Archive
See how Citrix XenDesktop for Linux looks – #Citrix, #XenDesktop, #Linux, #EnvokeIT, #BYOD, #DaaS
This is one of the coolest things a part from the Workspace Cloud service that Citrix is working on. I’ve had the pleassure of trying this out and we at EnvokeIT have been doing a lot of tests of this Linux VDA tech preview.
Isn’t it great that both Microsoft and Citrix now seem to love Linux 🙂 (and yes, I manipulated these images so it’s not an official Citrix statement!)
So this little blog post is just going to show of the capabilities and how nicely this integrates with the Citrix XenDesktop architecture. First of all I’d like to say thanks to my colleagues Björn Bekkouche and Peter Smali for letting me use their lab environment!
Before we get into showing how it works and looks I must just highlight that if you have any questions about how we can assist you to deliver Linux-based Terminal Servers or VDI’s to remote users in a secure and optimal just contact us at EnvokeIT here or pop me an email: richard at envokeit.com.
This is great for all of you with Developers on Linux! Have them code from anywhere in a secure manner! They can run their Linux VDA in your datacenter, connect to it from an Receiver compliant device and code from them and you have your intellectual property secured internally instead of having them checking out Git repositories to their local devices etc.!
So what is XenDesktop for Linux? Well, to answer that really simple I assume that you have some basic knowledge of the Citrix XenDesktop architecture.. if you don’t then please read up on that a little before continue reading, one really good contribution to bulding your architecture is described in this Citrix Virtual Desktop Handbook or this Citrix XenDesktop – Blueprint. These contains a lot of valuable information that you shall think of and how to configure the environment to fulfill you use cases.
But overall think of the XenDesktop architecture of something like the following pictures (click to enlarge them). The first one shows the new model where we could run and take care of the VDA’s ourselves on-premise but leverage the Workspace Cloud service from Citrix so that we don’t anymore have to bother about the XenDesktop infrastructure components and the life-cycle management etc. of those. The second one is the more overall traditional architecture overview that you’d see of the different layers.
And as you see above this details the standard architecture wher you would have your Server or Desktop VDA’s in the resource layer hosting the desktops for your users to connect to, but they have all been Windows-based up until now!
Now with the Tech Preview we can actually install the Linux-based VDA on a Red Hat or Suse machine and access that through the SAME Delivery Controllers and StoreFront stores that also manage our Windows-based VDA’s.
And this is awesome! 🙂 We can leverage the already existing Windows-based architecture to just “hook in” our Linux-desktops as well and get users to conect through Receiver for Web, Receiver and even through the NetScalers if you need (works like a charm!!).
So as you can see here we have a nice little landing page for our entry points that are running different versions and access different environments etc.
So we have Peters entry point running one NetScaler version and theme: Read more…
Synergy 2015 – A condensed recap of everything you need to know – via @gkuruvilla, #Citrix, #CitrixSynergy
This is a great summary recap that George Kuruvill has done of Citrix Synergy 2015! Great work and enjoy this blog post!
For those of you who were not able to attend Citrix Synergy this year & dont have the time to sit through the key note recordings, I decided to put together a condensed version of some of the key announcements. So here goes!
Citrix Workspace Cloud
- Citrix hosted control plane that enables customers to deliver a comprehensive mobile workspace to end users.
- Gives customers the flexibility to host workloads on premises, in public or private clouds.
- Control plane also provides end to end monitoring of user connections.
- Evergreen infrastructure since Citrix maintains all core infrastructure components.
- Workspace Cloud Connector installed on premises on a Win 2k12 server that establishes SSL communication between control plane and customer environment. Used to talk to infrastructure components like Active Directory and hypervisors hosting workload
I wrote a blog on CWC and the value proposition a month back that you can find here.
SYN 217 – Workspace Cloud – Technical Overview [Video]
Citrix Lifecycle Management
- Comprehensive cloud based service that can be used to design, deploy and manage both Citrix and other enterprise applications.
- Based on the ScaleXtreme technology.
- Lifecycle Management enables customers/partners to deploy infrastructure not only on premises but also public/private clouds (resource locations)
- Customers/Partners have the ability to create blueprints to automate infrastructure deployments end to end. Examples of blueprints include a XD deployment for instance where you could not only install all the XD infrastructure but also automate the installation of all supporting infrastructure like Active Directory, SQL etc.
- Vendors have the ability to create blueprints as well that can then be consumed by customers and partners alike.
- Customers/Partners also have the ability to incorporate scripts (new/existing) into the deployment.
- Once a blueprint is developed, its added to a library. Any resource within the library can then be deployed to a resource location (on premises, public/private cloud)
- Another key benefit of the Lifecycle Management technology is the ability to automate application upgrades.
XenApp/XenDesktop
- Xenapp 6.5 maintenance extended till end of 2017, EOL extended till 06/2018. Details here
- New Feature Pack for XA 6.5 (enhance storage performance, Lync support enhancements, UPM enhancements, Director “Help Desk” troubleshooting”, Storefront 3.0, Receiver.next)
- XenApp/XenDesktop 7.6 FP2 (End of Q2)
- New Receiver X1
- Lync 2013 on Mac
- Touch ID Support
- HDX with Framehawk
- Native Receiver for Linux
- Linux Apps and Desktops (Redhat and SUSE support)
- Desktop Player for Mac 2.0 (June)
- Desktop Player for Windows (Tech Preview)
SYN 233 – Whats new in XenApp and XenDesktop [Video]
SYN 319 – Tech Update for XenApp and XenDesktop [Video]
#Citrix #StoreFront 2.5.2 is released – #DaaS, #XenDesktop, #XenApp
Citrix has released Citrix StoreFront 2.5.2 with some good fixes…
Issues fixed in StoreFront 2.5.x
Updated: 2014-06-18
Issues fixed in StoreFront 2.5.2
Fail to launch a XenApp session from the second delivery site.
The StoreFront server had problems with load balancing between two XenApp farms. When the first farm was completely loaded, StoreFront did not use the second farm and the application launch failed. [#432279]
Enhanced enumeration fails with socket pooling enabled.
Enumeration failed for two or more farms when socket pooling was enabled in the store configuration file. [#470666 and #458139]
Issues with finding the domain controller for a domain.
Slow logon times occurred when geographically distant domain controllers were chosen. [#479210]
Submitting the logon form after the authentication service session timed out results in an HTTP 400 Bad Request.
When the logon form was submitted after the authentication service session timed out, an HTTP 400 Bad Request response was generated preventing the user’s credentials from being resubmitted. [#479200]
Directory queries are not thread-safe.
Citrix default Domain Services crashed because the Directory services account look-up was not thread-safe. [#479188]
Issues fixed from StoreFront 2.1 to 2.5
Changing an expired password on next logon fails.
When prompted to change a password, client domain users using Windows would not be able to successfully change their passwords because of Windows Server 2003 domain controllers failing to handle the operation correctly. Microsoft has issued an update that resolves this problem. The update is available via Windows Update or may be downloaded from Microsoft support directly at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2927811. [#438725]
A user with a large number of subscriptions loses the ability to manage subscriptions.
When logging on, users with 353 or more automatic app subscriptions would receive the following error: “Citrix Receiver cannot currently add, remove, or reposition apps.” [#432086]
The wrong user name is sometimes shown.
Clients would erroneously display a different username. [#430823]
PNA resource IDs do not match requirements of local launch logic.
PNA resources from XenApp were in a format different than StoreFront’s usage. This inconsistency led to slower performance due to excessive ICA connections.[#429055]
Partial wildcard certificates cause issues in the admin console.
The admin console would improperly display configured host names from the IIS bound certificates. [#424708]
Change password option is not available for some users.
Some users were not given the option to reset their password even though they were enabled to do so. [#416373]
Subscription export/import loses subscription properties.
StoreFront was not properly maintaining multiple subscription properties. [#408668]
DAC smart card authentication updated to use domain account services rather than IIS certificate mapping.
Desktop Appliance Connector certificate authentication with smart cards required manual configuration with IIS certificate mappings rather than using the default domain account services. [#406945]
A SAN web server certificate with no CN causes issues for the admin console.
StoreFront admin console was improperly handling common name entries in certificates which would cause console crashes.[#401815]
StoreFront home farms support gives a user access to all farms when they should have access to none.
When a user was configured without access to any farms, all farms were enumerated for that user.[#400869]
The admin console being closed would overwrite some manually applied changes made to the configuration file.
Some manual configuration changes were being lost when the admin console was closed. [#440946, #424460, #439887, #395155]
#Citrix #XenApp and #XenDesktop 7.5 is released
Finally it’s released, just go and download and enjoy (hopefully)! 😉
https://www.citrix.com/downloads/xendesktop/product-software/xendesktop-75-platinum.html
Documentation is available online in Citrix eDocs. Keeping in mind that the online documentation will be periodically updated, you may also download a PDF file with a current snapshot for offline use:
Admin Guide
Upgrade Guide
Install Guide
This single package contains the Core and components needed to deploy the server-side infrastructure supporting Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2 and includes Director, Studio, Delivery Controller, Virtual Delivery Agent, Personal vDisk, Universal Print Server, Receiver and StoreFront, Profile Management, HDX, Migration tool, License Server and CloudBridge (Branch Repeater) plug in.
//Richard
Bug in Citrix Receiver 13 for Linux – cannot connect with multiple STAs – @CitrixSupport, @CitrixReceiver, #Citrix
Ok, we’ve had some issues with Citrix Receiver version 13 for Linux.. and it’s not just ONE issue. I found one that I thought I just have to share… so it’s lab Saturday for me at the office in a true geek manner with two XenClients and my favourite MacBook!
I guess that some of you have tried the Linux Receiver and knows how hard it is to get working, especially on a 64-bit distribution of Linux like Ubuntu 12.04 LTS och 13.10 LTS.
If you follow these instructions you can get it onto the device and then login through a browser (local Receiver UI may still not be full functioning!)..
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CitrixICAClientHowTo
What I’m about to show you is that it’s not just only getting Receiver on the device and ensuring that the SSL certificates are trusted. You then have to be able to use it as well externally through a NetScaler Gateway (NSG) into StoreFront and your XenApp/XenDesktop VDA’s.
Just assume that you have a production environment that consists of a NetScaler Gateway and a StoreFront server, if you then in StoreFront have configured your NetScaler Gateway correctly and the appropriate STA configuration (with MULTIPLE STA’s) then you will notice that you can’t launch a session.
BTW, the recommendation from Citrix is to use multiple STA’s, right! See this from edocs:
For all deployments, if you are making resources provided by XenDesktop, XenApp, or VDI-in-a-Box available in the store, list on the Secure Ticket Authority (STA) page URLs for servers running the STA. Add URLs for multiple STAs to enable fault tolerance, listing the servers in order of priority to set the failover sequence. If you configured a grid-wide virtual IP address for your VDI-in-a-Box deployment, you need only specify this address to enable fault tolerance.
Important: VDI-in-a-Box STA URLs must be entered in the form https://serveraddress/dt/sta in the Add Secure Ticket Authority URL dialog box, where serveraddress is the FQDN or IP address of the VDI-in-a-Box server, or the grid-wide virtual IP address.
The STA is hosted on XenDesktop, XenApp, and VDI-in-a-Box servers and issues session tickets in response to connection requests. These session tickets form the basis of authentication and authorization for access to XenDesktop, XenApp, and VDI-in-a-Box resources.
If you want XenDesktop, XenApp, and VDI-in-a-Box to keep disconnected sessions open while Citrix Receiver attempts to reconnect automatically, select theEnable session reliability check box. If you configured multiple STAs and want to ensure that session reliability is always available, select the Request tickets from two STAs, where available check box. Read more…
#XenDesktop 7.1 on #Hyper-V Pilot Guide! – #Citrix
This is a great PoC guide, some thing I would have done differently in detail but overall great work!
You’ve heard of XenDesktop 7.1, experienced a demo and worked through the Reviewer’s Guide. Now where do you turn when you’re ready for a PoC, pilot and preparations for a full-scale rollout?
Here on the Citrix Readiness and Enablement Team, we’re always looking for ways to empower our customers to be successful on their projects. To this end, we’ve taken one of our most popular hands-on lab guides used to train hundreds of internal and external students and reworked it for consumption by the masses. The XenDesktop 7.1 on Hyper-V Pilot Guide can be download fromhttps://citrix.sharefile.com/d/scaa256260df4ab3b. In this guide we cover the following topics with step-by-step instructions and screenshots:
– Configuring System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Installing the Agent
– Setting Up SQL Server Mirroring for a XenDesktop site
– Setting up the XenDesktop Site
– Joining a Controller to an Existing Site
– Configuring StoreFront and Installing Certificates
– Configuring NetScaler for StoreFront Load Balancing
– Installing the VDA Software on Desktop and Server VMs
– Creating Catalogs of Machine for Desktops and Servers
– Creating Delivery Groups for Desktops and Servers
– Delivering Installed and App-V Applications
– Provisioning Services Configuration and Optimizations
– Using the XenDesktop Setup Wizard
– Setting up Remote Access with NetScaler and StoreFront
– Internal and External Connectivity Scenarios
– Load Evaluator Policies
– Monitoring with Director
– Exploring Configuration Logging
– Exploring Delegated Administration
– Working with PowerShell
And much more!
Take a look through the document and let us know your thoughts…
IMPORTANT: This guide is designed to be used as a reference for building PoC and/or pilot environments. Production environments should always be…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Performance Tuning Citrix Storefront 2.x – #Citrix, #StoreFront via @PeterSmali
Another great blog post from my colleague Peter Smali!
Performance Tuning Citrix Storefront 2.x
First of all I would like to thank Sandbu who came up with an extra performance tuning trick that I have been testing for a while now.
In this post I’ll be demonstrating an updated version of Sandbu’s due some small changes since the introduction of Citrix Storefront 2.x
As we all are aware of, Citrix Storefront is fully dependent on IIS to work, but it is really suffering of some perfromance issues that surely most of us who have been testing or implementing it are aware of. So Let’s give Storefront a new perfromance birth by doing the following
Attention! Take a backup of all files you are going to modify before doing this! And Remember that Citrix Systems does not support this!!
1. Enable Socket Pooling (pooledSockets=”on”)
Open your C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Citrix\Storename\Webweb.config file as administrator and chenge pooledSockets=”off” to pooledSockets=”on”
By enabling socket pooling, Storefront maintaines a pool of sockets instead of creating a new socket each time a new user connects to Storefront, this will give a better performance for SSL based traffic.
2. Changing the application pool to always running (Windows Server 2008 R2)
If you are running Storefront on Windows Server 2012, there is already a new feature implemented in IIS called always running on the application pools but if you are still Windows Server 2008 R2 as I do then you need to do some manual changes…
But if you are still running Windows Server 2008, then you need to do the following:
2.1 Download and install Application Initialization Module for IIS 7.5. A reboot may be required to finish the installation process…
2.2 Open the C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config on the storefront server as administrator and locate the following setting <configuration><system.applicationHost><applicationPools> and add thealways running paramter startMode=”AlwaysRunning” on each of following application pools
•Citrix Delivery Services Authentication
•Citrix Delivery Services Resources
•Citrix Receiver for Web
•Citrix Delivery Services
The result may look like this:
add name=”Citrix Delivery Services Authentication” autoStart=”true” managedRuntimeVersion=”v2.0″ managedPipelineMode=”Integrated” startMode=”AlwaysRunning”>
2.3 Now locate <configuration>…
Continue reading here!
And you can also check this tuning blog post:
Finetuning a Citrix StoreFront deployment
And also ensure that you intelligently load balance your XML brokers, my suggestion is to use content switching in combination with load balancing to get a more optimal solution in place.
Ensure that you DON’T use FQDN’s when you add the XML broker name into the Delivery Controllers config of the StoreFront Store!! Use NetBIOS names, and NOT like farm1.company.com, rather specify “farm1″ and then ensure that the StoreFront server can resolve “farm1″ to your CS VIP, that will speed enumeration up a lot due to that StoreFront first checks via NetBIOS/WINS which isn’t that optimal!
Content Switching instead of Load balancing of XenApp XML brokers? – #XenApp #NetScaler #CS #LB
Happy StoreFront’ing!
//Richard
How to: Create Desktop Appliance site on StoreFront – #Citrix, #StoreFront, #ThinClient
I guess that some of you out there by now are using Thin Clients and some are using Desktop Appliance site functionality in the old Web Interface for these thin clients that are XenApp- or XenDesktop-ready.
So now you have or are thinking on how to setup this on StoreFront!
Citrix has A LOT of work to do in order to ensure that StoreFront becomes a stable and enterprise ready! There are so many tweaks and configurations needed in config files etc. that just isn’t ok! Add them into the console! It’s not hard, even I could code in some menus, forms windows and trigger the underlying PowerShell scripts!
But back to the topic, how do we configure Desktop Appliance site in StoreFront? Well, first we need to have a look at the following edocs articles that explain how to do it:
Desktop Appliance sites – And the most important in this article is the bottom that details WHAT DOESN’T WORK!
Important considerations
Desktop Appliance sites are intended for local users on the internal network accessing desktops from non-domain-joined desktop appliances. When you decide whether to use Desktop Appliance sites to provide users with access to your stores, consider the following restrictions.
- If you plan to deploy domain-joined desktop appliances and repurposed PCs, do not configure them to access stores through Desktop Appliance sites. Instead, configure Citrix Receiver with the XenApp Services URL for the store. For more information, see XenApp Services URLs.
- Desktop Appliance sites do not support connections from remote users outside the corporate network. Users logging on to NetScaler Gateway cannot access Desktop Appliance sites.
How do you release this and don’t support connecting through a NetScaler Gateway? Then you miss the whole point of SmartAccess, you cannot trigger EPA (host checks) for instance to control ICA/HDX features like drive mapping etc. internally. And you cannot have thin clients on the Internet that connects into the enterprise through NetScaler Gateway!
Next you should read this article that details the PowerShell madness 😉
Configure Desktop Appliance sites
I won’t go into details of the article above but rather show you how it’s done and with some examples of arguments to pass to the PowerShell scripts.
Step one is to log on to your StoreFront server, and just to show you our current setup is that we have one Receiver for Web (RfW) sites used for browser access into StoreFront:
From a Store perspective you can see that we have one (1) store that the RfW site exposes:
#Citrix #StoreFront subscription database replication, #GSLB, #NetScaler
Ok, so we’ve all started to use StoreFront (or have U?) and find out that there are A LOT of things that you have to do in order to get it to work as you most probably want it to.
This post is more around how you ensure that the StoreFront architecture supports an enterprise with multiple sites while still having a concistent end-user experience.
Just imagine that you’ve built your architecture out in a true high availability manner with global server load balancing across all products used in the stack to deliver your Windows apps and desktops to your end-users. It may look something similar to this:
In this view you can see that we’ve setup GSLB to ensure that external (Internet) connected users and devices are being connected to a NetScaler Gateway vServer in either London or Miami, and from there the NetScaler and the session profile that communicates with StoreFront (SF1 and 2 in each site) is also load balanced using GSLB to ensure high availability. So everything seems good, right! But no… consider that you as an end-user is being connected to the Miami site and that StoreFront group that has a subscription database containing all the apps and desktops etc. that you have selected and added to your workspace. You will see all these icons by default now when you login to Miami, but you will not see them in the case Miami goes down for some reason or if you travel to London and then gets connected to that StoreFront group as I try to show by this picture:
#Citrix #Receiver for Linux 13 released
Finally Citrix has released a Receiver version for Linux that for instance has StoreFront support! Can’t wait to try it out and see if it gives the same user experience etc like the one on OS X and Windows!
Here you have some details about it and links to the product documentation:
Access Windows applications and virtual desktops, as well as web and SaaS applications. Enable anywhere access from your Linux thin client/desktop or use web access.
What’s new
The following new features are available in this release:
- Support for XenDesktop 7 features – Receiver supports many of the new features and enhancements in XenDesktop 7, including Windows Media client-side content fetching, HDX 3D Pro, HDX RealTime webcam compression, Server-rendered Rich Graphics, and IPv6 support.
Note: Link-local network addresses are not supported in IPv6 environments. You must have at least one global or unique-local address assigned to your network interface.
- VDI-in-a-Box support – You can use Receiver to connect to virtual desktops created with Citrix VDI-in-a-Box.
- Self-service UI – A new graphical user interface (UI), like that in other Citrix Receivers, replaces the configuration manager, wfcmgr. After they are set up with an account, users can subscribe to desktops and applications, and then start them.
- Deprecated and removed utilities – The pnabrowse command-line utility is deprecated in favor of the new storebrowse command-line utility. The icabrowse and wfcmgr utilities have been removed.
- StoreFront support – You can now connect to StoreFront stores as well as Citrix XenApp sites (also known as Program Neighborhood Agent sites).
- UDP audio support – Most audio features are transported using the ICA stream and are secured in the same way as other ICA traffic. User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Audio uses a separate, unsecured, transport mechanism, but is more consistent when the network is busy. UDP Audio is primarily designed for Voice over IP (VoIP) connections and requires that audio traffic is of medium quality (that is Speex wideband) and unencrypted.
- Packaging – An armhf (hard float) Debian package and tarball are now included in the download packages. In addition, the Debian package for Intel systems uses multiarch (a Debian feature) for installations on 32- and 64-bit systems. 32-bit binaries are also available in RPM packages.
- System Flow Control – Video display has been enhanced on low-performance user devices that connect to high-performance servers. In such setups, System Flow Control prevents sessions becoming uncontrollable and unusable.
- Localization – Receiver is now available in German, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese.
- Keyboard improvements – You can now specify which local key combination (Ctrl+Alt+End or Ctrl+Alt+Enter) generates the Ctrl+Alt+Delete combination on a remote Windows desktop. In addition, a new option supports Croatian keyboard layouts.
- Deferred XSync – While one frame is still on screen, Receiver can now decode tiles for the next frame. This provides a performance improvement compared with previous releases, in which Receiver waited for a frame to finish being displayed before decoding the next frame.
- Audio and webcam playback improvements – Various changes are implemented that conserve CPU cycles and reduce latency.
- Audio settings – Several new audio settings are now available in module.ini.
For more product and release info read here!
//Richard
The IT Melting Pot! 