For those XenServer administrators who don’t know what RES Automation Manager is, it’s a task automation tool which makes it possible to run almost any command on managed computers with an agent. You can create runbooks with multiple commands or install software remotely unattended. With the release of RES Automation Manager 2012, Linux is now also supported as a platform to install agents on. This makes it possible to manage XenServer from RES AM. Where you previously used bash scripts and the cron scheduler, you can now put those commands in RES AM and schedule them. For example you can create a runbook to stop a vm on a schedule, export the vm for backup purpose and after that start the vm. Multiple triggers are possible. When you look to my previous post, you can schedule a vApp to start after every reboot of the XenServer host.

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In XenServer 5.6 there was the autostart feature on VMs. When the autostart checkbox on the VM was enabled, the VMs would start automatically after the XenServer host environment was powered up. In XenServer 6, this feature is removed from the XenCenter console. There are multiple blogposts that describe how to re-enable the autostart feature from the commandline. But that is not needed. You can use the new vApp feature. With vApps you can accomplish the same, but better. vApps is a logical grouping of multiple VMs. For example you can create a vApp “core infrastructure”, put your domaincontroller and licenseserver in it and some additional servers. In a vApp you can also define the order in which VMs are started and also a delay time between the startup sequence. So vApps is much more flexible than autostart. You can find vApp in XenCenter under Pool –> Manage vApps.

• Create a new vApp
• Assign VMs. A VM can be added to only one vApp at a time
• Change VM startup sequence. Add delays between sequences.

That’s it. This is a Pool feature, but it will also work with just one stand-alone XenServer. The automatic starting of a vApp only works for a paid version of XenServer. Although the administrators guide mentions vApps in combination with HA (High Availability) or DR (Disaster Recovery), you don’t need the platinum edition for vApps. In fact, you don’t need HA. I have it running with the Advanced Edition without HA enabled. If you want automatic starting of a vApp with the free version of XenServer you have to use the following commands:

List the vApps: xe appliance-list

Start a vApp: xe appliance-start uuid=<appliance-uuid>

Add above command to /etc/rc.local

So forget the autostart feature, use vApps. Even with the free version of XenServer you can use it.

Since Access Gateway 5.0.4 it is possible to customize the logonpoint. However, there is very little documentation on how to do that. Especially the required size of custom bitmaps is undocumented. After a lot of trying, I found out what bitmapsizes are needed on what places to create a nice layout. To begin first, where can you customize the logonpoint? You will probably overlook the second tab on the logonpoint properties.

There is a Customization tab. When we click on it, there are three options:

• Citrix Default
• Receiver Green
• Custom

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I finally got time to upgrade our XenServer environment to 5.6 SP2 and enabled IntelliCache on XenServer. Enabling IntelliCache during installation is easy, just put a checkmark when asked “Enable thin provisioning”. XenServer will then format the local disk as EXT3 instead of LVM.

When XenServer is installed with Intellicache, you have to re-add the XenServer host in XenDesktop and enable Intellicache. In XenDesktop Studio add the XenServer host and put a checkmark when asked to use IntelliCache.

You can only enable this during addition of the host, not afterwards.

So now I have a XenDesktop / XenServer environment with Intellicache enabled. Time to see if this really works. We have an EMC SAN, but to proof that IntelliCache is doing its job, I decided to do the ultimate test. I created a NFS share on a Synology NAS, which is not really a fast storage. Then I installed a master Windows 7 machine with all applications on it. That didn’t go very fast. Shutdown the VM and opened XenDesktop Studio. In XenDesktop Studio I created a catalog with 5 pooled random desktops. I noticed that Machine Creation Services created a few desktops on the EMC SAN and a few on the Synology NAS. It is obviously spreading the load, but that’s not what I wanted, so I had to delete the EMC SAN from XenDesktop Studio. This can only be done from PowerShell, not from the console. Use the following command to remove storage (add your own names of course):

Remove-HypHostingUnitStorage -LiteralPath XDHyp:\HostingUnits\XSPool1 -StoragePath ‘XDHyp:\Connections\XenServer\EMC_XS_Disk1.storage’

I recreated the pooled random desktops, and now they were all created on the Synology NAS.

Now assign the desktops and boot them. Let’s see how it performs. First boot takes a while, but then it is running really good. When we take a closer look at the XenServers, you can see the caching happening. First we look on the XenCenter console. When you click on a XenServer host and choose Local Storage, you can see that Size used will grow (a Rescan may be required for the storage to see this).

You can also look at the XenServer itself in the path /var/run/sr-mount. In that folder, subfolders with guid names are created. In the subfolder related to the XenDesktop (that with the latest date stamp), you find several vhdcache files.

The biggest one is the cache of the masterdisk. The others are local differencing disks. Because I created pooled shared desktops, the cache file will be located only locally, there is no writing on shared storage. At reboot, the cache files are flushed. So this will significant reduce load on shared storage.

The cache files for private images are created both in local storage and on the shared storage.

So IntelliCache is really working, both for reads and writes. Performance of the vm’s is great when the cache is already created and load on shared storage is almost eliminated. Even from a cheap NFS storage, XenDesktop will run smoothly.

With the last Citrix Synergy in San Francisco in May, and this week Citrix CiTIE in the Netherlands, I’ve heard a lot of new stuff coming up. In this blog I will give an overview of it.

XenApp

Citrix XenApp 6.5 is on the roadmap. New features are:

• Session prelaunch and session lingering. When users logon to their desktop and the receiver is sending its first ping to the farm, it’s likely that the user will start an application on the farm in the near future. So an empty session is already started for the user. This can also be scheduled, based on time. When the user eventually starts an application, this is started within the empty session. As you can imagine, this is much faster than first going through a logon process. The same is done after closing an application. When the user closed the application, the session remains running for a certain time, but is empty. This is called lingering. This has the same effect as the prelaunch.
• XenApp Streaming with VHD mount points. This is especially useful for streaming to VDI. The problem when streaming to VDI, and also with other streaming methods, like App-V, is that the stream is cached locally on the VDI disk. When the VDI reboots, the changes to the local disk are destroyed and the VDI is reset to a clean state. The cache must be rebuild every time again. With VHD mount points this is solved. Instead of streaming to a local cache, a VHD disk is mounted in the cache, which contains the stream. This is a VHD mount point per stream, so not a shared cached disk, like App-V. This makes it easier to update the stream. The Citrix profiler can create a VHD file for the stream.
• XenApp 6.5 will also support the Machine Creation Services method which was introduced with XenDesktop 5. This is useful when virtualizing XenApp. With MCS you create a master image. MCS will make a clone of it and creates ID-disks and differencing disks for every server. With MCS you have a fast method of building your XenApp farm, extend is, or restore it to a previous state. As you can see, MCS is taking over the role of Citrix Provisioning Services more and more.
• Because XenApp with MCS will be managed in the same way as XenApp, it’s likely that this will also integrate with the Desktop Studio console.
• The ICA protocol will be multi stream. The current protocol has one IP port with multiple virtual channel. This will be separated in different streams on different ports. The reason for this is that it’s easier to manage different streams for e.g. QoS.
• Web Interface will be replaced by the Web Receiver. The Web Receiver will be part of a new framework, which will also contain Merchandising Server and Delivery Services. Web Receiver will be based on HTML 5. The Delivery Services framework will be extended. It will offer an authentication point for multiple authentication methods and a self service and workflow module, where users can request an application.
• The Receiver will now contain the online plugin embedded. Formerly these where two components, which where bundled. The new Receiver will support the new Web Services and will support roaming of your settings. For example, when applications are approved and added on one machine, they will show up on al devices in the startmenu.

XenDesktop

In a future version of XenDesktop, new features are:

• XenDesktop will support RemoteFX and Windows 7 aero.
• In previous statements of Citrix, Machine Creation Services was positioned as a solution for POC and small environments up to 500 desktops. But Citrix has done extensive testing with MCS, and now they position it for environments up to 5000 VDI desktops. So there is less need for using Citrix Provisioning Services for virtual environments. For physical environments PVS is still the only possible solution.
• With XenDesktop, you can also host a MacOS VDI. So you can run MacOS desktops on any platform with a Citrix receiver.
• And the same features as for XenApp, like multi stream ICA, Web Receiver and Delivery Services.

XenServer

XenServer 6 is on the roadmap:

• XenServer is growing fast as a hypervisor platform, already with a 17% marketshare. Now used more than Hyper-V according to a Forester research for company production environments and more public clouds on XenServer than on VMWare.
• XenServer 6 will have the Xen 4 kernel.
• Until now, XenServer used the build-in Linux virtual switch. With XenServer 6, this will be the Citrix vSwitch, which will offer much more configuration options, like ACLs between VLANs.
• Storagelink and Site Recovery will be integrated in XenServer, and won’t be separate virtual appliances anymore.
• GPU pass-through is added. This means you can run a virtual CAD workstation with a powerful video card. This looks like RemoteFX in Hyper-V.
• XenServer is the hypervisor that is best optimized for VDI. Other hypervisors are just made for server virtualization, and yes, you can also virtualize desktops with it. But XenServer has Intellicache. This means that you can place the master disk on a SAN storage, but when VDI’s are running, the disk blocks will be cached locally on the XenServer host. The write cache can also be created locally on the XenServer. So this means an enormous offloading of your SAN for both reads and writes IOPS. With this great features, I think you should always use XenServer as the hypervisor platform for XenDesktop. Besides these features, it’s also much cheaper than VMWare or Hyper-V (for VDI you don’t have the advantage of the 4 “free” vm server licenses), and for VDI you don’t need the full blown features of VMWare. In most cases, the server virtualization infrastructure will already be separated from the VDI virtualization infrastructure, so why not using another platform. Just call this platform the desktop host environment, and the server environment can still be the virtualization platform.

This week, XenDesktop 5 SP1 was released. The most interesting improvement is support for XenServer 5.6 SP2 with IntelliCache. IntelliCache will reduce IOPS load on your storage with 90% according to Citrix. Because we are using XenServer, and want to use this new feature, the first step is to upgrade to XenDesktop 5 SP1. Continue Reading »

Many people do not realize that the search function in Windows 7 offers important functionality. When you press the Windows key you can directly enter a keyword for “Search program and files” in the startmenu. When you get used to this, it’s a quick way to start applications without clicking with the mouse or find documents. When implementing Remote Desktop Services, people also want to use this functionality. Besides searching in the startmenu, they also want to search in files and contents of files on fileshares, e.g. homedirectory. By default, this is not working as expected. There are some pitfalls:

• Typically, access to local disk is prohibited on RDS servers. This is most often implemented as a policy. As a result, the search function does not find the shortcuts of the user’s startmenu. To make this work, you have to permit access to local disk on the RDS server. You can still hide the local disk. Hiding and access to disk are two different policies.
• To search documents and in contents of documents on network shares, you have to install the File Server role with Windows Search Service on the RDS server. Without this role, you cannot search in contents on fileshares.

• To enhance performance of searching in shares on fileservers, also install the Search Service on the File Server. The search job will then be performed by the File Server instead of the RDS server.
• To search in document contents, you have to enable “Always search file names and contents” in Windows Explorer.

After you have solved above problems, users can use the “Search program and files” function on RDS the same way as on Windows 7 clients.

I have several customers with SBC environments which have pc’s of 2-4 years old, that run Windows XP. They asked me if they have to buy thin clients or if they can use their pc’s as thin clients. I have done several investigations of thin clients, but most thin clients are too thin or are too expensive. This means that the client does not have enough power to display Citrix HDX technology like you get on fat clients, or the thin clients cost more than a fat client. So why not turn your pc in a thin client? Most customers already have the computers and the infrastructure to manage them.

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Microsoft has released SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2. In SP1 there are several enhancements for Remote Desktop Services. Especially RemoteFX is a noticeable change. So what’s the impact on XenApp 6.0? One would expect that this also requires an update for XenApp 6.0. But when we take a closer look at RemoteFX on the server, you see that this is a separate Role Service of Remote Desktop Services. One requirement for RemoteFX is that the server must have one or more GPUs installed and it works with RDP, not with ICA. When you don’t install RemoteFX, RDS is just RDS with all hotfixes bundled in a service pack.

To support XenApp 6.0 on Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1, just install CTX125388 – Hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64001. In http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX126711, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 – Known Issues, there are no further issues reported.

When you use SBC or VDI, you probably have multiple environments where you log on. In most cases you have different settings on your local laptop and on your hosted environment. Wouldn’t it be nice when you have the same settings on every system? So you only have to create one custom dictionary in Word or change that proofing setting only once? With the new RES Workspace Manager 2011 this is really simple and the good news is, it’s free! Per April 1, 2011, RES will release Workspace Manager 2011 in an Express Edition, which offers free profile management for unlimited users.

How does it work? On every system you have to install the RES Workspace Manager agent. The agent will monitor applications and captures settings of applications to a central folder, like a homedirectory, and reloads them on application launch. So you don’t have to logon again to apply changes, just restart the application. You don’t have to configure what settings must be captured. The agent just monitors the executable and sees what settings are changed by the executable or dependent executables.

If you want to see how it works, take a look at the following movie:

More movies on http://www.youtube.com/itconcern