When I was thinking about what to write next I thought it might be a good idea to use something ‘from the field’, an issue that I’ve been involved in personally during the past two weeks or so. Then I figured, why just discuss one specific use case when there is so much more to tell. So I won’t, instead I’ll focus on troubleshooting in general and use my ‘real world’ example as a reference throughout this article.
Continue reading Troubleshooting Citrix XenDesktop & XenApp 7.x ? Read this !
When Citrix re-released their XenApp and XenDesktop products not that long ago, things changed. XenApp’s Independent Management Architecture, IMA, was no more and got replaced by XenDesktop’s Flexcast Management Architecture, or FMA. With it some of the functionality and features loved and used by many disappeared as well. Features like Sessions Lingering, Anonymous Users, Pre-Launch and a few more, were missed, and for some this even became one of the main reasons not to migrate at that time. Luckily Citrix has again reinstated some of the most popular features known to XenApp 6.5, again, not all, but some, in its latest XenApp release, version 7.6.
Continue reading Connection Leasing vs. Local Host Cache. Conclusion? CL doesn’t stand a chance!
I don’t want to spend to much time talking about the different kinds of editions and or licenses available, if you want to know about those I suggest you check out one of my previous articles here, or just give citrix.com a visit. Throughout this article I’d like to briefly focus on some of the basic terminology and traffic flow that comes with the NetScaler Gateway edition providing our users with secure remote access. This (the Gateway edition) is probably one of the most popular NetScaler implementations today, although, and as you might know, the NetScalers ADC edition also has the Gateway functionality build-in and can provide us with a bunch of additional features as well. Let’s have a look shall we?!
During the past few months I have spend a considerable amount of time looking at various storage related topics. Among others I discussed Web Scale technology as part of converged and software defined architectures, with Nutanix being one of the main vendors, next I also took a, somewhat, deeper dive into the wondrous world of IOPS where I talked about some of their characteristics and ways to potentially enhance performance and the end user experience, which are still two of the main concerns when dealing with these bad boys. Throughout this article I want to take a closer look at some of the differences between block vs file level storage, the accompanying file systems, the different protocols used, potential block sizes and some of the characteristics of VMware VMFS in particular.
Continue reading Block vs file level storage, VMware VMFS, NTFS and some of the protocols involved.
About two months ago I released my ultimate XenMobile survival guide. It’s packed with over 80 notes, general tips & tricks, best practices, recommendations and lessons learned from the filed with regards to XenMobile implementations. When people subscribed they would immediately receive their own personal copy (they still do by the way), which was sort of a test for me personally. As far as I am concerned my experiment worked out very well, over 200 people subscribed and it was well received throughout the community, thank you all very much! As of today it is available in my download section as well, of course it is still a 100% free and you won’t need to subsribe. It goes without saying that I’ll keep updating my current, as well as new, subscribers with interesting and useful content every now and again, or at least try :-)
Continue reading The ultimate Citrix XenMobile survival guide! Download now, no subscription needed.
Hi everybody, as you might have heard by now Citrix announced XenApp and XenDesktop version 7.6 build on top of the their new and improved Flexcast Management Architecture. I took the liberty to summarize some, if not all, of the newly announced features and enhancements that both products will bring to the table, sparing you the marketing propaganda surrounding it. If you feel I left anything out, drop me a line and I’ll include it, and of course this goes for the Citrix employees as well :-) Here goes:
Continue reading Presenting Citrix XenApp 7.6 & Citrix XenDesktop 7.6… What’s new?!
Sounds easy enough right? Rebooting your XenDesktop Site’s application servers. When your Site isn’t that big and you don’t have a few hundred machines running or you have to deal with 24/7 shifts and so on, it can be fairly straightforward. I don’t want to spend to much time on why we would want, or need, to reboot our machines on a weekly or perhaps daily basis etc. a lot of factors come into play and there’s really no ‘one size fits all’. You could be using App-V or Citrix provisioning Services for example, both caching data which you would like to clear from time to time. Or perhaps the underlying Windows OS, when physically installed, might need a refresh every once in awhile, which we all know it does! Fact of the matter is, reboots are a given and need to be thought trough to keep operations running as smooth as possible. Make sure to finish the article, there is a question on the Citrix build-in reboot tooling, maybe you can help me out!
Continue reading How to: Rebooting your XenDesktop 7.x application servers.
What a great title for a blog post, don’t you agree? To bad I didn’t came up with it myself, my friends at VMTurbo did. You’ve probably heard of them, they are the ones that enable virtualization teams to control complex environments and at the same time enhance the performance of VMware, Hyper-V, RHEV and Citrix orientated architectures and deployments. The reason for this blog is twofold, first of all I would like to spend a few minutes briefly introducing VMTurbo, and secondly, as some of you might already know, they love to give a way free stuff, and I’m not talking about a baseball cap or a T-shirt, read on …
Continue reading Control, or control not. There is no manage! Free VMworld Europe tickets!
If you recall, and I think you do, last week I published an article / guide, named: The ultimate IOPS cheat sheet, which, I’m glad to report, was an instant success! For those of you who might have missed it you’ll find it here. Throughout the article / guide I talk about what IOPS are, how and why they impact overall performance, how they can be measured and (a lot) more. However, as you’re probable well aware, there is more to it then ‘just’ IOPS and the underlying disk subsystem when it comes to measuring or validating (benchmarking) overall performance with regards to our VDI and or HSD orientated architectures. Although they (IOPS) do make up a large piece of the puzzle, we also have to deal with CPU, memory, networking and more.
Continue reading LoginVSI advanced performance & scalability testing. What’s new with version 4.1?!
Lately I’ve seen a lot of talk about IOPS, we need as many as possible and as such we are constantly on the look out for new ways to boost performance. No matter what kind of infrastructure we build, virtual or physical, or what ever products we use, in the end it all comes down to the end user experience. Topics often relate to flash like storage solutions, converged infrastructures, Citrix provisioning services, Machine Creation Services, or a combination of the above.
