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How to: #Citrix #XenMobile 8.5 MAM upgrade! Part 2 – #StoreFront, #AppController, #NetScaler
Hi again!
If you haven’t read Part 1 then I highly recommend doing so prior to going directly to the upgrade that we’re covering in this post!
Prepare for a journey in this post about Citrix StoreFront upgrade, uninstallation, console and how messy it could be! NOT all the time, sometimes it “just works”! 😉
My little NetScaler is already upgraded to 10.1 so unfortunately I couldn’t take you on that journey as well, so we’ll start with the StoreFront upgrade from 1.2 to 2.0 in this post. These are the steps that we need to cover as highlighted in the migration guide that seems very short and straight forward:
Upgrade StoreFront 1.2 to 2.0.
- Logon to the StoreFront server console.
- Upgrade StoreFront by running the StoreFront 2.0 installer as an administrator.
- When the upgrade is completed, open StoreFront administration snap-in, remove CloudGateway controller from each store as this will be moved in the migration solution.
- Open NetScaler Gateway Properties and for each gateway defined and change the version field in settings from 9.x to 10.0.x or later.
- Test the configuration by logging on through web browser or Citrix Receiver.
- Verify if the users are able to login and authenticate to StoreFront defined stores configured.
Is it this easy?
Ok, I’ve downloaded the 2.0 installer, and I’m logged on to the server.
Before we even start the upgrade there are things that could go wrong in removal or upgrades of StoreFront. And one that I’ve seen cause a lot of headache for a lot of people out there is that they have the Windows Firewall service disabled. Though the installation and removal wants to delete or add these rules the installation will fail unless this service is running. As you can see in this picture below you see the FW rule added in StoreFront 1.2:
So let’s verify that the Windows FW service is started, and it is!
I’ll now start the installation by double-clicking the StoreFront 2.0 installer!
What is this popup that came directly after starting the installer?
Wait, ok so you guys at Citrix couldn’t ask me whether you could do this for me? My plan is to upgrade, so please just add a little step in your upgrade program that does this for me… change request #1 for the next SF release and it’s upgrade process! Verify pre-requisites or deal with them!
Configuring #ShareFile and #SAML Walkthrough – via @andyjmorgan
Another great blog post by Andrew! Great job!
While working with a customer recently on a sharefile implementation, I set about creating a SAML / Active Directory single sign on deployment. Configuring ADFS and SAML were complete unknowns to me so I set about documenting the process end to end for future reference.
The end result of this activity will allow you to login to sharefile using a native account (think Guest) or an active directory account (think internal user).
What you will need in order to follow this guide:
- An enterprise Sharefile account.
- A local domain.
- An active directory service account. (standard user rights are fine)
- A windows 2012 server to host ADFS (windows 2008 r2 is fine, but you’ll need to install ADFS 2.0 manually).
- This windows server must be accessible via https (443) from the internet. (Netscaler SSL works fine).
- An external trusted certificate for the web server hosting saml (e.g. adfs.yourdomain.com). For this walk through, I’ll assume you have already done this. *
- A copy of the Sharefile User Management Tool.
- About 2-3 hours spare.
* for this, generate a server certificate and import it into the local machines personal certificates.
Steps:
- Installing Active Directory Federated Services.
- Configuring Federated Services.
- Configuring Sharefile for SAML.
- Syncing Active Directory users with Sharefile.
- Testing the saml login….
Continue reading here!
//Richard
How To: #XenMobile #MDM 8.5 Deployment Part 1 and 2: Installation – via @AdamInTheCloud
Wow, it’s like Adam read my mind, I’m doing the same kind of blog post series but for a XenMobile MAM deployment! Will post part 2 of the MAM series later tonight (once it’s done, waiting on some StoreFront issues to solve and I’m getting there!)
But in the meantime have a look at this great series by Adam! Great job Adam!!!
How To: XenMobile MDM 8.5 Deployment Part 1: Installation
n late 2012 Citrix announced they had purchased a 7-year-old startup company called Zenprise that was a hot player in the mobile device security market. Up until that time, Citrix was positioning for that sector with its CloudGateway Enterprise product and focusing mostly on apps and data management..not really the device. Zenprise helped them flesh out their offering, which is now known as “XenMobile”. Although it’s gone through a few iterations it has finally reached a final “form” if you will of three editions: MDM, App, and Enterprise.
The purpose of this article series will be to walk through the installation and basic setup of the MDM (Mobile Device Management) Edition which focuses almost exclusively on managing the device, and not necessarily so much the data or apps. Although it is capable of application pushes and the like… a feature comparison can be found on Citrix’ website HERE. I encourage you to view that. One major difference to note is MDM does not sandbox apps/data, but App Edition does, and Enterprise Edition can.
In researching this product for some internal training we are currently going through it became pretty apparent there is very little information out there on it, and if there is its unfortunately outdated because the product has been rapidly evolving over the first half of the year. In this series of blog articles I will go over how to deploy a single instance of XenMobile 8.5 MDM on an internal network, configure basic policies and rules, and apply them to your devices.
If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:
This, unfortunately is the most boring part of MDM which is the install…but I would be remiss by not going over it for some of you that “have to see” it. So lets get to it so we can get on to the more exciting stuff!
First: Pre-req’s. All of this is straight from eDocs, I’m not reinventing the wheel here.
- MDM 8.5 needs to go on a 2008 R2 or 2012 server.
- Setup an active directory service account and make it a local admin on the MDM server
- Disable IPv6 (not via registry, just uncheck the box)
- UAC disabled
- Firewall disabled (this is my preference..I disable server firewalls but you’re welcome to do as you wish)
- Your service account needs permissions creator/owner/read/write on your SQL server. I will not be using PostgreSQL.
- SQL 2005/2008/R2/2012 in your environment (Reference Architecture recommends SQL for production deployments, not PostgreSQL. See HERE)
- Java SE 7 Update 11 (dk-7u4-windows-x64.exe) installed on the server
- Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) USJP 7 on the serverExternal DNS record such as mobile.mydomain.com
- To install the Java Cryptography Extension
- Install Java SE 7u11
- Open the JCE zip file and copy local_policy.jar and US_export_policy.jar to your computer desktop.
- Navigate to the folder /java/jdk1.7.0_x/jre/lib/security and copy the files from Step 2 to this folder.
- To install the Java Cryptography Extension
- Obtain an Apple….
Continue reading part 1 here and part 2 here!
//Richard
#Citrix #XenMobile 8.5 MAM upgrade! Part 1 – #StoreFront, #AppController, #NetScaler
In this little blog series series you’ll follow a little upgrade process to XenMobile 8.5 for Mobile Application Management (previously known as CloudGateway).
Ok, I don’t exactly know where to begin. I must first say that Citrix is THE master when it comes to renaming products, updating/changing the architecture, changing consoles (claiming to reducing the number of them like every year but at the same time introduce new ones).
How hard can it be to make crystal clear documentation and upgrade processes that works and are easy? I feel already that my tone in this blog post is “a bit” negative… but I think that Citrix actually deserves it this time.
I must now take a step back and calm down and point out that Citrix is delivering some MAJOR changes and good news/features in the new XenMobile 8.5 release though! It’s great (when you’ve got it up and running) and I must say that I don’t see anyone that is near them in delivering all these capabilities in a nice end-to-end delivery!! 🙂
Have a look at everything that is new, deployment scenarios etc. here before you even start thinking to upgrade or change your current NetScaler, StoreFront and AppController environment!
Once you’ve started to read the different design scenarios you’ll see that App Controller can be placed in front of StoreFront, in the back of StoreFront or totally without StoreFront… all the options just make your head spin! Because Citrix doesn’t really make it clear on how all of this should work with a Receiver and Worx Home depending if the device is on the internal network, external through NetScaler or what the capabilities that you need are supported in the different scenarios in a simple way, just text that explains it. And I find the pictures and text a bit misleading:
As you see above the App Controller is added as a “Farm” just as in 2.6, but is that the truth now in version 2.8 of App Controller?
If you have a look at the text from this page it’s getting even more confusing: Read more…
True or False: Always use Provisioning Services – #Citrix, #PVS, #MCS
Another good blog post from Daniel Feller:
Test your Citrix muscle…
True or False: Always use Provisioning Services
Answer: False
There has always been this aura around Machine Creation Services in that it could not hold a candle to Provisioning Services; that you would be completely insane to implement this feature in any but the simplest/smallest deployments.
How did we get to this myth? Back in March of 2011 I blogged about deciding between MCS and PVS. I wanted to help people decide between using Provisioning Services and the newly released Machine Creation Services. Back in 2011, MCS an alternative to PVS in that MCS was easy to setup, but had some limitations when compared to PVS. My blog and decision tree were used to help steer people into the PVS route except for the use cases where MCS made sense.
Two and a half years passed and over that time, MCS has grown up. Unfortunately, I got very busy and didn’t keep this decision matrix updated. I blame the XenDesktop product group. How dare they improve our products. Don’t they know this causes me more work? 
It’s time to make some updates based on improvements of XenDesktop 7 (and these improvements aren’t just on the MCS side but also on the PVS side as well).
So let’s break it down:
- Hosted VDI desktops only: MCS in XenDesktop 7 now supports XenApp hosts. This is really cool, and am very happy about this improvement as so many organizations understand that XA plays a huge part in any successful VDI project.
- Dedicated Desktops: Before PVD, I was no fan of doing dedicated VDI desktops with PVS. With PVD, PVS dedicated desktops is now much more feasible, like it always was with MCS
- Boot/Logon Storms: PVS, if configured correctly, would cache many of the reads into system memory, helping to reduce the Read IOPS. Hypervisors have improved over the past 2 years to help us with the large number of Read disk operations. This helps lessen the impact of the boot/logon storms when using MCS.
Organizational Challenges with #VDI – #Citrix
And yet another good blog post by Citrix and Wayne Baker. This is an interesting topic and I must say that the blog posts still goes into a lot of the technical aspects, but there are more “soft” organisational aspects to look into as well like service delivery/governance model and process changes that often are missed. And as Wayne also highlights below and that’s worth mentioning again is the impact on the network that also was covered well in this previous post: #Citrix blog post – Get Up To Speed On #XenDesktop Bandwidth Requirements
Back to the post itself:
One of the biggest challenges I repeatedly come across when working with large customers attempting desktop transformation projects, is the internal structure of the organisation. I don’t mean that the organisation itself is a problem, rather that the project they are attempting spans so many areas of responsibility it can cause significant friction. Many of these customers undertake the projects as a purely technical exercise, but I’m here to tell you it’s also an exercise in organisational change!
One of the things I see most often is a “Desktop” team consisting of all the people who traditionally manage all the end-points, and a totally disparate “Server” team who handle all the server virtualization and back-end work. There’s also the “Networks” team to worry about and often the “Storage” team are in the mix too! Bridging those gaps can be one of the areas where friction begins to show. In my role I tend to be involved across all the teams, and having discussion with all of those people alerts me to where weaknesses may lie in the project. For example the requirements for server virtualization tend to be significantly different to the requirements for desktop virtualization, but when discussing these changes with the server virtualization team, one of the most often asked questions is, “Why would you want to do THAT?!” when pointing out the differing resource allocations for both XenApp and XenDesktop deployments.
Now that’s not to say that all teams are like this and – sweeping generalizations aside – I have worked with some incredibly good ones, but increasingly there are examples where the integration of teams causes massive tension. The only way to overcome this situation is to address the root cause – organizational change. Managing desktops was (and in many places still is) a bit of a black art, combining vast organically grown scripts and software distribution mechanisms into an intricately woven (and difficult to unpick!) tapestry. Managing the server estate has become an exercise in managing workloads and minimising/maximising the hardware allocations to provide the required level of service and reducing the footprint in the datacentre. Two very distinct skill-sets!
The other two teams which tend to get a hard time during these types of projects are the networks and storage teams – this usually manifests itself when discussing streaming technologies and their relative impacts on the network and storage layers. What is often overlooked however is that any of the teams can have a significant impact on the end-user experience – when the helpdesk takes the call from an irate user it’s going to require a good look at all of the areas to decipher where the issue lies. The helpdesk typically handle the call as a regular desktop call and don’t document the call in a way which would help the disparate teams discover the root cause, which only adds to the problem! A poorly performing desktop/application delivery infrastructure can be caused by any one of the interwoven areas, and this towering of teams makes troubleshooting very difficult, as there is always a risk that each team doesn’t have enough visibility of the other areas to provide insight into the problem.
Organizations that do not take a wholesale look at how they are planning to migrate that desktop tapestry into the darkened world of the datacentre are the ones who, as the project trundles on, come to realise that the project will never truly be the amazing place that the sales guy told them it would be. Given the amount of time, money and political will invested in these projects, it is a fundamental issue that organizations need to address.
So what are the next steps? Hopefully everyone will have a comprehensive set of requirements defined which can drive forward a design, something along the lines of:
1) Understand the current desktop estate:
Microsoft is progressing quickly! – SkyDrive Pro updated to 25GB and improved sharing – via @BasvanKaam
I must say this once again, Microsoft looks to be on the right track when it comes to getting back as one strong supplier of services in the future/present “BYOD” world. As I wrote in my post #Microsoft – On the right track! – #Windows, #BYOD, #Citrix now Microsoft is actually targeting to solve many of the gaps that we see with today services for BYOx scenarios. For instance how to manage what you want on top of the device (Azure, Intune, SkyDrive, Work Folders etc…) in a controllable fashion and not a full managed device that costs you a fortune to manage… and ShareFile, Box and others are great solutions that have many features that SkyDrive doesn’t have. But there is one thing that they all lack (or please enlighten me!!):
Encryption at rest on Windows, OS X and Linux OS’s/distributions, here all providers are leaning on that you already have hard drive encryption like BitLocker etc. But who manages that then? Can you then say that your service is “BYOD-compliant”? I wouldn’t say so… It’s not only SmartPhones and Tablet devices that we loose… but here Microsoft and SkyDrive may be the first to come with encryption on at least Windows 8.1 devices and somewhat manageable…
But again back to the announcement from Microsoft and SkyDrive:
Microsoft announced today that it is giving business users more storage space and a better way to share files across multiple devices. As first reported by TechCrunch, through its SkyDrive Pro accounts, employees will now receive 25GB of storage to start out with, a sharp increase from 7GB — and even this capacity can be increased to 50GB or even 100GB. Additionally, using SkyDrive’s Shared with Me view, users can share files with their friends and co-workers securely and in real-time.
According to Microsoft Senior Product Managers Mark Kashman and Tejas Mehta, the new storage space limits will be available for both new and existing customers.
This certainly makes the service standout among its competitors, namely Dropbox and Box. It was only about a week or so ago when the latter heralded in the launch of a new pricing plan aiming to increase the number of small businesses using its service. For personal users, Box also wound up doubling the amount of free storage they received.
Here’s how you can figure out the overall storage for each user:
With Office 365, you get 25 GB of SkyDrive Pro storage + 25 GB of email storage + 5 GB for each site mailbox you create + your total available tenant storage, which for every Office 365 business customer starts at 10 GB + (500 MB x # of user(s)1).
While Dropbox, Box, and Hightail certainly are some of the popular services out there today, SkyDrive isn’t something to be trifled with either. Through its integration with the Surface, Windows Phone, and other Microsoft products, along with iOS and Android devices, it has the potential to be a very powerful service.
As for the new sharing feature, just like you would perhaps see in Google Drive or any other cloud storage service, SkyDrive Pro is now offering a Shared with Me view that lets you take a shared document and view, edit, re-share, download, and more — all as if it were in your own storage bin.
But Microsoft isn’t stopping there, as it is adding several minor, but interesting enhancements to SkyDrive. The company has also increased the overall file upload limit to its SharePoint Online service to 2GB per file. Files placed into the recycle bin will now remain…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
#Citrix #PVS vs. #MCS Revisited – #Nutanix, #Sanbolic
Another good blog post from Citrix and Nick Rintalan around the famous topic whether to go for PVS or MCS! If your thinking about this topic then don’t miss this article. Also ensure that you talk to someone who have implemented an image mgmt/provisioning service like this to get some details on lessons learnt etc., also with the change in the hypervisor layer and the cache features this is getting really interesting…
AND don’t forget the really nice storage solutions that exists out there like Nutanix and Melio that really solves some challenges out there!!
http://go.nutanix.com/rs/nutanix/images/TG_XenDesktop_vSphere_on_Nutanix_RA.pdf
Melio Solutions – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
Back to the Citrix blog post:
It’s been a few months since my last article, but rest assured, I’ve been keeping busy and I have a ton of stuff in my head that I’m committed to getting down on paper in the near future. Why so busy? Well, our Mobility products are keeping me busy for sure. But I also spent the last month or so preparing for 2 different sessions at BriForum Chicago. My colleague, Dan Allen, and I co-presented on the topics of IOPS and Folder Redirection. Once Brian makes the videos and decks available online, I’ll be sure to point people to them.
So what stuff do I want to get down on paper and turn into a future article? To name a few…MCS vs. PVS (revisited), NUMA and XA VM Sizing, XenMobile Lessons Learned “2.0″, and Virtualizing PVS Part 3. But let’s talk about that first topic of PVS vs MCS now.
Although BriForum (and Synergy) are always busy times, I always try to catch a few sessions by some of my favorite presenters. One of them is Jim Moyle and he actually inspired this article. If you don’t know Jim, he is one of our CTPs and works for Atlantis Computing – he also wrote one of the most informative papers on IOPS I’ve ever read. I swear there is not a month that goes by that I don’t get asked about PVS vs. MCS (pros and cons, what should I use, etc.). I’m not going to get into the pros and cons or tell you what to use since many folks like Dan Feller have done a good job of that already, even with beautiful decision trees. I might note that Barry Schiffer has an updated decision tree you might want to check out, too. But I do want to talk about one of the main reasons people often cite for not using MCS – it generates about “1.6x or 60% more IOPS compared to PVS“. And ever since Ken Bell sort of “documented” this in passing about 2-3 years ago, that’s sort of been Gospel and no one had challenged it. But our CCS team was seeing slightly different results in the field and Jim Moyle also decided to challenge that statement. And Jim shared the results of his MCS vs. PVS testing at BriForum this year – I think many folks were shocked by the results.
What were those results? Here is a summary of the things I thought were most interesting:
- MCS generates 21.5% more average IOPS compared to PVS in the steady-state (not anywhere near 60%)
- This breaks down to about 8% more write IO and 13% more read IO
- MCS generates 45.2% more peak IOPS compared to PVS (this is closer to the 50-60% range that we originally documented)
- The read-to-write (R/W) IO ratio for PVS was 90%+ writes in both the steady-state and peak(nothing new here)
- The R/W ratio for MCS at peak was 47/53 (we’ve long said it’s about 50/50 for MCS, so nothing new here)
- The R/W ratio for MCS in the steady-state was 17/83 (this was a bit of a surprise, much like the first bullet)
So how can this be?!?
I think it’s critical to understand where our initial “1.5-1.6x” or “50-60%” statement comes from – that takes into account not just the steady-state, but also the boot and logon phases, which are mostly read IOPS and absolutely drive up the numbers for MCS. If you’re unfamiliar with the typical R/W ratios for a Windows VM during the various stages of its “life” (boot, logon, steady-state, idle, logoff, etc.), then this picture, courtesy of Project VRC, always does a good job explaining it succinctly:
We were also looking at peak IOPS and average IOPS in a single number – we didn’t provide two different numbers or break it down like Jim and I did above in the results, and a single IOPS number can be very misleading in itself. You don’t believe me? Just check out my BriForum presentation on IOPS and I’ll show you several examples of how…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
#Citrix blog post – Get Up To Speed On #XenDesktop Bandwidth Requirements
Welcome to the HDX bandwidth testing blog series! In the following posts I’ll be sharing key findings and results from an extensive round of XenDesktop 5.6 / XenApp 6.5 bandwidth testing. Already using XenDesktop 7? Well then stay tuned for the last post in the series where I will be discussing that as well. Before I begin, I want to take this opportunity to thank Andy Baker and Thomas Berger for their tremendous help and guidance in managing this effort.
Part 1: The Prologue
It is not uncommon these days to have great LAN networks with what seems like unlimited bandwidth. I find myself at the office running multiple virtual desktops, uploading my files to ShareFile, all while streaming Spotify to my machine at the same time without even noticing. Even at home you have a nice fast connection just for yourself. Unfortunately many users do not have this luxury due to expensive business grade connections which are often over utilized. Overlooking this fact during a deployment can result in frozen and disconnected sessions and an overall poor user experience. This leaves IT departments frequently asking “how much bandwidth do I need for XenDesktop?”
Of course the answer to this question – in my opinion more so than most questions – is it depends. Why is that? Because it depends on what is on the screen at any given time. The amount of bandwidth consumed will be close to none when the session is idle, but can vary greatly depending on whether a user is typing, browsing a document, running a slideshow, or watching a video. Of course there is always the magic number of 20-30kbps that has been around forever, but that was before the explosion in multimedia content both on the web and now seen more frequently in applications as well . (Although I would note that we did reach and beat that 20-30kbps zone with some of our less multimedia intensive tests).
To help better answer this question our team decided to start running some tests…..a lot of tests. We measured general daily usage, took a deep dive into single application tests, and put some optimizations and best practices to the test. In part one of this blog I will be discussing the infrastructure and methodology for our first round of testing.
Infrastructure
The tests that I will be discussing were run in the environment shown below. A laptop was connected to anApposite WAN Emulator and used as the endpoint for both the manual and Login VSI tests. The emulator was used to control the bandwidth limits for each scenario that I describe later on in this blog post. The other end of the emulator was connected to a switch that was configured to send all packets in and out of the emulator to a mirrored port monitored by a server running Wireshark. This ensured all communication between the client and virtual desktop were captured without interfering with the VSI scripts. The environment infrastructure and desktop pool were also connected to the switch and communicated transparently to the laptop.
The environment was built using the product versions shown below. This is important to note as future tests are planned with XenDesktop 7 which benefits from newer codecs and algorithms for rendering. These tests were also run with the latest version of Login VSI which features more intense workloads than previous versions and a large randomized content library.
- XenServer 6.1
- Microsoft Server 2008 R2
- Windows 7 x86
- XenDesktop 5.6
- VDA 5.6.2
- Receiver 3.4 Enterprise
- Login VSI 4.0
Disclaimers
Before I begin to explain the tests that we ran I need to make a few disclaimers. The first being that quality of service (QoS) was not…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
A look at Work Folders – #Microsoft, #WorkFolders, #MIM, #BYOD – via @STEALTHPUPPY
This is an interesting new feature by Microsoft. I’ve touched upon the topic in my earlier post: #Microsoft – On the right track! – #Windows, #BYOD, #Citrix
And here you have another good blog post from Aaron Parker around the topic!
Microsoft announced some interesting new features in Windows Server 2012 R2 at TechEd 2013 and one of those that piqued my interest is Work Folders. I’m not the biggest fan of Redirected Folders and Offline files, but it’s essentially the only enterprise solution Microsoft provides today for taking your data offline. Microsoft needs to provide a completely new method of syncing file data – one that is designed for todays use cases and computing environment.
Work Folders is a brand new direction for enabling access to data in offline scenarios, along the lines of Citrix ShareFile and Dropbox, but without the web and sharing features. Like most Microsoft OS features, Work Folders is tied to a specific release of Windows; however according to this Channel 9 video, Microsoft will release Work Folders for Windows 7, iOS and “other devices” (presumably Android). This is excellent news.
Here’s a short look at setting up and connecting to Work Folders using the preview releases of Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 – what’s version 1.0 going to deliver?
Server Configuration
For a more detailed walkthrough on deploying Work Folders, download this document: Windows Server 2012 R2: Enabling Windows Server Work Folders.
Work Folders is a component of the File and Storage Services role in Windows Server. I’ve installed Windows Server 2012 R2 into a virtual machine and am using local storage.
Once installed, Work Folders is managed through Server Manager:
Creating a new sync share is performed via a wizard which will first ask where the Sync Share will be located. This can be a new folder or an existing share – mixing user home drives and Work Folders should be possible. Note that at this time, Work Folders only supports providing users with exclusive access to Sync Share location – there is no provision for providing access to shared data. Read more…
The IT Melting Pot! 