Throughout the last couple of years, I have published multiple, so-called ultimate cheat sheets around the FMA, Citrix printing, and application layering. But also around IoT networking and IOPS in general, for example. Looking through my website statistics I can see that these articles or small e-books are by far the most popular, even the older ones. Because of this, and because I like to have them a bit more organized myself – they really come in handy from time to time – I decided to bundle them all into one page, for your convenience. The ultimate cheat sheet page, if you will. Next to this blogpost, you’ll also find it here (the page itself).
For your convenience – 100+ Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop FMA facts listed!
I like, no wait, I love lists… there, I’ve said it. But no, really, I think (bulleted) lists are one of the best ways to share facts and knowledge. That’s also why I used multiple lists in my book, dozens of them containing hundreds of bulleted (FMA) facts. Throughout the various chapters I highlight multiple so-called ‘FMA facts’, 116 in total to be exact and I conclude each chapter with a list of key takeaways. This post is meant to share with you most of the FMA Facts that I came up while writing The FlexCast Management Architecture, though I did slightly alter quite a few of them.
Citrix printing internals cheat sheet… Part one!
A user clicks print, what happens next? When Citrix is thrown in the mix things work a bit differently. Although the Microsoft print basics still apply, and I’ll discuss them shortly, the way that print traffic will, or can be, routed throughout your environment depends on, one: the physical setup of your machines and printers and, two: the Citrix (print) policies configured. Due note that I will only focus on native Citrix printing and won’t go over any of the third party solutions out there.
Houdini’s guide to Citrix printing… My contribution to the first ever Virtual Expo!
This was/is the title of my presentation, which I presented at the first ever Virtual Expo powered by Xenappblog.com on September 30th 2015. And what a ride it turned out to be. A great event with some top-notch speakers, awesome content and for me personally it was my first ever webinar. Have a look at the recording below. I really enjoyed some of the research involved, making the slides and of course presenting all this during the Virtual Expo conference, a great initiative. Let me know what you think. Note that I’m also working on a detailed blog post to go with it, give me a few weeks. And yes, I know, I’ll make sure to keep an eye on my mouse pointer the next time :)
Troubleshooting one on one
During the past few weeks I’ve collected a set of tools which assist in troubleshooting XenApp and XenDesktop orientated architectures. Before you continue make sure you have a look at the Citrix Brief Troubleshooting Guide: support.citrix.com/article/CTX106727 and the Citrix Logon Optimization Guide: support.citrix.com/article/CTX128277. Both are a MUST read with lots of tips and tricks, what and when to ask, and dozens of knowledge base articles including explanations on the logon processes etc…
Citrix Printing Pathway… an overview
Citrix printing can be, or at least can be made, pretty complex, unfortunately I had to find out the hard way myself. When troubleshooting print issues the path a print job follows throughout your infrastructure is always a good place to start especially when its performance related. However, you do need to understand the differences between the various routes a print job can take, why and where it could impact performance. I remember a few years back all this got me buzzing… Let’s start and see what comes up.