Computer Stuff

This is the latest version from Citrix. It runs on the latest OS Windows 2008 R2 64 bit (R2 only runs on 64 bit), is tightly integrated with AD in regards to new server deployment and group policy.

What’s New Under The Hood?

1. All new management console, Citrix Delivery Services Console
2. Worker Groups
3. Citrix Universal Printer – sends print jobs to the client as an emf file, client previews the print job, and then can print it to their owner printers
4. Citrix Policies integrated into the CDSC
5. Initial installation of the XenApp platform is much simpler
6. Dazzle user interface – designed to look like the iTunes interface
7. HDX integration for improved audio and video presentation

With the integration with Server 2008 R2 and the 64 bit architecture XenApp 6 is a must have for performance enhancements.

I’ve been working with the Microsoft HyperV hypervisor now for about a year now in an enterprise class environment. Overall HyperV functions adequately in a production environment. Servers stay online, there are minimal issues with corruption/downtime, etc. We haven’t suffered from performance issues, and customers are not aware they are in a virtualized environment. There have been a fairly regular number of bugs, annoyances, and the general lack of features available in the other commercial hypervisors.

We have several hundred virtual servers of all operating system types, new installations, physical to virtual conversions, etc.. We started in the Server 2008 R1 environment, and then upgraded/fresh install of Server 2008 R2. We use System Center Virtual Machine Manager to manage the environment.

Issues

We’ve run into a wide range of issues:

• Ghost nics causing SCVMM to crash
• Templates causing SCVMM to crash
• When removing virtual machines SCVMM fails to remove all files from the CSV, causing crashing issues
• Cluster Shared Volumes – Backup issues
• Limited to 4 cpu’s per guest
• CPU types, cores, and clock speed are meaningless

Conclusion

HyperV will function adequately in an environment with lower end requirements. However, it is an immature product that lacks many of the features that VmWare or Citrix have. And in typical Microsoft fashion they have rushed a product into the market just to be sure they are in the market. Once in the market it appears they reason they will improve the features and work out the bugs.

Add Note: I will be adding more to this post as I discover (and remember all the issues) issues with HyperV.

So, I was tasked to evaluate Remote Desktop Services on Win2k8 R2 for an enterprise class environment. While it has some nice features, it is still very immature.

Features

• Web Interface – not necessarily a new feature.
• Published applications – You can publish individual applications to the web interface (like citrix) and when the user clicks on one it will launch just that app.
• Application Partitioning – You can limit who can see/access the different published applications (R2 only)

Downsides

• No centralized management interface – Holy cow, managing multiple servers in an RDS farm is a nightmare. The settings are all over the place and finding anything is not very easy
• When server components are separated into a multi-tier environment (Web Server, Application Servers, Connection Broker Server, etc.), user authentication gets lost and users have to log in multiple times. Even with all components on a single server it requires two logins to launch an app.
• Still somewhat unstable – At various times during the testing, server roles were corrupted/lost and had to be reinstalled and reconfigured
• Lacks mature load balancing – Server workloads are not based on current CPU/RAM or similar loads, it is based on how many users are connected to a particular server and uses round robin dns to distribute users.
• Uses an ActiveX component to work. Doesn’t work in other browsers, and we had several instances where the ActiveX component would not initialize properly and wouldn’t without a re-imaging of the machine.

Conclusion

This product is adequate for a small environment (single server). However, it lacks the features needed to deploy and manage it in an medium or enterprise level. Recommendation: Go with Citrix and not RDS 2008. Even in a small environment.

Problem #1 XenApp 6

We were having an issue with the ability to stream apps to servers or clients. The error message was non specific. One of my coworkers found an obscure article talking about a response from the server of 20000 when running qfarm /load. Turns out, if the server displayed this particular load response, it meant that the licensing was incorrect and apps would not stream.

They will continue to work properly from a standard installed and remotely run model, but will error out when streamed. In our case, the newly created XenApp 6 licensing server policy had the “default” checkbox checked. Which means that it was using the license server that we had typed in during installation. The licensing server we had typed in was for our XenApp 5 farm and was the wrong version for XenApp 6.

It had given us a error message, but we had modified the policy to use the new license server. So, we figured all was well, nope….. Because the default check box was still selected, it was ignoring our new entry. Once we unchecked that box and rebooted the server things worked and the server no longer displayed the 20000 in the command line.

Two of the servers still wouldn’t change their licensing status. For one, the solution was we had to remove it from the farm and then rejoin. Once that was done it worked as it should. The other server was fixed when we went into the policies area and specified the version we were running.

Problem #2 Xen App 5

We were also unable to stream apps on our XenApp 5 farm. All licensing was correct, streaming app profiles done correctly, etc. However, when the app was published, the drop down box was left alone because it appeared you only changed that box when the option directly next to it was selected.

All I can say is Wow! The Citrix Synergy Conference was great. Lot’s of new technologies, great exhibits, breakout sessions, hands on labs, and a lot more. If you weren’t able to attend, you can still enjoy much of it through the Citrix website. They recorded many of the sessions and other events.

• XenDesktop 4 – More improvements to the Virtual Desktop technologies
• XenApp 6- A completely new version with tight AD integration, brand new GUI, Worker Groups, and more.
• Receiver – There are actually several technologies at work here to create a better experience for the end user.
• XenClient – This is a client based hypervisor allowing remote users to have multiple desktop images on their PC, while still being able to communicate with the corporate network. Backups and other management features are available for these remote desktops.

I’ll go into more details on the new versions as well as the other releases very soon.

Well, I’ve changed the scenery and the focus of this site. I haven’t been doing much of the web design in the last few years and have become more of a systems administrator. So, this site will now be dedicated to all things that involve Systems Administration:

• Citrix Technologies
• Virtualization Technologies
• Network Projects
• and of course, Troubleshooting

So, keep an eye on this site for some good stuff!