XenApp 6.5 has been available for just over a year – so what’s the verdict? Are you happy with your application virtualization rollout? Are your users happy? Is your boss happy? Or, perhaps, you haven’t even deployed applications on demand and are simply looking for some third-party advice.

Well then, this eGroup Roundtable, “XenApp 6.5 and Beyond”, hosted by Jason Webster and eGroup’s “XenMaster” Steve Rattacasa, is definitely for you.

Please join Jason and Steve for an interactive discussion on application virtualization and a review of XenApp 6.5.

“XenApp and Beyond” will take place on Wednesday, September 26th at 9:30 am ET.

The agenda is as follows:

•What’s New?

•Why XA vs. XD vs. “VDI”

•Common issues

•Profile handling

•XA from the Cloud – Multi Site Design

The eGroup Roundtable Series is a twice monthly discussion covering the latest products, innovations, and use cases with eGroup thought leaders, partners and technology users. Participants delve into and dissect specific technology issues impacting today’s IT and business leaders.

The format of the eGroup Roundtable Series is an open discussion and Q&A hosted by eGroup’s Application Services Manager, Jason Webster. Attendees to the Roundtable Series are encouraged to interact with the thought leaders by asking questions and providing their specific experience and anecdotes as they relate to the topic at hand.

REGISTER!

The post 9.26 eGROUP ROUNDTABLE: XenApp 6.5 and Beyond! appeared first on eGroup.

Recently, I tried to create a XenDesktop group that is using ESX 5.x as the hosting infrastructure, only to receive the following error message:

“Unable to contact the hypervisor”

vSphere vCenter Server only allows connection through SSL (HTTPS) on port 443 by default. The vCenter uses a self-signed certificate that the Citrix XenDesktop application will not accept. The automatic installation process for certificates does not import into the correct location required for XenDesktop.

Below are the steps required to import the self-signed certificate onto the XenDesktop server to make the connection. Hope this helps. If you encounter any other issues or have any specific feedback, leave it in the comments below.

To use the VMware installed, self-signed certificate on vSphere

1. Add the fully qualified domain name for the vSphere server to c:\windows\drivers\etc\hosts if not present in DNS.

2. Using Internet Explorer – enter https://<FQDN of vSphere server>.

3. Accept the security warnings.

4. Click on the Certificate Error part of the address bar and select View Certificates.

5. Click Install Certificate.

6. Click Next.

7. Click Place all certificates in the following store.

8. Click Browse.

9. Click Show physical stores.

10. Expand Trusted People.

11. Select Local Computer.

12. Click OK.

13. Click Next.

14. Click Finish.

Here’s an easy step by Step by Step install of self-signed certificate (word document).

The post Fixing the XenDesktop error: “Unable to contact the hypervisor” appeared first on eGroup.

The following Steps will resolve this issue.

1. Deleting the following entries under the registry location
   1. HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Citrix\ICA Client\Engine\Lockdown Profiles\All Regions\Lockdown\Virtual Channels\Control
2. Search for (AllowHotKey)
   1. Delete “AllowHotKey”
3. Log back into Citrix
   1. Another error should pop up mentioning “URLRedirection”
   2. Search within the registry for “URLRedirection”
   3. Delete “URLRedirection”
4. Log into Citrix again
   1. Another similar error should populate mentioning “ClientHostedApps”
   2. Search within the registry for “ClientHostedApps”
   3. Delete “ClientHostedApps”
5. Log into Citrix once more, and you should be good to go.

We know Citrix so if you have any other issues or questions, let us know in the comments below!

The post Citrix Receiver/Online Plugin (AllowHotKey) appeared first on eGroup.

First, there are several reasons why I think this technology is a great step forward. It allows the virtual desktop to be much more “user-friendly” in that the user can customize it, install their own applications, and make it the way THEY want it– versus being “constrained” by the way the IT department wants their desktop to be. This increases user buy-in and morale, and can help push a proof of concept over the last hurdle.

It minimizes the amount of management required for “dedicated” desktops, as you still have a single image to patch, install standard apps on to, etc. It’s also a technology from a 3rd party that used to charge per user, but is now included at no additional cost into the XD offering.

It took almost no time at all to configure and set up, and has worked flawlessly since– it doesn’t require re-learning an entire solution. These are all great and important things.

However, where I see this falling short today is that it requires a user-to-desktop assignment in a 1:1 manner, the same way dedicated desktops do. To recap quickly, what this means is when a user logs in for the first time, they are assigned a specific desktop (let’s say XD15), and every time they log in moving forward, they will receive the SAME desktop (XD15).

So for every user you need a virtual desktop.

There are a few reasons for this, and they’re all good reasons.

The PVD is “assigned” to a desktop for the user, and it stays put on that desktop. It HAS TO stay on that desktop because the “PVD layering” does not get loaded at login. It gets loaded at boot time to allow it to access drivers, system services, and low-system level components some applications require. If this “disk layering” was handled at login, you’d lose that.

It’s also good to note that this is the same situation with Unidesk– a technology very similar to the RingCube PVD technology.

You might be thinking “well that’s not a big deal, I’ll have a desktop for each user (which you may already be doing) and they’ll be able to do everything they need. This still sounds great!”, and I couldn’t blame you for it. But this 1:1 mapping of user to desktop creates what’s known as the “Concurrency problem”.

Let’s say you have a total of 1000 users that connect to your virtual desktop environment each day. They’re broken out into separate shifts of 250 users each, so at any given time, 250 connections and virtual desktop are in use. You’d still need 1,000 desktops provisioned (1 for each user), even though 750 of them wouldn’t be used at any given time in the day.

It’s because of this that a lot of (specifically) VDI solutions combine different desktop pool types, with some as non-dedicated, and now likely some without the PVD feature. The PVD pools could be used for “power users” or executives, and the non-persistent “floating” desktops could be used for task workers. It adds a little bit of management overhead, but not much considering the power of the solution. And it’s likely this is how things will remain for the near term– it’s an acceptable solution/design.

To me, and also to Gunnar (we had a good discussion around this a few times now), the ideal solution for Personal vDisk / Persistent Disk / Unidesk would be to have the PVD, whatever the name is, float with the user and require no desktop assignment. You could create a pool of only the # of desktops needed at any given time and regardless of which desktop the user was connected to, their PVD would “snap-in” and they’d have access to their data, profiles, and self-installed applications. That’s the sweet spot.

Until then, keep the concurrency problem in mind when doing your designs, and be sure to give yourself plenty of disk space in your PVD– you’ll find yourself installing more apps than you originally planned for (I know I did).

The post Citrix XenDesktop 5.6 PERSONAL VDISK – PART III appeared first on eGroup.

• Open the server.xml file located in C:\Program Files\Citrix\Licensing\LS\conf\
• There should be an entry that begins with <user firstName=”System” id=”admin”…
• Replace the contents between the quotes of password=”" and replace it with a simple plain-text password. This is only a temporary password. The contents will be encrypted
• Change passwordExpired=”false” to passwordExpired=”true”
• Save and close the xml file
• Restart the Citrix Licensing Server Service
• Log into the Licensing Console using the username admin and the password you set in Step 3
• You should be prompted to reset the password upon logging in
• Re-open the server.xml file and verify that the password=”password you set” is now an encrypted string representing the new password you just entered

Good luck!

The post RESETTING CITRIX LICENSE SERVER PASSWORD appeared first on eGroup.

Here’s a quick overview on the Personal vDisk feature.

The PVD attaches as a separate “disk” to a virtual desktop and “intercepts” IO requests from the user logged in. It then takes these requests and writes them to the PVD instead of the base image disk. Because of this, users can store their profiles, download files, and even install applications with 100%  ”personalization persistence” maintained across base image updates.

PVD Desktops use a “pooled” model instead of the Dedicated model, which retains the simplicity of managing a single base image for updates, patches, standard business applications, etc. and greatly reduces the cost of storage that would be required for the Dedicated desktop model.

Important: However, it’s important to note that while the desktops are pooled, the users are still assigned to a desktop in a 1:1 fashion, and receive the same desktop every time they log in, the assignment is handled automatically on first login.

While admittedly a bit weak in this area, my understanding of the “pre-PVD” pain points were as follows:

• If the user needed to make changes or install apps to their virtual desktop, you used Dedicated desktops.
• Dedicated desktops lose the storage benefits of using a single “master” image, as each desktop can occupy the same space of the original “golden desktop”. If you had a 30GB base image, each virtual desktop could occupy  30GB . Scale that to 1,000 users? Ouch!
• Dedicated desktops also lose the management benefits of having a single image, a single place to install apps, patches, hot fixes and Service Packs, as they’re managed individually like you would in the physical desktop world.

You can see from the list above that while there’s a need and a use case for Dedicated desktops, it’s certainly not the best solution, and it’s here that the PVD can be very useful. In fact, Citrix tweeted that the PVD technology was intended to replace the need and use case for persistent desktops entirely. Check their twitter feed if you don’t believe me. http://www.twitter.com/xendesktop

The post Citrix XenDesktop 5.6 PERSONAL VDISK – PART I appeared first on eGroup.

Happy Pi Day readers!  It’s day 011 of FLISH MADNESS and we are continuing our conversation on End User Computing.

To review, we discussed yesterday that three things are needed for EUC to be successfully deployed in a corporate IT environment.

1.  Device agnosticism aka BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).

2.  Application abstraction / Modern Application development (HTML 5)

3.  Secure MDM (Mobile Device Management)

We went in depth about topic number one yesterday.

Today we will discuss topic number 2:

Application abstraction / Modern Application development

Just about everybody now has a tablet computing device, usually an iPad or Android device.  Those that don’t most likely have some type of smart phone.  The users of these devices are beginning to demand that their corporate legacy applications (most likely written for Microsoft Windows) work with their chosen device.  This can be done in two ways:

The first way is to sandbox and present the application to the device.  The “presentation” of the legacy applications really only has one player in the game right now and that is Citrix, though a few others are making strides, namely Ericom.  It makes sense that Citrix is the leader in this space with their Xen App product, they have been delivering data and applications from a distance for years.  What Citrix doesn’t do as well as others is abstract the application from the operating system and put it in a sandboxed environment.  VMware’s ThinApp is the best tool in this space (at least in this blogger’s opinion).  What we at eGroup see as the “Best of Breed” design for delivering legacy applications to a mobile platform is first “Thinapping” the legacy app and then presenting the app to the device via Citrix Xen App and the Citrix receiver.  By doing this we are able to actually load more applications per Xen App server with less software conflicts.

The second way to get the corporate data and applications to the end point device is to rewrite there frontend interface with the native device programming language.  Though this is obviously more expensive we do have rumors that some of the big players out here are starting to go down this route.  For example, Micrsoft Office for the iPad.  There is an obvious advantage to this as the rewritten native applications are going to behave better  with a  “touch” interface then one that was written for a standard desktop OS with a mouse as navigational input device.

Beyond rewriting the applications with modern native device programming languages there is a large push to design the applications to run within the device’s browsers via HTML 5.  Really this is what JAVA has been trying (successfully in a lot of cases) to do for years.  The JVM loads an environment that is self-contained and unaware of the underlying operating system.

IMHO, in the long run I think we will see more and more application rewrites but there will likey always be use cases for packaging legacy applications and presenting them to modern devices.  Mainframes are still around aren’t they?  Though the numbers are dwindling.  Is this the path for x86 systems running Windows Apps?

Being the third day of FLISH MADNESS I am going to leave you readers with a little three point basketball factoid.

Chris Ford of the Boston Celtics scored the first three-point field goal in NBA history with 3:48 left in the first quarter of the Celtics’ 114-106 victory over Houston at Boston Garden (October 12, 1979).

The difference in the score between the Celtics and the Rockets for that game was 8.  8 multiplied by 3 (3^rd day of FM) =24.  24 backwards = 42.  42 is Chris Ford’s Jersey number.  MADNESS I tell you.

The post End User Computing part 2 of 3 appeared first on eGroup.

EUC part 1 of 3

Its day two of FLISH MADNESS and today’s topic is End User Computing.

Recently I was on plane flight coming back from Las Vegas and I looked around half way through the flight to see that 80 % of the people around me were using some type of tablet computing device.  I thought to myself the post PC era is truly underway.  But, we have a ways to go.  First and for most we still have too many devices per person.  Case in point, I carry my laptop, iPad and iPhone to every meeting I go on.  Ideally we would combine at least two of these devices if not all three.

I envision a world where we have one device (call it an identity disc) where we jack into computing resources (public, private, personal cloud) as needed.  Some of us are already taking steps in this direction.  For example, the Cisco Cius can be “docked” into a station where you would have the full keyboard, monitor and mouse capabilities of a traditional desktop.  From there you could launch native applications, VDI from Citrix or VMware or some type of legacy application presentation.

End User Computing is one of the most spoken buzz terms across all tech industry verticals today.  The actual meaning of the term may depend on whom you are speaking with.  But what it boils down to is empowerment for users of the users and by users.  In IT we no longer live in a world where we have the luxury to control what end point device the users bring to work.  We do have the ability to control the corporate data, how the data gets to the end user (including how it is presented), and finally how the data is secured.

To summarize this line of thought, EUC needs three things to be successfully deployed in an IT environment.

1. Device agnosticism aka BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)
2.  Application abstraction / Modern Application development (HTML 5)
3.  Secure MDM (Mobile Device Management)

Device Agnosticism

It’s happened to every IT admin out there.  A VIU (very important user) for example a CEO or CFO brings in his latest and greatest smart phone and expects it work seamlessly with all corporate systems.  This of course is as tremendous challenge but surmountable with the right technology applied.

The idea of bringing your own device to work simple put makes the user feel “empowered”.  A user that is empowered with end point choice is usually happier than one that isn’t.  Furthermore, if IT can “containerize” the corporate assets that the end user needs on their chosen device they open the door for getting out of the end user hardware business and getting into software as a service.

Think about it, as an IT admin you want to profile, image, and streamline your end user’s experiences; that way you have consistent, manageable interfaces that the user cannot meddle with.  This would seem almost impossible if everybody brought their own device.  Unless, we abstract the corporate resources needed by the end user thus sandboxing the corporate experience from the chosen end point device.  We’ll get into the specifics of how this can be done in EUC part 2 and 3.

Stay tuned as FLISH MADNESS continues tomorrow as we continue the EUC conversation.

The post End User Computing Part 1 of 3 appeared first on eGroup.

After doing some checking and verifying what I had set in the GPO was being “applied” configuration-wise to the server, I stumbled across Ctrix article which outlined our scenario, with the solution.

It turns out that when you install VMware tools, it includes a “Shared Folder” option, which remains locked on user logout and does not allow for the profile to be properly deleted. When this happens, the next time the user logs in to that server, it creates a new profile for them along the lines of “user.domain”, and increments that each time after, as in user.domain.001, user.domain.002, and so on.

The fix is simple– go through and Modify the installation of the VMware Tools, and remove the “Shared Folder” feature from the installation. It does require a reboot, so make sure you plan accordingly, but once that was gone, the profiles operated as desired. What I found to be a little strange is that this issue did not have any impact on profiles managed through VMware’s View Persona Management, which offers very similar features/configuration, but for View environments. Perhaps just a better VMware integration?

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX122501

The post Citrix User Profile Management – NOT DELETING LOCAL PROFILES appeared first on eGroup.

mirroring_role being equal to 1 indicates it has the PRINCIPAL role where the mirroring_state being equal to 4 indicates it is SYNCHRONIZED.

The procedure should be run on the server where the database is the PRINCIPAL. Running it on the MIRROR server will not result in any changes. Using Linked Servers and 2 parameters in the Stored Procedure such as:

sps_FailoverMirror (@databaseName nvarchar(200), @serverOne nvarchar(200), @serverTwo nvarchar(200))

would allow the Stored Procedure to query both servers, find the PRINCIPAL server, and perform the failover.

The post QUICKLY FAILOVER SQL SERVER MIRROR DATABASE appeared first on eGroup.