/05/20:00:13:22 CSG1303 Ticket timed out. A8478127C7971E4CD95C28FFD2B85BBE
INFORMATION 2009/05/20:00:13:23 CSG1305 Request Ticket - Successful. FF985D4B11DA3AE7B6CBBAA9CA833415 V1 CSGTestData Thisistheextendeddata
INFORMATION 2009/05/20:00:13:23 CSG1303 Ticket timed out. CDE1751C367B45506481C26727C3E6C1
INFORMATION 2009/05/20:00:13:23 CSG1305 Request Ticket - Successful. 19078A551F501BCC0F77E7361EE76CAD V1 CSGTestData Thisistheextendeddata
INFORMATION 2009/05/20:00:13:23 CSG1303 Ticket timed out. 414CB490647B8A2FCE023D66E7D0850E
…
and so on.   You will need to parse for a line like the following:
INFORMATION 2009/05/20:00:13:24 CSG1305 Request Ticket - Successful. 5C6C67EB127CFDB0821DC88CA1C10972 V4 CGPAddress = XXX.XXX.XX.XXX:2598:localhost:1494 Refreshable = false XData = XXX.XXX.XX.XXX:1494USER@DOM.COMRemote Desktop AccessICA ICAAddress = XXX.XXX

From the above line we can get the ticket status, the username, the published application, and the target server that hosts the application. When this is parsed and placed in a database, we can associate a time and date with the ticket creation and determine how long the user is logged in and what applications they are running. 

To accomplish the data gathering, we use tools from InterSect Alliance like Epilog Agent for Windows to tail the stalog files.  This raw data is then sent to a server running Kiwi SysLog.  Kiwi parses the data (using a script) and then inserts it into a database table.  We’ve found these tools to be inexpensive and have a low resource utilization. 

So, to sum up we have external users connecting to our Citrix farm and STA logs generating when they connect, what they run, and what server they connect to.  We parse the logs into a database and that gives us a real-time/historical record of the user’s use of our Citrix farm.    Next post will cover gathering average telecommuting statistics from the Internet.

Thanks,
Alain