Today I have received two new applications to play with; that's exactly what I did.

After installing and playing with both apps, I can say they do exactly what their respective developers advertised. Each can be very useful to deployments and day-to-day admin tasks.

Kudos to both developers. I hope you guys find these apps usefull, if not, let them know where and how they can improve.

I just came back from BriForum in Chicago and besides the awesome event that was, one more thing came to attention, half of the Notebooks being carried around by attendees and speakers were Macs.

Carried away by the energy of the event I decided build something for our Citrix Community. A dashboard app that makes easier for our visitors to read the latest posts and collaborate with their comments.

 Meet the Citrix Blogs Widget

 With version 1.0 you get:

• The latest 30 Citrix Blog posts
• Adjust view from Full to Summary
• Collaborate with your comments
• Open posts on Safari or Firefox
• Spotlight Search (Instant search)
• Push updates (no refresh required)
• Watch blogged videos
• Check for updates
• Send feedback

Requirements:

• Mac OS X 10.4 or greater

Download via CDN:

Citrix Blogs Widget

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Special thanks to Chris Anthony's group for designing our dashboard logo! Thank you guys so much!!!

We have recently released an update for the Health Monitoring & Recovery SDK, and it is now available for download.

The popularity of the Health Monitoring & Recovery (HMR) feature, included with XenApp 4.5 Platinum and Enterprise editions, has greatly increased during the last few months among Citrix customers. This feature monitors the health of XenApp by periodically executing multiple tests and by starting a recovery action if any of those tests fails.

Citrix provides multiple HMR tests out-of-the-box for the administrators to configure, but customers and third parties can use this SDK to develop additional tests.

Some of the improvements in this update of the SDK include:

• Improved error handling.
• Support for additional test formats.
• Additional sample tests.
• Support for Windows Server 2008.

We are planning a future video blog regarding HMR in general and about the SDK in particular. So, stay tuned!

In the mean time, you can check the Citrix Presentation Server Administrator's Guide or a prior posting about the feature for more information.

Enjoy!

Aureliano Lopez-Martin
Senior Product Manager, XenApp SDKs

The purpose of this document is to provide best practices from an application developer's perspective on the common nuances encountered with application development for troubleshooting application issues in a seamless Citrix environment.

An interview/conversation with Derek Slayton Product manager for Citrix Workflow Studio. Derek just came down to Ft Lauderdale and we couldn't pass the opportunity to learn more about WFS and share with our friends and visitors.

regards,
Gus Pinto - Technology Evangelist
Microsoft MVP | Gus.Pinto@citrix.com
http://www.frameworkx.com

We have integrated the Citrix Developer Network blog with the official Citrix blog. Please update your CDN RSS feed link to
http://feeds.citrix.com/officialcitrixblog/group/cdn . The integration provides better stats on blog postings and provides a single interface to post blogs. Here are some stats on the popular CDN blogs

This integration also makes it easier for our readers as well to get all blogs at a central place. I am planning to post couple of blogs this week so don't forget to update the feed URL.

The wait is over. I am happy to announce that Citrix PowerSmart Utility is available for download now at this newly designed Developer Network site. Please visit this page for more information and to download the utility. Be sure to check out the related page section for the FAQ page page and new idea page page.

The new site makes it so much easier to post new projects. I love it. Please try it out. I hope you like it too. I've even left the FAQ page open so that you can edit directly yourself.

A great platform is of no use if no one is using it. We'd love to hear from you and we hope the new platform makes it easier.

I've also posted the same information at my blog post at official citrix blog site. Going forward, I guess I will post more CDN specific information here and general information at Citrix blog site and cross reference. It's the power of the web...

Many thanks to everyone who have contributed to this project!

Merry Christmas and  Happy New Year!

Ray Yang

I am happy to announce that Citrix PowerSmart Utility is available for download at the new Citrix Developer Network web site now. Please visit [this page] for more information and to download the utility. Be sure to check out the related page section for the [FAQ page] and [new idea page].

Many thanks to everyone who have contributed to this project!

We'd love to hear from you. The new Wiki based Citrix Developer Network is cool. Please check it out.  I've even left the FAQ page open so that you can edit directly yourself. 

Merry Christmas and  Happy New Year!

Ray Yang 

Update: 

The utility has been released to CDN. Here is the link

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Hi my name is Ray Yang. I am a senior technical business development manager at Citrix. The new official Citrix blog site displays my name as Ruiguo Yang. But most people at Citrix refer me simply as Ray Yang. That was the name I used for the old community blog.

I haven't posted anything new recently because I've been busy working on an exciting new project called "Citrix Power Smart".

So what's "Citrix Power Smart"?

Nowadays, server power consumption and associated cooling cost have been a hot issue. Many people in Citrix and Citrix customers are asking what Citrix can do to help addressing this issue.

During a discussion with some members of the CTO Office team, a small group of us conceived the idea of powering off idle presentation server during off peak hours.  Here is our thought process.

Just imagine you have 10 presentation servers.  During the business hours they are fully utilized. However at nights or on weekends hardly anyone connects to them. These servers however still consume power needlessly during such "off business hours".  Simply powering off such servers during "off business hours" can save you up to 30-50% of your presentation server farm power consumption based on our rough estimate.  It sounds easy. But why haven't we found many people doing so? Many of them do want to save money and are environmentally conscious. We think one of the reasons is that it has to be made easy and reliably before such practice is widely adopted. Can you imagine the following scene?

A presentation server administrator stays late every night.

Wait for the last person to log off.

Shut down each idle server.

Get up early to power on all servers before everyone else comes to work.

It's a bit tough to do, isn't it?

Well, such repetitive work is best left for computers. And they can be programmed to do it reliably!

In fact, we realized that the existing presentation server and the underling server platforms have the necessary ingredients already. The existing Presentation Server SDK provides the ability to see what user sessions are running on a given presentation server. There are existing standards such as IPMI and infrastructure such as Windows Remote Management available to power on/off servers reliably. What's missing is a small piece of software to tie them together.

But wait a minute. What if some poor fellow do have to check emails or get some work done during the "off business hours"? You can leave some Presentation Servers running to serve them. However without additional work, the default Presentation Server load balancer will typically distribute the load evenly across all the servers preventing many servers to be shut down. To give you an example, say you have 10 servers in your farm. Each server is capable of supporting 50 concurrent user sessions.  Based on historical data, you expect at most 30 concurrent user sessions will be needed during "off business hours". So I only need to keep one server running after business hour then. But wait. You have set up your presentation servers to balance user load evenly across your servers. These 30 user sessions will be spread across all 10 servers during "off business hours" preventing you from shutting them down. After all you don't want to lose your job because you disconnect your CEO's session when he is checking an important email at home.

So how can we improve our simple algorithm? Well, it turns out that Presentation Server has a "scheduling rule" for all the currently supported versions. You can define the time periods when certain servers are available. Perfect, we thought. If we add a simple scheduling rule, to make sure the servers we want to shut down aren't going to accept new connections in "off business hours", chances are much greater that these servers will have zero active sessions as people log off.

"Sounds great and simple. We have App Delivery Expo coming up next month. It's going to be a great talking point. Can you have it done, like tomorrow?" Marketing guys asked.

"Well, we like it but it is likely going to take XXX man weeks to go through the release cycle. And we are fully booked" answered development team.

Finally, the technical folks in the business development group volunteered to deliver the first version via Citrix Developer Network with forum support. Because of my developer background, I volunteered to lead the project. We volunteered because we love doing something good for the environment, sooner than later. And we believe once we showed the leadership and initiative, the community (users and partners) will help us get there even if the initial functionality is limited. And it is easier to convince the product team to include such features in the future releases once we have positive feedbacks from users. Personally it is gratifying to be able to contribute to something I believe in while getting paid 

Thus "Citrix Power Smart for Presentation Server" project is born.

At this year's "App Delivery Expo" (AKA IForum), we announced "Power Smart" initiative. Here is the link to the press release. If this project is successful, we may bring more exciting projects under this model. For example, a Power Smart Utility for Xen. Since then we've got many interests from partners and customers. I may be able to share some more information on that subject later.

We know Presentation Server very well. But we are not the experts in controlling the physical servers such as powering on/off servers. Luckily we found some like-minded folks at one of our great partners HP to help us. HP's development team is busy too. But they gratefully provided advices and test equipments to allow us deliver a solution that will work with HP servers. And they happily agreed to do joint marketing with us. It's been a pleasure working with the HP team involved with this project so far.

I've been itching to share more information with Citrix community about this project. But I felt I had to get the utility working and release it on schedule first.  I am still running some last minutes testing and getting feedbacks from selected beta users.  It now looks promising that we will have the utility delivered to the community as a New Year gift from Citrix.

I will share more details with you as we make progress.

In the mean time, I'd love to hear from you, good or bad. If you prefer, you can also send an email to me at Ray.Yang@citrix.com. I can't promise to respond to every email. But I will try. For this reason, I would encourage you to comment on my blog or soon to be setup user forum to exchange your ideas with the broader community. Let's do something good, together!

I hope you find this blog interesting. And if you do, please help us spread the message.

Thanks!