My Virtual Vision - Kees Baggerman blog

The last couple of days there is a lot of positive but also some negative commotion in the twittersphere about the announcements made at Citrix Summit/Synergy in SF.

Some of the announcements made:

• Server hosted VDI
• XenClient Enterprise (Citrix’s acquisition of Virtual Computer)
• Project Avalon
• a new release of AppDNA
• Project Aruba
• HP’s HDX SoC
• ShareFile, Podio and Receiver integration
• FP1 for XA
• The HTML5 Receiver
• CloudGateway 2
• GloudBridge 2

And much more..

What I see and hear is that people are disappointed about the fact that there are supposedly no major releases announced of XenServer, XenDesktop and XenApp but the real wow factor lies in the fact that Citrix is finally integration integrating all of their the “point” solutions bought in the last couple of years, so we can deliver the best services possible in the simplest way to our end users. Looking at Project Avalon, we were told that it’s an a complete stack of Citrix (or and non-Citrix) products to deliver services:

 

Project Avalon is a powerful new solution that brings together a wide range of Citrix technologies to help customers deliver any Windows app or desktop as a true cloud service. Rapidly deploy personalized Windows apps and desktops in a flexible, private cloud environment across single or multiple sites and utilize public clouds in a “capacity-on-demand” fashion. Leveraging the new Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack, makes it easy for existing customers to adopt new features at whatever pace they like. This allows them to mix and match different versions of Microsoft Windows Server®, Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenApp and span across any mix of public and private cloud infrastructure to host and deliver powerful, effective work styles for all users.

 

The architecture of Avalon:

On a high level this is an interesting article: http://blogs.citrix.com/2012/05/09/project-avalon-what-does-this-mean-to-me/

From a technical level this is a good explanation: http://blogs.citrix.com/2012/05/09/project-avalon-automating-windows-app-and-desktop-delivery/

So in the architectural overview makes clear that all products are used in Project Avalon are integrated to a complete solution, I heard a Citrite once say: “We’ve got all the right ingredients to make the bake, all we have to do..” Looks like Citrix is baking the cake as we speak.

Think about it, the integration between ShareFile, Podio and the Receiver leverages all the best of those point solutions with a single point of access, Project Avalon creates a vendor agnostic provisioned cloud platform which can deliver resources without interference of an IT organisation.

So the real ‘wow’ faction in integration, maybe it’s save to say that integration is the new innovation?

A couple of weeks ago Microsoft came to Inter Access to give a Windows 8 Demo Mania event, they mentioned the Scenario based RDS deployment so that triggered me to look into it and the result is this video. I hope this clarifies how scenario based deployment works:

 

I’m using two Win8 Server VM’s on Hyper-V 2.0, just installed them with the ISO and added them to the domain. As you can see the whole deployments is just a few clicks and the configuration is completely automated.

 

After installation you can browse to the installation directory and start the Generator, this provides a couple of options:

• Create a settings location template
• Edit a settings location template
• Validate a settings location template

So when I click on ‘Create a setting location template’ the following screen pops up:

So you can browse to the path of the application and click on next to discover locations. I selected Notepad.exe as application as I’m using a default installation of Windows. After clicking on ‘Next’ the wizard proceeds to discover locations.

 

You can review these location and confirm them by editing the properties, as you can see in the following screenshot you can change Registry and Files as well. The next step is to finish the template and store it in a template storage location.

 

 

In my case the template of Notepad showed the  following:

Because the discover didn’t work and I didn’t add registry settings or files manual it’s a pretty basic XML file. From the client side you have to install an agent and load the XML files so application settings are being imported when needed.

 

Although it’s a lot of work to define which application uses which registry keys and files it’s crucial information! This type of information is normally underrated and can speed up deployments and migrations by light-years.

So is this a step forward? Yes it is and there is a use case for this technology, like Shawn Bass and Helge Klein discussed on twitter it’s probably in the category ‘Just good enough’ for some situations.

As being new tech it’s pretty limited as it does only profile management and no workspace management. That’s where AppSense and RES Software come in, they deliver a complete solution. I can imagine that RES/AppSense and maybe Liquidware Labs are excited by this announcement because customers who have a business case for such technology will soon discover that there’s so much more to manage than application settings and will be looking for the complete solution.

 

I was helping out on a project with XA.65 and RES WM 2011 in combination with mandatory profiles. The customer wanted to pre-define some settings in Office using the Run-Once option but after some tests we noticed that these settings weren’t preserved, obviously the files and registry settings modified to make these changes weren’t in the Global Settings Template for the Office installation we’re using.

 

Going through all these files and registry settings can be pretty time consuming so I used http://gps.cloudapp.net to track down the GPO’s we’re using and thus tracking down the registry settings we’re using. In this example I was configuring the value of  ”Capitalize first letter of sentence”.

 

After adding these registry settings to the template the settings where stored and consistent.

 

As the Customer Preview of Windows 8 was released yesterday and I had some additional time today I wanted to install the VDA in the Windows 8 CP. I already tried it with the Windows 8 developers release but that wouldn’t work, it came up with the Windows 8 version of a BSOD. So with this new release and the release of VDA Version 5.5.100 I thought why not just try again.

So I installed VMware Workstation 8 and loaded the Windows8-ConsumerPreview-64bit-English.iso and followed the install steps on HelmersBlog, after installation I downloaded the VDA as mentioned above.  When I tried the installation it gave an error that Windows 7, Vista or XP (strange how 7 is listed first btw) was needed to install this VDA.

 

Next step was to download ORCA to create a MST file so this requirement wasn’t bothering my installation again, after the download and installation I opened the MSI, created an MST and edited the LaunchCondition. After saving the MST I could run the command to install the MSI using the MST without the version check:

 

XdsAgent_x64.MSI TRANSFORMS=DisableVersionCheck.mst

After running this command I could get past the version check but the installer warned me about the .Net Framework 3.5 SP1, this is a default Windows 8 feature so I could enable it from the Control Panel – Programs and Features:

 

But during the installation it went to a BSOD with the stopcode STOP 0x0000001E: KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED, I’m going to look into this but according to Barry Schiffer it has something to do with the graphics so I guess I’ll be fooling around some more with this install. I’ll keep you posted and if you have some suggestions just let me know!

 

 

Yesterday I was discussing the Mobility pack with a co-worker on a project and he told me his start menu was changed. After logging into the desktop with my iPad I recognized the mobility pack (which is a good step in new functionality). He was wondering how it got installed so after some investigation he found the reason, he had been installing hotfixes on his system and installed Hotfix XA650W2K8R2X64011 and the readme says:

This release is a part of the XenApp 6.5 Mobility Pack. Documentation for the mobility pack is available in eDocs athttp://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/xenapp65-w2k8/ps-mobility-pack-landing-page.html. To install the mobility pack in its entirety, you must install:

• Server hotfix XA650W2K8R2X64011.msp
• Group Policy Management Console hotfixes CitrixGroupPolicyManagement_x64.msi (GPMx150WX64002) and/or CitrixGroupPolicyManagement_x86.msi (GPMx150WX86002)

After installing the GPMC Hotfixes he was able to disable the Mobility pack via policies. One of the stranger things we noticed was that although the C: drive was hidden via policies it could be accessed when using the Mobility pack, I remembered Dennis van Dam saying something like that on twitter and I found the following threat on the Citrix forums  Mobility Pack and Group Policies where other people were having the same experiences but the topic seems to be dead, when there’s an update I will test it and report it back in this blogpost.

 

On Thursday 16th of Februari the RES PartnerFocus event was held in the Verkade factory  in Den Bosch, during this event RES Software informs it’s partners about the results of the past year and the plans for the upcoming year. There where a lot of good sessions planned but first the opening keynote was given which was followed by a session on IT Consumerization and ‘Iedereen de werkplek die het beste werkt’ (a follow up on ‘Making the desktop dynamic’).

After the first break a couple of sessions you could choose a track to attend:

Licensing & Packaging RES Workspace Manager 2012: What’s new Strategisch Pitchen RES Automation Manager 2012: What’s new Bring your own.. Whatever IT is een Dienst met de dynamische werkplek Service Orchestration is een koekie Gratis en voor niks een werkplek die voor iedereen het beste werkt Neem een duik in de werkplek die het beste werkt RES Software partner strategie update

Rob Aarts, Patrick Kaak and Ingmar Verheij did an excellent job on a wrap up of news from this event:

Highlights van de RES Software Partner Dag (In Dutch by Patrick Kaak)

Be aware, RES is about to unleash WM2012! (by Ingmar Verheij)

RG043 – RES AM: Dispatcher+ Explained (by Rob Aarts)

 

At the end of the day there was an award ceremony for the Partner of the year award, the fastest growing partner of the year award and the RES Software Most Valuable Professional of 2011 award. I was awarded as RSMVP, according to RES because of my blog, social media appearance and the contacts with RES Support and Product Development to improve growth and quality of the products from RES Software.

I want to thank Inter Access for the time I get to write my blog posts and of course everyone at RES Software but special thanks goes out to Bob Dekousemaeker, Grant Tiller and all the helpful and knowledgeable people at RES Support.

I was working on a project and one of the sys admins wanted to display which thin clients where logged on, so we made a script to export all active thin clients to a txt file. He could make a script that would enumerate that txt file into HTML to display the occupied thin clients on a screen at the entrance so employees could determine which client they could use that day.

 

Source code   

1. set-executionpolicy remotesigned
2.  
3. if (Get-PSSnapin Citrix.XenApp.Commands -ea 0)
4. {
5.     Write-Host "Citrix.XenApp.Commands snapin already loaded" -ForegroundColor Yellow
6. }
7. else
8. {
9.     if (Get-PSSnapIn "Citrix.XenApp.Commands" -registered -ea 0)
10.     {
11.         Write-Host "Loading Citrix.XenApp.Commands snapin..." -ForegroundColor Yellow
12.         Add-PSSnapin "Citrix.XenApp.Commands"
13.     }
14. }
15.  
16. Function Global:Get-CtxCommand
17. {
18.     param([string[]] $Name = "*")
19.     Get-Command $Name -CommandType Cmdlet, Function `
20.         -Module Citrix.XenApp.Commands |
21.         Sort Noun, Verb | Out-Host -Paging
22. }
23.  
24. Get-XASession -Farm | where { $_.Protocol -eq "Ica" -and $_.State -eq "Active" -and $_.ClientName -ne $null -and $_.ClientName -like "TCL*" } | Format-List -Property ClientName | Out-File \\servername\sharename\ActiveTCs.txt

Here’s the script, it’s pretty straight forward: It gets the Citrix.XenApp.Commands snapin if it’s not already in place and lists the information based on active ICA sessions and the only when the client name starts with TCL (Thin Client names based on the naming conventions for this customer).

Output is as following:

ClientName : TCL0004

ClientName : TCL0003

ClientName : TCL0001

ClientName : TCL0002

ClientName : TCL0008

I can’t published the script to enumerate the txt file as it contains to much customer details but I’m sure this is a good start to create the same interface for your users. In this case we used RES Automation Manager to run the script every 5 minutes so employees would know where they could work.

After Dane Young wrote an excellent blogpost on how to setup a load balanced multi-node Citrix Receiver StoreFront Server group for use with the Citrix Cloud Gateway I used his information and screenshots to build a similar environment. The only thing that’s different from Dane’s stetup is that we were using Cisco ACE’s for loadbalancing. We created a setup with two Cisco ACE 4710′s in an HA pair (Hot-standby) on both of the available data centers.  The ACE can be divided into virtual contexts, so we were able to create a separated management configuration and dedicated resources for the SBC/VDI configuration.

 

So to configure this please use Dane’s blog because he has all the screenshots and information needed to complete the setup but instead of configuring the Netscaler(s) like this:

Similar to Access Gateways, the actual load balancer setup is rather involved, so I will just cover the pieces that are important.  1) Create an LB VIP that ties to the http(s) (80/443) services and IP addresses of your Receiver Storefront servers. I simply used tcp for the monitor:

2) On the method and persistence tab, I used Method: Least Connection, Persistence: Cookieinsert with a backup persistence of SourceIP. Note, my storefront.vm.2k8 DNS record points to the load balancer VIP.

 

Like I said, you can configure different virtual contexts so we did, as we are using the ACE’s for the new Exchange environment too and the Administrator virtual context.

The Cisco ACE is configured to listen on the Virtual IP addressess (VIP) for traffic that has to be load balanced. These VIP’s are virtual ‘servers’ within a configured virtual context. Layer 3/4 and 7 policy-maps are assigned to these VIP’s so you can configure what the ACE has to do with the incoming traffic for this VIP. The VIP will be configured to a server farm that contains the physical IP addressess (this can be a VM on a hypervisor or aphysical server).

 

Both the StoreFront servers are added to the proper group so load balancing will be done over both nodes.

On the real servers are Health probes active, these Health probes will probe on ports or services and will make sure the webservices are available when routing traffic to one of the available nodes. For this group we configured two probes:

• Ping probe: basic availability
• http probe: availability of the web service

When the probe gives a different result than configured the server will be transfered to an “Out of Service” state and no additional traffic will be routed to this node.

 

So we configured Real Servers but there’s no mechanism yet to configure them into a clustered resource so we have to create server farms. Server Farms are groups combined on resources that have to be load balanced. In this case we’ve added two web servers with the Cloud Gateway Express software installed on them.

 

Don’t forget to set the VLAN and the NAT pool ID otherwise your VIP will be available and will round robin ICMP requests based on availability but won’t load balance the ports you already specified. This happened to one of our configurations and being new with Cisco ACE’s it took me a while to find the ‘Advanced View’ tab as you can see in the right-top of the screen. Be sure to set this with the proper values and you’re off!

In the end the base configuration took some time but adding a VIP, Real Servers and Server Farms was relatively easy. I was able to configure the complete scenario within a couple of hours. If you don’t have a Netscaler or Netscaler knowledge this could be a valid solution for you too.

 

 

 

Yesterday one of my colleagues reported an error at one of our customers stating the following while logging onto a published desktop (XA6.5 with RES WM2011): “The item referred to by this shortcut cannot be accessed. You may not have the appropriate permissions”. The error was displayed by pfwsmgr.exe.

 

If you clicked on the red cross in your taskbar you would see that the RES Workspace Manager – Workspace Composer is displaying this error and when the Workspace Composer was selected there would be another error message stating that there’s no access to the device, path or file, basically it was giving an access denied message.

 

When we used ProcMon to determine which process was causing this message we found that Workspace Manager had some problems locating the programs that where run from the network. After that it was pretty clear what the problem was, somebody was editing the NTFS permissions on the fileshare which hosted those program. The user couldn’t access that fileshare anymore so Workspace Manager couldn’t proceed with building the start menu.

I want to thank Misja for the screenshots and for helping me write this blogpost.