A few years back, a rock star by the name of Rick Dehlinger created a reference design document that serves as a blueprint to document/implement Citrix farms. Starting in 2005, Roddy Rodstein maintained the document. Here is a brief explanation from the document itself: "The XenApp Platinum Reference Design is a best-practice based comprehensive standard. more...

Vishal Ganeriwala recently reported that Citrix's Dr. SDK has written a new white paper titled "The Ultimate Guide to MFCOM" (MFCOM is the API for Citrix Presentation Server/XenApp). The white paper covers everything up to SDK version 4.5 including advanced MFCOM topics such as multi farm management, publishing different types of applications, policies, load evaluators and more. This guide goes very deep into the internals of MFCOM, but it is written in such a way that beginners can pick it up. more...

One of the challenges that Citrix administrators face is keeping up with hotfixes, hotfix rollup packs, and patches. One of the cool things Citrix did with the new support site is set up RSS feeds for each product's updates. Just subscribe to the feeds you need in your favorite RSS reader. I have already subscribed to several of these feed using IE 7 RSS support. more...

A new utility titled "Citrix Fast Launch" will be released soon on the Citrix CDN site. This is kind of a unique tool because it was developed for internal use by the Citrix Application Delivery Team. The Citrix Application Delivery Team is responsible for rolling out XenApp and related products for internal use by Citrix (or Citrites). Anyway, this tool launches applications at workstation startup very quickly - quicker than your local applications in fact. more...

Citrix maintains a support article (Document ID: CTX107572) that contains a plethora of troubleshooting tools for your Citrix/Terminal Services environment. Most of the tools are targeted at Citrix installations, but there are several tools useful in a pure Terminal Services environment as well. At last count, there were 106 tools available. Some of these tools you will use on a daily basis - others you will use once in a blue moon. more...

If you use Citrix Web Interface or Program Neighborhood Agent, you have no doubt seen those buttons that say "Reconnect", "Disconnect", and "Logoff". Those buttons are part of a feature called Workspace Control - which is part of a feature called Smooth Roaming. The gist of Workspace Control is that user's sessions "follow" them between devices. more...

Microsoft recently released a video showcasing their "Presentation Virtualization" suite of products. In the video, Microsoft demonstrates how Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services, TS Web Access, TS Gateway, and TS RemoteApp work together to enable a remote workforce. The video is presented from both the administrator's point of view as well as a home user's point of view connecting to the corporate network. more...

The benefits of virtualizing Citrix XenApp (Presentation Server) servers in the past was often offset by performance and complexity trade-offs. more...

Citrix is hosting a webinar detailing the use of PowerShell and MFCOM to manage Citrix Presentation (XenApp) Servers. Brandon Shell and Vishal Ganeriwala will teach you all you ever wanted to know about this topic. PowerShell is one of my personal favorites. more...

Are you looking to get a better grasp of some of the features available in Citrix Presentation Server (XenApp)? Or, maybe you would like to see how a particular feature works that you might not be using. more...

In an earlier post, I presented a question as to how the features of Citrix Presentation Server (XenApp) compare to Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services. There is a new white paper available for download on the Citrix website that explores this issue in great detail. The cool thing about this white paper is that is was co-developed with a couple of members from the Microsoft Terminal Services team. more...

With the release of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services, there has been a lot of comparison with Citrix Presentation Server (XenApp) features. It does, in fact, seem that Microsoft has baked a lot of the Citrix XenApp functionality right in to the product. But, how do these features stack up with the Citrix features? That is the question Information Week's Randy George aimed to answer in an article titled "Rolling Review: Citrix XenApp Vs. Windows 2008 Terminal Services". more...

Did you know that Microsoft TechNet has a Terminal Services community? In this Terminal Services community you can find answers in Microsoft newsgroups, locate non-Microsoft Terminal Services communities, join in chats, and share best practices and tips with your peers. There are blogs from Microsoft employees, Terminal Services MVPs, top downloads, resources for web casts, knowledge base articles, and more. more...

There are several policy types in a Citrix Presentation Server (XenApp) environment including: Presentation Server Policies Active Directory Policies Local Server Policies Custom ADM Policies There are strengths and weaknesses to each. Because of the growing complexity of environments many enterprise organizations will require the use of two or three different policy types in the environment. more...

Did you know that Citrix is migrating several farm, server, and session policy settings to Microsoft Active Directory Group Policies? This integration will allow you to leverage some of the cool things Group Policy does - such as Resultant Set of Policy (RSOP), drag and drop servers between OU's for certain types of settings, policy overrides, etc. Juliano Maldaner has written a nice article explaining this. more...

PowerShell has quickly become one of my favorite scripting interfaces. One of the cool things about PowerShell is its object oriented design and use. This makes it easy to blend command line scripting with Citrix objects exposed via MFCOM. Brandon Shell has posted a nice example of manipulating Citrix policies using PowerShell. more...

What do you get when you mix Citrix Desktop Server, XenServer, and Citrix Provisioning Server? You get Citrix XenDesktop, and the beta is freely available at citrix.com. Al Solorzano recently downloaded XenDesktop beta and compared XenDesktop to VMWare Virtual Desktop Manager. Al does a good job of explaining the evolution of VDI and how both XenDesktop and VMWare fit in to this space. more...

Missed one of the recent Citrix technical webinars? No problem - Citrix records these webinars for on-demand viewing. Some of the most popular webinars have been posted on the official Citrix blog. I have personally attended almost all of these and there is a lot of information packed in these webinars. more...

The Terminal Services Session Broker is not a new idea in Windows Server 2008, but there have been some significant security and performance improvements over the previous version in Windows Server 2003. The Microsoft Terminal Services team has a blog post explaining some of the new improvements. In a Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services environment, "when a terminal server in a farm received a connection request, it created a temporary session to authenticate the user and load user policies. more...

In an earlier blog post, I mentioned that Microsoft had written a white paper detailing how Microsoft IT implemented Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services internally. The success of the MSIT project and the white paper have prompted an upcoming webcast by Microsoft - TechNet Webcast: How Microsoft IT Deployed Windows Terminal Services 2008 and Terminal Server Gateway Technologies (Level 300). more...