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I wanted to you to let you know that the Citrix TechEdge event being held on Monday, May 4th at the MGM Grand Convention Center in Las Vegas at Citrix Summit and Citrix Synergy, will be a day packed with in-depth knowledge on the latest troubleshooting tools, methodologies and fixes for your Citrix Application Delivery Infrastructure.
If you can't make it to the show, don't worry, you'll be able to join the
conversation online:
- Twitter at http://search.twitter.com
- Enter: #TechEdgeP (Partners)
- Enter: #TechEdgeC (Customers)
- Enter: #TechEdgeP (Partners)
- With each Tweet you can reply to comments, ask questions, provide event feedback, broadcast key takeaways, post links, news, photos, etc.
- If you already use Twitter, you can simply use #TechEdgeP or # TechEdgeC
- Feel free to begin to participate now on what you expect from Citrix TechEdge 2009.
Note that Citrix TechEdge is encouraging both show attendees, colleagues that can't attend and online enthusiasts to join the conversation on Twitter, so we expect a large turn-out. We hope that you will not only participate, but that you will also spread the word about Twitter: #TechEdgeP or #TechEdgeC.
Jerome Reid manages both the Citrix Technical Support escalation team and the frontline teams for XenServer and Provisioning Server in the Dublin, Ireland office which assists customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Jerome will be presenting the following sessions at Citrix TechEdge during Citrix Summit and Citrix Synergy 2009: End-to-end virtualization with Citrix Delivery Center, with a focus on Citrix XenServer, and then his in-depth session will cover Disaster recovery and automation with XenServer.
Q. How has XenServer improved from a support perspective over the past year?
Jerome: Much work has been done over the past year to improve the support processes for XenServer. We now have a dedicated team in each GEO with responsible for managing cases that are referred to our engineering team. This support escalation team ensures that our customer issues are prioritized correctly with engineering and that our customers are aware of their case status. Escalation is also able to bring pre-release solutions in the form of private fixes to customers which allows us to be confident at the earliest opportunity that the fixes for bugs are really addressing the reported issues. We have also been working hard in support to understand the key areas in the product that can be improved from a support and supportability perspective. We have projects designed to allow us to capture this information and carry it to the engineering team. This is a key driver for product development going forward. Q. What XenServer and Citrix Delivery Center tips will attendees learn at your session this year? Jerome: The session will provide the key information you need to consider when implementing a disaster recovery plan for a XenServer deployment. We'll review how to use the different backup and restore mechanisms provided with XenServer 5.0, including VM metadata backup, XenServer host backups and database backups. In addition we'll automate the different backup mechanisms using Xenserver consoles and CLI scripting, and show how to leverage the XenServer CLI for task automation via scripting.
About Jerome Reid
Jerome has been with Citrix Technical Support just over five years. He began as an escalation engineer in the Dublin, Ireland office supporting EMEA customers. He then took on management of the XenApp escalation support. Recently he's been responsible for managing the Server Virtualization and Provisioning support team. In this role he's responsible for managing the support case lifecycle for these technologies from when a customer first logs a call with technical support until a resolution is provided. He graduated from Waterford Institute of Technology with a degree in Software engineering, and has his CCA. He enjoys spending time with his family of three children, two girls and a boy, age nine, six and two. He's also training for his private pilots license.
Do you have an XenServer troubleshooting area that you would like Jerome to focus on during his presentation? Leave a comment.
As part of the Citrix Technical Support Escalation team that focuses on Debugging/Code analysis, Kapildev Ramlal is constantly learning new technologies and thinking of ways to help improve the support process at Citrix. Kapildev will be presenting the following sessions at Citrix TechEdge during Citrix Summit and Citrix Synergy 2009: End-to-end virtualization with Citrix Delivery Center, with a focus on Citrix XenApp, and then his in-depth session will cover Troubleshooting tools and methodology for Citrix XenApp 5 environments.
Q. How has XenApp improved from a support perspective over the past year?
Kapildev: Over the past year XenApp has improved significantly from a performance standpoint. With the release of hotfix rollup pack 3 for XenApp 4.5 and the release of XenApp 5.0, there has been some tremendous IMA improvements. As we know, IMA is the backbone of XenApp, and is considered the most critical component of the Farm. From our internal stress testing, we have found that IMA is now more stable than it has ever been in the past, so I expect to see less support cases opened regarding performance issues.
Q. What XenApp and Citrix Delivery Center tips will attendees learn at your session this year?
Kapildev: I hope that attendees would pick up several troubleshooting tips and techniques that they can readily use in their own environments. For my session, I've updated several tools and techniques as things have evolved a bit with the release of Windows Vista and Server 2008. For example, I include tips on how to enable local debugging on Windows Server 2008, which can be extremely useful for live debugging and analysis. It is becoming more common to see servers with 16+GB of RAM, so learning how to debug and analyze complex server related issues live, can save precious time on a trip to Citrix or Microsoft.
Q. What new tools or techniques are you using to troubleshoot XenApp?
Kapildev: We have had some improvements with our internal tool development process, and because of them, we now have a lot more public Citrix tools available for use on our Citrix Knowledge Center. These tools not only help automate time consuming tasks, but they also help expedite the time it takes to resolve problems.
Q. What types of cases have you worked on this past year? Why?
Kapildev: I have covered several synchronization and memory related cases over the past year. I believe this is mainly due to the wide variety of applications that can be run on a XenApp server. Because of this, the chances for a rogue application or driver causing problems on a system will be increased. Surprisingly not all of these cases were Citrix problems. In most of these cases, which I have worked on, the problem usually turned out to be a problem with a 3rd party application, and usually that 3rd party vendor already had a fix for the problem.
About Kapildev Ramlal
Kapildev has been with Citrix Technical Support for about five years. He started as a technical support engineer, and had a strong motivation for learning programming, C/C+, and Windows internals. One year later, he transitioned into the Global Escalation team as an Escalation Engineer. On the Escalation team, he's been able to learn debugging user mode and kernel mode Windows components, and has been actively assisting with analyzing complex development analysis cases. He's also developed several software application utilities for Citrix including CDFControl, Print Detective and TSUserLog (to name a few). He holds certifications in Network, A+, MCP, CCA. When he's not learning a new technology, he loves to be playing music.
Do you have an XenApp troubleshooting area that you would like Kapildev to focus on during his presentation? Leave a comment.
Nelson Esteves has moved through the ranks as part of the Citrix Technical Support team. He started out as a level one support engineer on the XenApp team, and now is an Escalation Engineer for the NetScaler and Advanced Access Gateway (AAG) support team. Nelson will be presenting the following sessions at Citrix TechEdge during Citrix Summit and Citrix Synergy 2009: End-to-end virtualization with Citrix Delivery Center, with a focus on Citrix Access Gateway, Enterprise Edition (AGEE), and then his in-depth session will cover Integrating and troubleshooting Citrix Access Gateway, Enterprise Edition.
Q. How has AGEE improved from a support perspective over the past year?
Nelson: AGEE has evolved to a bigger and better product. With the 9.0 release we are able to meet most of users demands such as full Microsoft SharePoint Integration as well as Branch Repeater acceleration. From a support perspective, the new filtering capabilities of network tracing on the appliance is great not to mention the ability for more granular control such as choosing packet type and size.
Q. What AGEE and Citrix Delivery Center tips will attendees learn at your session this year?
Nelson: During the breakout session, attendees will learn with great detail how pre and post-authentication scans work and how to configure them properly. They'll also learn how AGEE integrates with XenApp via Web Interface. I'll show what's involved on the login process to Web Interface and how Smart Access works in the background. In addition to all that they'll learn how to successfully decrypt a network trace and how to troubleshooting SSL errors when launching a published application via a pre-recorded troubleshooting video. The CDC presentation will explain how AGEE integrates with XenDesktop as well as Web Interface and NetScaler.
Q. What new tools or techniques are you using to troubleshoot NetScaler?
Nelson: The new filtering system when taking network traces was a great addition, and it made troubleshooting a lot faster since we can now select what we want to filter instead of having to handle very large network trace files.
Q. What types of cases have you worked on this past year? Why?
Nelson: I have handled cases related to VoIP issues via the VPN, SSL Errors when launching applications, Microsoft SharePoint integration issues, and several others. Most of the VoIP issues had to do with the software being used since it didn't have an option for VPN configuration. We need to make sure the call manager server receives the VPN user Intranet IP and not its local IP. SSL Errors were due to clients either not having the proper certificates installed or misconfiguration on the AGEE or Web Interface (missing STA, wrong STA URL, missing STA port, etc.). SharePoint integration has been challenging since the release of 9.0, but now we have corrected all the errors we have encountered.
About Nelson Esteves
Nelson has been with Citrix Technical Support for a little over three years. He started as level one support engineer working on core products such as XenApp, Password Manager, Installation Manager and Resource Manager. He was then transferred to the Web Security team working with Web Interface and Access Gateway. One year later he was promoted to the frontline NetScaler support team, and about a year after that he became an Escalation Engineer supporting NetScaler, Application Firewall and AGEE. He holds certifications in A+, Net+, MCP, CCNA and CCA for Citrix NetScaler 8 Platinum Edition. He's also pretty quick on his feet, as an amateur soccer player, and has played in local tournaments and traveled with the Florida select team.Do you have an AGEE troubleshooting area that you would like Nelson to focus on during his presentation? Leave a comment.
As part of the Citrix Technical Support team, Jacob Salassi is not only a senior escalation engineer, he's also an appliance technical relationship manager (TRM). Jacob gave us a glimpse into the following sessions he'll be presenting at Citrix TechEdge during Citrix Summit and Citrix Synergy 2009: End-to-end virtualization with Citrix Delivery Center, with a focus on Citrix NetScaler, and then his in-depth session will cover Advanced troubleshooting of Citrix NetScaler.
Q. How has NetScaler improved from a support perspective over the past year?
Jacob: With the release of 8.1 and 9.0 we have seen big gains in overall feature sets, UI improvements, and stability improvements. Along with that have come enhancements and additions to logging (TCP logging for example), and the various tools we in support employ to troubleshoot issues. A hotly awaited change in 9.0 was the addition of the ability to use filters in nstrace.sh which allows us to capture much smaller sniffs and avoid post-capture filtering while still preserving the entire session and its related packets.
Q. What NetScaler and Citrix Delivery Center tips will attendees learn at your session this year?
Jacob: My sessions will take an administrator through overall troubleshooting methods and techniques, to a simple XenApp deployment example, and then to troubleshooting that same deployment using the techniques that have been learned.
Q: What NetScaler Tech Tip can you give people now?
Jacob: Always disable unused interfaces on BOTH nodes of an HA pair. It's common for administrators to forget about the secondary node which may cause HA to behave improperly in the event of a failover.
Q. What new tools or techniques are you using to troubleshoot NetScaler?
Jacob: Having more experience and spending more time using and developing troubleshooting tools has been a huge benefit for me. We now have tools to automate many things we had to do manually in the past, and this really helps our customers provide us with the data we need to resolve their issues.
Q. What types of cases have you worked on this past year? Why?
Jacob: I don't like the restrict myself to any particular kind of case, and the issues around NetScaler can be of a huge variety. This year some of the stand out issues have been dynamic routing deployments, as well as some very large, exotic, and sensitive deployments where resolving an issue quickly is absolutely a requirement.
About Jacob Salassi
Jacob's been with Citrix Technical Support for just under two years. His first position at Citrix was as an escalation engineer. He was then promoted to lead escalation engineer, and then to senior escalation engineer where he joined the TRM team. He holds certifications in Citrix Certified Administrator (CCA) for NetScaler. When Jacob is not troubleshooting a hot issue, he's listening to his motorcycle scream around the track at 15,000 RPM.
Do you have a NetScaler troubleshooting area that you would like Jacob to focus on during his presentation? Leave a comment.
Keith McLaughlin, Escalation Engineer
Keith McLaughlin is a Provisioning Server expert on the Citrix Technical Support Escalation team, joining the team when Citrix acquired Ardence about two years ago. Keith filled us in on the two sessions that he'll present at Citrix TechEdge during Citrix Summit and Synergy 2009: End-to-end virtualization with Citrix Delivery Center, with a focus on Active Directory integration with Provisioning Server, and then his in-depth session will be on Planning and implementing a Provisioning Server high availability (HA) solution.
Q. How has Provisioning Server improved from a support perspective over the past year?
Keith: The biggest improvement this year is the addition of the Streaming Service Logs. These logs, which came out as part of 5.0 SP1 are extremely helpful in narrowing down the issue.
Q. What Provisioning Server and Citrix Delivery Center tips will attendees learn at your session this year?
Keith: This year's session is focused on High Availability. In the session we are going to go over troubleshooting procedures and explain in depth what happens when a Target Device fails over and how to track that failover through the logs files. For the Citrix Delivery Center session, I'll focus on Active Directory integration with Provisioning Server Standard Image.
Q: What Provisioning Server Tech Tip can you give people now?
Keith: When planning your Provisioning Server deployment, give the Target Devices unique names in the Provisioning Server Console. Do not use the hostname of the machine that is being imaged as the name of the Target Device. This avoids conflicts when booting the Target Device from the Vdisk.
Q. What new tools or techniques are you using to troubleshoot Provisioning Server?
Keith: A year of working with the 5.0 is probably the biggest factor. 5.0 had many improvements over the previous version and many architecture changes. Also seeing where customers and end users were running into problems and being able to identify the symptoms because of past experiences greatly cuts down on troubleshooting time.
Q. What types of cases have you worked on this past year? Why?
Keith: As part of the Provisioning Server Escalation group, I have covered a lot of different issues ranging from Active Directory integration to tracking down possible bottlenecks on customers networks that could be causing timeouts on the provisioning server.
About Keith McLaughlin
Keith's been with Citrix Technical Support for two years. He holds certifications in Citrix Certified Administrator, CCA, for Provisioning Server and XenServer. During his free time Keith loves playing the guitar, and his favorite artist is Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Do you have a Provisioning Server troubleshooting area that you would like Keith to focus on during his presentation? Leave a comment.
Want to learn more about TechEdge 2009, www.citrix.com/techedge. Stay tuned for our weekly close-up interviews on the TechEdge presenters.
Posts in this series:
- Interview 2: Close-up with Keith McLaughlin
Jamie Baker, Sr. Escalation Engineer
Without a doubt one of Citrix Technical Support's top engineers is Jamie Baker. Jamie works with the Strategic Managed Accounts Resolution team, SMART, which handles 24 hour coverage on critical and high priority issues, and he also is a Subject Matter Expert, SME, in various areas such as Printing, Application Streaming and currently the XenDesktop, SME, for the SMART team. Jamie took a few moments out of his busy day of solving customer issues to answer some questions on the sessions that he'll be presenting at Citrix TechEdge.
The sessions he'll be covering are End-to-end virtualization with Citrix Delivery Center with a focus on XenDesktop, and then presenting an in-depth session on XenDesktop 3 architecture and design. TechEdge is the new name for the Citrix Support and Engineering Institute of Technology, CSEIT. The event is hosted by top Citrix Technical Support engineers at Citrix Summit and Synergy, and is the event for troubleshooting your Citrix Application Delivery environment
Q. How has XenDesktop improved from a support perspective over the past year?
Jamie: The release of XenDesktop 3.0 has closed a lot of issues, added USB device support which was a big need for a lot of customers and provided pool management failover when using XenServer as the desktop hosting infrastructure. The new failover allows the administrator to configure multiple pool masters for the same XenServer pool in the XenDesktop Management Console and if the original XenServer pool master fails, the Pool Management service will fail over to the secondary pool master. This makes the product much more resilient by eliminating a single point of failure, which is always more supportable
Q. What XenDesktop and Citrix Delivery Center tips will attendees learn at your session this year?
Jamie: We will provide tips on both how to design your XenDesktop infrastructure to take advantage of the new features in XenDesktop 3.0 and how to implement those new features, including USB device support. We will also provide tips on how to configure XenDesktop to take advantage of the robust hosting infrastructure provided by XenServer.
The Citrix Delivery Center Session will highlight how each of the components of the Citrix Deliver Center can integrate to provide secure and robust access to desktops and applications. We'll focus on each product and the features it brings specifically to complement the entire Citrix Delivery Center.
Q. What new tools or techniques are you using to troubleshoot XenDesktop?
Jamie: Besides from having a year's more experience working with customer issues and the new products, we've developed our internal tools to more quickly identify XenDesktop issues. We've updated the CDFControl utility to allow for remote CDF trace on VDA and DDC machines. This allows us to more easily set up a diagnostic trace and resolve issues more quickly.
This year we've also stood up a public symbol server. This allows us to access more diagnostic data through system dumps and memory dumps without having to bring those dump files in house. In time sensitive situations, this can save us hours of time. It also allows customers and other vendors to diagnose issues from dump files more quickly.
Q. What types of cases have you worked on this past year? Why?
Jamie: For me, being on the critical situation team, I've focused on identifying single points of failure and issues that have the potential for wide impact. The pool management service's ability to connect to a hosting infrastructure and to recover quickly in case of an issue with the infrastructure is the biggest issue we tackled this year. As mentioned above, we were able to build in failover when using XenServer infrastructure. The addition of HDX technology has improved multi-monitor display handling as well as USB device remoting and multi-media display.
About Jamie Baker
Jamie's been with Citrix Systems for six years, and all of those with Citrix Technical Support. He started out as a first level frontline support engineer, supporting MetaFrameXP. After two years on the phones, he moved to the Escalation team, and a year later moved to the SMART team. Jamie is currently a Sr. Escalation Engineer, and holds certifications as a CCA in XenDesktop and XenApp, as well as a Windows MCSE.
When Jamie isn't working, he loves to spend time with his wife and three year old twin daughters, exploring all the playgrounds that North Georgia has to offer. On Fall Sundays, you'll find him watching the Philadelphia Eagles and trying desperately to control his emotions so he doesn't scare the dog.
Do you have a XenDesktop troubleshooting area that you would like Jamie to focus on during his presentation? Leave a comment.
TechEdge 2009 sessions:
- End-to-end virtualization with Citrix Delivery Center
- XenDesktop 3 architecture and design
- Planning and implementing a Provisioning Server high availability (HA) solution
- Integrating and troubleshooting Citrix Access Gateway
- Enterprise Edition Advanced troubleshooting of Citrix NetScaler
- XenServer disaster recovery and automation
- Troubleshooting tools and methodology for Citrix XenApp 5 environments
Want to learn more about TechEdge 2009, www.citrix.com/techedge. Stay tuned for our weekly close-up interviews on the TechEdge presenters.
Posts in this series:
- Interview 1: Close-up with Jamie Baker
What's Citrix TechEdge?
TechEdge, the new name for Citrix Support and Engineering Institute of Technology (CSEIT), started nine years ago as a small in-depth troubleshooting training event hosted by Citrix Technical Support for support agreement customers. Over the years, this event has grown from 50 customers to over 300 customers and now provides training to our support agreement customers prior to Citrix Synergy and to our partners as a part of Citrix Summit. This has become the event for troubleshooting the Citrix Application Delivery environment.
Meet the support experts who can answer all of your technical questions:
Citrix Technical Support's top Escalation team engineers are hosting the TechEdge 2009 sessions. Here are some interesting facts about the team.
- On average these guys work and close 65 to 100 cases each per year.
- There are a total of 65 engineers on the team, so that's over 5,000 cases total per year.
- The average engineer has ten to fifteen years experience in the IT industry; the most common certifications are CCA and MCSE, ANG NetScaler and AGEE.
What they'll cover:
- End-to-end virtualization with Citrix Delivery Center
- XenDesktop 3 architecture and design
- Planning and implementing a Provisioning Server high availability (HA) solution
- Integrating and troubleshooting Citrix Access Gateway, Enterprise Edition
- Advanced troubleshooting of Citrix NetScaler
- XenServer disaster recovery and automation
- Troubleshooting tools and methodology for Citrix XenApp 5 environments
Who can attend?
All partners who have registered for Summit, Citrix Technology Professionals (CTP) and customers with active support or maintenance agreements as of the first day of the event (May 3, 2009).
When and where?
The event will be at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada on Monday, May 4th from 8:00am to 5:30pm.
Here's what a few past attendees had to say:
"This was probably the most valuable day of iForum [Synergy]. It was extremely technical and really provided a lot of insight into managing a Citrix environment."
"In-depth seminars, get to meet face to face with the people that support us, a wonderful venue."
Check out past event presentations and videos:
TechEdge 2008
October 29, 2008
Orlando, FL
Presentations and Session Videos
CSEIT 2008
May 19, 2008
Houston, TX
Presentations and Session Videos
CSEIT 2007
October 21, 2007
Las Vegas, NV
Presentations and Session Videos
Click here to register for TechEdge 2009
Learn More:
Want to learn more about TechEdge 2009, www.citrix.com/techedge. Stay tuned for our weekly close-up interview blog posts of the TechEdge presenters. Please let us know your thoughts, questions and feedback.
This post is part of a series on the TechEdge event:
- Check out my interview this week with Jamie Baker to discuss his sessions on End-to-end virtualization with Citrix Delivery Center and XenDesktop 3 architecture and design.
If you have missed these presentations and videos from CSEIT 2007 then take a look at them. These presentation are really technical and given mostly by Citrix escalation engineers.
http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx115136
To view the CSEIT presentations and webcast recordings from the Citrix Presentation Server and Citrix NetScaler sessions, please click the appropriate presentation title.
Note: A codec may be necessary to view some of the presentations. The codec is available at http://www.gotomeeting.com/codec.
Citrix Presentation Server
• CTX115207 - CSEIT 2007 - Printer Driver Management
• CTX115208 - CSEIT 2007 - Citrix Presentation Server Health Monitoring
• CTX115192 - CSEIT 2007 - Troubleshooting Tools for a Citrix Presentation Server Environment
• CTX115204 - CSEIT 2007 - Understanding and Troubleshooting the Application Streaming in Citrix Presentation Server 4.5
• CTX115202 - CSEIT 2007 - Brief Troubleshooting Guide
• CTX115225 - CSEIT 2007 - Citrix MFCOM Programming for Administrators
• CTX115228 - CSEIT 2007 - Using and Understanding Citrix EdgeSight 4.5
• CTX115206 - CSEIT 2007 - Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 / Feature Pack 1
Citrix NetScaler
• CTX115222 - CSEIT 2007 - NetScaler Architecture, Concepts and Networking
• CTX115226 - CSEIT 2007 - Monitoring the Citrix NetScaler Application Switch
• CTX115221 - CSEIT 2007 - Command Center 3.0
• CTX115227 - CSEIT 2007 - Printer Driver Management