VirtualPro

Anyone who has worked with Citrix XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) will know that printers and drivers  are a very big part of your farm design and its stability. A print driver that causes instability is a nightmare for Citrix Administrators,  now there is a handy tool to help you troubleshoot print driver issues.

The Citrix Print Detective application can be downloaded by clicking the link and is described on the web site as follows.

Print Detective is an information-gathering utility that can be used for troubleshooting problems related to print drivers. It enumerates all drivers from the specified 32-bit Windows computer, including driver-specific information. It can also be used to delete specified print drivers. It also offers logging capabilities and provides a Command Line Interface (CLI).

I can see this being most use for identifying exactly what drivers are installed on your XenApp server.  If you’ve not configured your farm(s) to use driver compatibility lists or policies to prevent driver auto install from print servers you can end up with all sorts of drivers installed on your XenApp server.  Any of these can cause you stability issues with the print spooler service or even cause a dreaded blue screen of death,  nothing like a print driver crashing a server and dumping 50+ Citrix users out of their sessions. 

A couple of screenshot of the application can be found below with some details on use, the full instructions on use can be found on the Citrix Print Detective page.

To run the Print Detective software against a remote host , enter the name and click the enumerate button. 

Once the drivers are displayed for your local or remote host you can delete a selected driver, (requires administrator privileges)

Now I haven’t used this application in anger myself, as always I’ll keep this in reserve for the next print driver issue in my employers Citrix farm. If anyone has any experience of using this in a real world scenario please feel free to share your experience by leaving a comment or two.

Citrix, XenApp Citrix, XenApp

Just been catching up with the latest updates on the new Citrix Reciever for the iPhone, codename Project Braeburn. Citrix seem to now be in full flow with the work on this product,  the advanced product team in Sydney, Australia are leading the charge with the development.

The following is an extract from the latest update from Adam Jacques on the 17th of December,  sounds like Citrix are working to release this as soon as possible and look to fine tune the new application via real world usage and feedback.

One of the exciting parts of being able to work on this project is the fresh and innovative approach we are taking to get the software in your hands as soon as we can so we can shape future releases.  It’s fair to say that the Braeburn team is working schedules like never before and using a much more agile approach to the project’s release.
We are aiming to be very transparent (through the use of this site) so that you know what’s going on with current and future releases of the project.

The way we are approaching the initial release is that we will be getting our version one on to the AppStore as soon as we can so we can get feedback from all of you… our plan is that it will have the core technology which will allow you to manage and make connections to the Citrix Delivery Center and as I mentioned, we are working on a very aggressive schedule and we will be having many regualr updates to the project available on the AppStore as we add additional feature after feature.

But it’s not all about features that you have grown to expect from other the other App Receivers available to connect to Citrix infrastructure, we also have a few tricks up our sleeve that we think you’ll love on your iPhone… let’s just say we are thinking differently about ways to access and interact with your information whilst going mobile with the iPhone.

The initial release is scheduled for sometime in the first half of 2009. The initial release will consist of base functionality with the added extras coming later as App Store updates,  the team have indicated they would like feedback to assist in deciding the priority of new features and would like to hear from you on their forum pages. The main website for the Project Braeburn team can be found here, the forums are not up and running yet but they’ve been promised soon.

To keep up to date with all the latest on this release you can find all Citrix blogs relating to the iphone by clicking this link. 

As a little teaser here’s a little demo video of a prototype,  looks good so far!!

Citrix, Iphone, New Products, Smartphones Citrix, Iphone, Smartphones

I finally finished my 18 month mobile contract this week and so to celebrate I jumped supplier and moved to O2 in the UK so I could get myself a new 3G Iphone.  So today was the first real chance i’d had to sit down and look around at what applications were out there for use with this fantastic device.

One of the first things I went looking for was a Citrix ICA client.  I use Citrix as my main way of connecting into work remotely when I’ve got a task to do out of hours,  being able to use it on the Iphone therefore would increase my flexibility in that I don’t have to be at home or near an internet connection when I want to do something that can only be done out of hours.

After doing a bit of reading it would appear that Citrix don’t have an Iphone Citrix client yet but they are definately working on one.  Chris Fleck’s Iphone blog has been updated recently to state that they will be shipping a “Citrix App Receiver client for the iPhone”  sometime in the first half of 2009. Keep your eyes peeled to this blog page for updates and make sure you cast your vote to tell Citrix what you need Citrix on the Iphone for,  lets raise the priority on this one.  There’s a great little video of what they’ve managed to achieve already on Albert Grandville’s blog site looks pretty sweet.  Suppose the only question is going to be in and around interaction with the windows desktop,  I don’t think anyone will be writing up any large reports on their Iphone.

Citrix, Iphone, XenApp Citrix, Iphone

I attended a Microsoft roadshow the other day at Microsoft’s new offices in Edinburgh, absolutely stunning views I’m sure you will agree.

So the roadshow was advertised as being presented by James O’Neil but for some reason he wasn’t there and we got Andy Malone who is an MCT and MVP based in Scotland. The event was based around “what’s new in Windows Server 2008″ and covered a number of subjects, including Active Directory, Server Core and of course virtualisation. One of the areas that caught my eye at James O’Neil’s last roadshow in Edinburgh was the new terminal services role in Windows Server 2008.  Now the company I work for use Citrix and I worked on implementing a brand new Xenapp 4.5 farm last year,  I’ve since sat my Citrix Certified Administrator exam and think I know a thing or two about presentation virtualisation. So I was very keen to hear the Terminal Services presentation again to see if I missed anything the last time,  because last time I was convinced that this was a valid alternative to Citrix XenApp.

Microsoft have provided Terminal Services as part of windows for many years, capabilities have always been basic, with Citrix adding a lot of the nice features that made TS attractive to enterprise companies. However in Windows 2008 I think Microsoft have done a lot of work on TS which makes it less entry level and a lot more enterprise friendly everytime I see it. Some of the key features are detailed below.

RemoteApp - This is the equivalent of published applications on Citrix,  applications are delivered seamlessly onto a users desktop through the RDP client but run on the terminal server.  The icons for running RemoteApps can be delivered as an .rdp file or can be packaged up into an MSI for delivery to the desktop via group policy or the deployment tool of your choice.

Terminal Services Web Access - Now this is a very similar service to the Citrix Web Interface whereby users can access TS RemoteApps and connect to the terminal server desktop from a web browser front end.  Users can visit a Web site (either from the Internet or from an intranet) to access a list of available RemoteApp programs. When they start a RemoteApp program, a Terminal Services session is started on the Windows Server® 2008-based terminal server that hosts the RemoteApp program.  The one thing that distinguishes it from Citrix is that the Web Access portal is not customisable and that all users see all RemoteApps, although permissions are applied to control the execution of RemoteApps.

Terminal Services Gateway - utilises RDP over HTTPS to establish a point to point RDP connection allowing access to the resources of a terminal server without the need for a VPN.  That’s not to say that you should not have some other form of security in place such as ISA Server but it does allow you to operate across port 443 which is generally open on most corporate firewalls.  This makes the TS Gateway very easy to deploy without large amounts of change to firewall rule sets, the same cannot be said of Citrix Secure Gateway.

Terminal Services Session Broker - This is a new role wich is designed to provide load balancing when multiple terminal servers are grouped together in a farm.  Before Windows 2008 TS load balancing across terminal servers was not very intuative,  this new role brings it into line with the functionality we see in Citrix farms.

One thing that wasn’t covered in any of the demonstrations I’ve seen is printing,  now coming from a Citrix background I know what a pain printing can be in a TS environemnt.  There is a good reason that it makes up about 30% of the CCA examination and that’s because there’s lots to think about in it’s configuration.

Terminal Services Printing - Windows Server 2008 comes with the Terminal Services Easy Print driver,  allowing users to print from their RemoteApp or TS Desktop to a printer on their local client device.  Where it differs from Citrix is that when you log on to a TS session the server will attempt to install the Easy Print driver first and if for some reason it can’t it will then use a matching native driver.  if this step then fails and it can’t find a native driver then the printer will not be availble in the TS session. Citrix will usually search for the native driver first (unless told otherwise via policy) before reverting to the Citrix Universal Print Driver or as a last resort, not allowing the printer in the TS session at all.  This is an interesting approach from Microsoft as it means that they do not have to add in additional management features to control driver exclusion lists or driver mapping functionality,  thus making it easier than Citrix in the printing arena.  I’d be interested to see how the easy print driver performs when you put a slow link or transatlantic WAN connection in the way.

All in all the Windows 2008 Terminal Server offering is very impressive,  especially considering it is free straight out of the box.  It looks to be a worthy advisory to Citrix for small to medium businesses looking to centralise applications without the usual associated costs.  Where it may struggle to gain a foothold is in the enterprise market where all to often they require the extra features that a Citrix solution provides.  It’s an interesting move by Microsoft who have a close partnership with Citrix,  it’s almost like they didn’t want to take it any further for fear of upsetting them.  Maybe in the next incarnation of Windows Server?!

Microsoft, Terminal Services, Windows 2008 Citrix, Presentation virtualisation, Terminal Servers, windows 2008

I recently blogged about XenAppPrep which was being worked on and blogged about by Shannon Ma over at Citrix.  No update on it’s release date yet and I’m sure there are people out there who have a requirement to clone XenApp servers.  So in the meantime please find a link to the XenApp Cloning Tool which is available for download on www.citrixtools.net.  The latest release now adds support for the cloning of servers with the edgesight agent on it.

This is something that came up at my work recently,  our third party data centre partner cloned a production server for DR Purposes and when it came back up the edgesight agents re-registered all the data and statistics gathered in the database against the DR server instead of the original production one.  I’ll be passing on this link to them for future reference.

http://www.citrixtools.net/en/Home/newsid374/144.aspx

General Citrix, Citrix Cloning, Cloning, XenApp, XenApp Cloning Tool

Ever had to take a Citrix server out of the farm?  Sure you have,  everyone has at some point or another. 

This can be achieved in a number of ways.  You could stop the server accepting connections but if your server is in a remote datacentre and you don’t have ILO (HP), DRAC (DELL) or RSA (IBM) then you can’t remote desktop on to it to do the maintenance.

You could block ICA Connections in Terminal Services Manager but then what happens to users who are on the server already?  Well they’re going to have issues connecting to existing sessions.

My preferred option is to unpublish all the applications from the server the day before the maintenance. This means that the users can still access the applications they’re already connected to and that over time the server will clear down as users log off.

During a recent XenApp deployment project myself and a olleague came up with a script to unpublish all applications on a named server.  The Script writes out a note of the unpublished applications to a text file in the same folder as the scripts so that you can run another script to reverse the process after maintenance is complete.  This proved invaluable during the project and has been used quite a lot since the farm went into production.

svroffline - Script to unpublish all applications
svronline - Script to republish all applications

You can run this from a XenApp server without issue but if you want to run it from your machine you will need the Citrix SDK installed so that your client PC has the MFCOM objects required locally by the script.

Let me know how you get on with this or if you have any questions.

Citrix, XenApp Citrix, MFCOM, Published Applications

Been having a little look at Shannon Ma’s Citrix web log today and have been reading with interest about XenAppPrep which is a tool that allows you to clone XenApp servers in a nice clean manner. You basically setup your XenServer with all the apps and customisation /fine tuning required,  install the XenAppPrep application and run it to remove all machine specific information.  Run any other tools such as sysprep and then capture your image using whatever imaging software you usually use.

When the clone comes online the XenAppPrep service starts,  reset all the machine specific information and start services such as IMA.  You’ve now got a nice clean new XenApp Server without any of the normal hassle associated with cloning a Citrix server.

You can read more about XenAppPrep at the link below and read about Automated Deployment on Shannon’s blog which is linked in the blogroll to the right of this article.

http://shannonma.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/cloning-a-xenapp-server-with-xenappprep/

Citrix, XenApp Citrix, deployment, imaging, XenApp

Welcome to VirtualPro’s first posting!

I’ve only recently discovered igoogle and ever since then I’ve been adding blogs to it via RSS on all sorts of subjects.  One of my areas of interest is virtualisation and I’m an avid follower of bloggers such as Mike Laverick at http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk and Eric Sloof http://www.ntpro.nl. 

I started thinking following the recent rounds of blogging on VMWorld 2008 that I might have something to offer the virtualisation community and so have decided to start my own blog site.

Main areas of Interest are VMware and Citrix,  however I try and follow all areas of virtualisation to keep abreast of what’s new in this ever growing sector of IT.

I’ll be posting a few articles in the coming week or two, so please check back regularly as i get to grips with this new world of blogging.

General blogging, Citrix, virtualisation, virtualization, VMware