Archive
VRC white paper about impact of AV on VDI performance – @LoginVSI, @LoginConsultant
New VRC white paper about impact of antivirus on VDI performance
The independent research initiative Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) released the long awaited ‘Phase V’ white paper which provides new insights in the impact and best practices of various antivirus solutions on VDI performance.
By testing and comparing different solutions and configurations Project VRC discovered the best practice to perform a pre-scan of the master image before deployment.
Another key finding is that antivirus off-loading architectures makes a big difference from a storage IO point of view, but not always from a session density point of view.
This Project VRC white paper with all Login VSI test results and best practices can be downloaded for free here:
Download the Project VRC white paper
Read other white papers based on tests with Login VSI
//Richard
Jan. Edition of XenDesktop Technical Newsletter Now Available – #XenDesktop, #Citrix
It’s out again with more exciting topics! Check it out!!!
Using XenDesktop? Then you need to get the XenDesktop Technical Newsletter! The newsletter is comprised of the best technical resources from across Citrix Services: Consulting, Technical Support, Education, and Technical Readiness. In its third year the newsletter is designed to help customers run their XenDesktop optimally and get more out of their investment in Citrix desktop virtualization. And its FREE!
I am pleased to announce that the January 2013 edition of the newsletter is now available.
Check out the archive page, where you can access both the current and past issues, as well as subscribe to the FREE monthly newsletter.
The January edition of the newsletter is packed with great content, including:
- Optimal XenApp 6.5 VM Configuration (Blog)
- Introduction to the new Project Accelerator (Blog)
- Deploying XenApp 6.5 using PVS (Blog)
- Insider Troubleshooting tips for Administrators (eBook)
- Whats new with Excalibur (Blog)
- Top Knowledge Center content for December 2012 (Articles, hotfixes, whitepapers, etc…)
- How to configure Access Gateway 5 standalone for use with XD5 (tech note)
- XenDesktop Tools & Hotfixes
- And much more.
If you have any..
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Content Switching instead of Load balancing of XenApp XML brokers? – #XenApp #NetScaler #CS #LB
Ok, I was contacted by another colleague today again about a customer and their setup of XenApp load balancing. They of course had NetScalers and had read the guidelines and best practises from Citrix on how to do load balancing and monitoring of XML brokers. But they had the same issue that many have, they had to contact the network team when they needed to add farms that they should load balance, and they needed an IP for each LB vServer per XenApp farm…
And this is not the first time I’ve seen this… why doesn’t people use Content Switching instead when doing load balancing of their XenApp farms (and other resources as well of course!)?
This is the Citrix picture on how to do it;
But what I’d do instead and recommend is to use Content Switching (CS) instead. Setup a CS vServer with an IP and an A-record in DNS, in the picture below it’s the one with bogus IP 10.10.10.10 and FQDN of cs8080.envokeit.local.
Then what you do is to configure a CNAME alias for each of your farms in DNS, like farm1.envokeit.local that you can see in the picture. Have the CNAME to be an alias of the CS you just created. Then in the NetScaler you setup your LB vServers just like you’ve always done and create the Service Group and add the correct monitors etc. to it. And remember that you in this case don’t have to have an IP set on the LB vServers, these don’t have to be directly addressable from the network, only through your CS that you just setup.
Then on the CS create your policies to do CS on the hostname of the incoming requests to the respective LB vServer. No more requesting IP’s per farm and all of that, one IP and you can support MANY farms…. I just love CS! 🙂
Happy content switching! 😉
//Richard
#Citrix #SmartAccess = A complete story or not? – #NetScaler #AGEE #EPA
This little blog post is about Citrix SmartAccess. I’ve been a fan of SmartAccess for a long time, and it’s also something that Citrix has been talking a lot about in their story. The way that Citrix technology can provide applications, desktops and information to end-users on any device in a secure and controlled way.
But the purpose of this blog post is to give you my view of this story, and how true the SmartAccess story is. Remember that this is my personal view and that I’ve actually not tested all my theories below so parts of it is purely theoretical at this stage.
So a bit of background first to build my case…
Citrix has been going on about SmartAccess, and it’s been true that the Access Gateway capabilities once added to Web Interface and XenApp/XenDesktop where great in terms of adding another layer of functionality that the IT supplier could use to determine how the XenApp and XenDesktop environments where accessed, and from what type of device. The device detection/classification is done through host checks (Endpoint Analysis Scans, EPA) that the Access Gateway feature provided as a pre- or post-authentication scan. This scan then resulted that either the device met the policies or didn’t, and then this policy could be leveraged by the other internal components (XenApp/XenDesktop) to control/manage which apps, desktops and functionality (virtual channels like printing, drive mapping etc.) that the end-user should get for that specific session.
And this was/is working well for certain scenarios from a technical point of view. But is it really working for the whole story that Citrix and the whole IT-industry is driving now with BYOD etc.? Think about the message that is being pushed out there today, use any device, we can control and deliver according to security policies, we can provide access from anywhere, etc…
And this is where it becomes interesting. All of a sudden then you as an architect are to take this vision that your CIO or IT-board has and realise it into manageable IT services that combined deliver a fully fledged IT delivery of Windows, Internal Web, SaaS, Mobile and Data for this great set of use cases and scenarios. Wow… you’ve got yourself a challenge mate!
This text is from the Citrix homepage about SmartAccess;
SmartAccess allows you to control access to published applications and desktops on a server through the use of Access Gateway session policies. This permits the use of preauthentication and post-authentication checks as a condition for access to published resources, along with other factors. These include anything you can control with a XenApp or XenDesktop policy, such as printer bandwidth limits, client drive mapping, client clipboard, client audio, and client printer mapping. Any XenApp or XenDesktop policy can be applied based on whether or not users pass an Access Gateway check.
So let’s start of then with going back to the SmartAccess which is the topic of this blog!
#Citrix #XenDesktop Monitoring: Desktop Availability – #EGinnovations #HP #BAC
Ok, this was an interesting blog post from Miguel Contreras. First of all I’d like to thank you Miguel for this post!
You can read the blog post here prior to reading my ramblings… 😉
XenDesktop Monitoring: Desktop Availability
The whole blog post message hits a spot that I know many of our EnvokeIT customers are looking for: AN E2E (END-TO-END) MONITORING CAPABILITY!Â
Citrix has great products and they work from a technical point of view, but I think that most part of the time development and evolvement of the products goes to fast so that the product teams doesn’t have time to synchronise how well they work together or what the service provider will need cross-products in the stack to deliver a managed IT service!
This blog post really proves it as well… Miguel has developed a powershell script that he schedules to run so that he could see in the morning if he could go to work or if everything is ok with his desktop service (or Windows as a Service (WaaS) as Citrix now talks about this type of service). And is that the way to go? I’m still looking for this E2E monitoring solution from Citrix that can provide real and good facts about how the overall WaaS service performs. Is the NetScaler VIP up, StoreFront, AppController, PVS/MCS, XenServer, the VM, File Server that hosts profiles etc. It’s only if yo get this full picture and fact that you can say that the service WaaS is available. It doesn’t matter if the desktop is running if the AGEE vip is down and he/she cannot reach it… or?
If Citrix isn’t getting into the monitoring business then please guide your customers to who of the partners that does the job, for instance EGinnovations, HP BAC etc.
Yeah yeah… my ramblings are over for tonight and this was not my first complaint about this “service readiness” stamp I’d like to see on enterprise products…
But still = I think no one else right now does the WaaS-job like Citrix!! But they can always improve like all of us! 😉
Cheers!
//Richard
My Post-Synergy View – Update 2 #CitrixSynergy #Citrix #CitrixSummit #XenApp #XenDesktop #NetScaler #Sanbolic
Hi again!
Ok, time to wrap up my Synergy update post series… In the previous post I started to give U my view of the takeaways from Citrix Synergy. So let’s continue! 🙂
As I wrote before I tried to structure the post using the following; each heading represents the enhancement request topic and/or the takeaway item, and then the subheading of Description and Status is showing you my personal view on the topic and its status.
NetScaler
Description:
These where the items that we had on the enhancement list before going to Synergy:
- Create SDX platform/architecture to run on all MPX appliances, for more info why see; NetScaler MPX vs. SDX dilemma; https://richardegenas.com/2012/10/03/netscaler-mpx-vs-sdx-dilemma/
- Add support for AG session policies so that ICA proxy can be turned on for specific published apps and desktops and not per session. This for situations where you might have one app or desktop that sits behind an AGEE and others don’t.
- The NetScaler/Access Gateway HTML/GUI pages used shall be able to be customized per AGEE/AAA Virtual Server. Today they are global pages so that specific modifications/customizations cannot be made and you have to buy an additional NetScaler unless major customizations are done and then life-cycle management becomes an issue.
- Change so that you can specify different Authentication policies and requirements mapped to Session policies instead of to a Virtual Server, AAA group etc. This could then provide a way so that you could offer ICA proxy mode with single auth and two-factor if you launch/select to open an SSL VPN tunnel. And then a user that has forgotten a hardtoken could still get access but only in ICA proxy mode and have all virtual channels disabled without having to have multiple accounts in the Receiver and admin doesn’t need multiple NS AGEE VS.
- It would be good to get the same Account Self-Service functionality that the Single Sign-On/Password Manager service can provide and have integrated into the AGEE login page where end-users can themselves unlock their accounts and reset their passwords without involving Service Desk. And the solution for how to get the single sign-on account self service feature should be an integration part of the NetScaler AGEE console rather than manually updating the HTML pages etc.
UCS and XenDesktop – Best Practises guide #Cisco #UCS #XenDesktop #VXI
I must admin that the Cisco, NetApp and Citrix story around providing a great offering around a complete server hardware, storage and networking solution!
I’m currently attending the 5h SYNBCN12-614W-Platform training on XenDesktop with Cisco Unified Computing System and NetApp session here and I must say that I like the offering due to the broad capabilities of the products included in the solution.
I think that one of the real added values that companies will like is that you have ONE (1) support contact (Cisco) for the whole solution, then Cisco wodk with the others to solve any potential issue etc.
And while playing around here the trainer also mentioned this best practise guide, and it looks good;
Additional info about the Cisco VXI – Desktop Virtualization can be found here.
Cheers!
//Richard
Issue 23 – The XenDesktop Experience A Technical Publication for XenDesktop Customers
Ok, Citrix has again released the XenDesktop technical publication, have a look at it!
Example topics include;
- High Availability for Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenApp – Planning Guide
- How to Tighten the Security of Windows Desktops
- Tackling Windows Migration
Continue reading here!
//Richard
The IT Melting Pot! 