Blog posts tagged with 'demo'
Robert O'Keefe has created a demo of how to use the Citrix Password Manager Localization SDK, which can be used to localize the CPM plugin to languages beyond those natively supported.
On June 20, 2008 the XenApp Technical Marketing team released the new version of the Evaluation Virtual Appliance (EVA) for Citrix XenApp (the new name for Presentation Server). This EVA lets you easily evaluate Presentation Server 4.5 with Feature Pack 1 and includes enhancements such as:
- Reduced file size and fewer files - just a single 8.6 GB file for XenApp Platinum Edition
- Managed download utility for increased download reliability anywhere in the world
- Faster downloads through Akamai hosting with Worldwide replication
- Updated and improved Quick Start Guide
- Addition of Hotfix Rollup Pack 2 and the latest Citrix client software for the most up-to-date evaluation experience
This kit is great and has come a long way. In previous releases you would have to download about 19 files which was just such a pain (albeit better than nothing). I personally felt it was such a burden but at the time it was our only option. in the past, it would have taken some folks a number of days to manage the downloads. With this release, we've optimized the EVA to take up just 8.6GB for Platinum Edition vs. 14.4GB which was the previous size. We've also hosted it on Akamai as a managed download and in our tests it has taken about 4 hours over a Broadband connection. This is obviously far better than a few days. Plus, Akamai mirrors globally so international downloads should be faster as well. In the kit, you get 3 servers - a domain controller, a Citrix services server and an application virtualization server. During installation and extraction you'll register for a license and registration code which you will receive in e-mail. Then you're free to use the machines for 30 days.
The EVA is a great tool for evaluations, demonstrations and even application testing. You can even use it to profile applications prior to rolling them out to production. There are lots of uses of this pre-packaged kit. You'll definitely want to check this new EVA out even if you have tried previous versions already.
Download and support links below...
Let us know if you have any questions through the support forum. Comments, suggestions... post them to this blog post.
View these demos of XenApp Individual Feature Demos for our flagship product, XenApp (Presentation Server) Platinum Edition 4.5 - the standard for delivering Windows applications at the lowest cost - anywhere. Each of these demos is in Flash format, and provides a narrated guide to the various aspects of the application delivery system that offers both application virtualization and application streaming for optimal application performance.
On February 11, 2008, Citrix announced that it changed the name of its Presentation ServerTM product line to XenAppTM. This new name was chosen to highlight the product line's growing application virtualization capabilities and to support the customer need for end-to-end virtualization. When the next product line release, Project Delaware, becomes generally available, the XenApp name will be used more fully. Until that time, and in these videos, you will see the Presentation Server name. To be clear, XenApp is not a new product, it's the new name for Presentation Server.
Web Interface
See how Presentation Server makes windows applications available to local or remote users via an easy to use website.
Two Factor Authentication
By using strong authentication methods provided by our partners, administrators have an extra line of defense against malicious software, keyloggers, and network intruders.
Client Heterogeneity
Presentation Server enables users on a variety of devices - including Windows, Linux, Mac, or PDAs - to access their applications from anywhere.
Management Pack for MOM 2005
The Citrix plug-in for Microsoft Operations Manager allows centralized monitoring and reporting of farm-wide events.
Resource Manager
Offering straightforward management and reporting capabilities for even the largest Presentation Server deployments.
Installation Manager
Easily deploy and publish applications across all of your Citrix servers.
Web Interface for SharePoint
Dramatically improve performance and security by giving users access to their applications with this SharePoint Web Part.
SmoothRoaming
See how Citrix provides personal access continuity across devices, locations, and networks.
Application Performance Monitoring
Using the Citrix EdgeSight agent, administrators can keep tabls on their Presentation Servers - as well as on all other servers and clients on their network.
Single Sign-On
Citrix Password Manager provide enterprise Single Sign-On capabilities, centralized credential management, and Self Service Password Reset.
View these demos of our flagship product, XenApp (Presentation Server) Platinum Edition 4.5 - the standard for delivering Windows applications at the lowest cost - anywhere. Each of these demos is in Flash format, and provides a narrated guide to the various aspects of the application delivery system that offers both application virtualization and application streaming for optimal application performance.
On February 11, 2008, Citrix announced that it changed the name of its Presentation Server™ product line to XenApp™. This new name was chosen to highlight the product line's growing application virtualization capabilities and to support the customer need for end-to-end virtualization. When the next product line release, Project Delaware, becomes generally available, the XenApp name will be used more fully. Until that time, and in these videos, you will see the Presentation Server name. To be clear, XenApp is not a new product, it's the new name for Presentation Server.
Presentation Server Platinum Edition
A general introduction to XenApp (Presentation Server) Platinum Edition. Learn what Application Virtualization is all about, and see the features that Platinum Edition adds.
64-Bit Benefits
Learn how moving to the 64-bit version of XenApp (Presentation Server) can greatly increase the number of users per server, without purchasing any additional hardware.
Smart Auditor
SmartAuditor uses flexible policies to trigger recordings of XenApp sessions automatically to monitor and examine user activity, demonstrate internal control, ensure regulatory compliance and conduct security audits of applications.
SpeedScreen Progressive Display
Choose from four different scenarios, zoom in and out on different displays. See how SpeedScreen technology allows users to productively access highly graphical applications!
SmartAccess
Citrix SmartAccess, powered by the Citrix Access Gateway, as provided in Citrix Presentation Server Platinum Edition. See how you can control remote access along a sliding scale!
I met with group of consultants and sales people for a large systems integrator a few weeks ago to discuss server virtualization with Citrix XenServer. During the discussion, someone asked for a demonstration on XenMotion. Unfortunately I did not have the hardware with me at the time needed (two XenServer hosts) to show a demonstration of live migration of virtual machines with XenMotion. After that meeting it occurred to me the best way to have a demo of XenMotion available any time is to post one up on the Official Citrix Blog.
XenMotion is a feature of Citrix XenServer Enterprise that gives an administrator the ability to move a running virtual machine from one XenServer to another. Virtual machines can be moved from server to server without service interruption for zero-downtime server maintenance. Administrators can move running application work loads to take advantage of available compute power.
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XenMotion is a very popular feature of Citrix XenServer Enterprise that works in conjunction with Resource Pools. You can live migrate a virtual machine to any other XenServer host running in the same resource pool. For more on Resource Pools, see this document in the KnowledgeBase.
One of our sales engineers, Adam Lotz, recorded a video of XenMotion in his lab. Adam sent me the video, and I uploaded it to YouTube. In this video, Adam has two XenServer hosts running in his lab with multiple VMs on each.
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In the first 30 seconds of the video, Adam live migrates a running CPS 4.5 virtual machine from one XenServer host to the other. The low resolution offered by YouTube makes it difficult to see admittedly, but you can see the highlighted virtual machine pop over from one host to the other in a matter of seconds.
At about the 1:07 mark, Adam brings up a command window and starts to ping citrix.com. While the virtual machine is running, the ping time is consistently 1 ms. At about the 1:31 mark, Adam clicks and drags the running CPS 4.5 virtual machine from one host to the other to start the XenMotion. He clicks yes when the Confirm dialog box pops up at 1:36. You then see the ping time increases to 11 ms for two pings. The ping time drops down to 9 ms, up to 10 ms, then the virtual machine pops over to the other XenServer host and the live migration is complete by about 1:45 - nine seconds after clicking OK on the confirm dialog box. Next, Adam expands the command window and highlights the ping time to show the impact of the XenMotion. You see the ping time jumped up to 49 ms while the live migration actually occurred, then immediately dropped back down to 1 ms. NO packets were lost at all.
(Since Adam narrates the video live as he shows it, there are portions of the video where Adam built in some talk time, so you see nothing happening on the screen for 10-20 seconds)
I plan to upload the video as an attachment so you can see all the video more clearly at a higher resolution. There is an issue with adding attachments currently, but once that is resolved I will upload the video file.
If you would like to see another video demonstration of XenMotion, Doug Brown and Chas Setchell of 2Virtualize include XenMotion in the extensive technical overview video on Doug's site. You can see the entire video "Citrix XenServer Enterprise v4 Technical Overview Video - DABCC-TV - 12-3-07 - Episode #2" at this link.
You can watch a 37 minute XenServer Mini-Product training here. This blog post includes a video done by Peter Blum of the Virtualization and Management division of Citrix.
I found this info about XenMotion on the Citrix knowledgebase -
Summary
This FAQ article includes questions related to XenMotion using XenServer 4.0.1. Refer to CTX115716 - Citrix XenServer 4.0.1H FAQ for the full set of FAQs.
Q: What is XenMotion?
A: XenMotion is a feature that allows you to move a running virtual machine (VM) from one physical XenServer Enterprise server to another without any downtime.
Q: Which of your products support XenMotion?
A: XenMotion is only provided in our XenServer Enterprise product.
Q: What are the requirements to enable XenMotion?
A: You need at least two XenServer Enterprise servers running in a resource pool.
The XenServer Enterprise servers must have similar processor configurations, some type of remote shared storage such as iSCSI or Network File System (NFS), and a gigabit network connecting them.
Q: How similar do the processors need to be on the XenServer Enterprise servers?
A: To use XenMotion, the processors must be the same type, but can have slight differences (such as CPU speed). So, for example, all the systems would need to have Intel Xeon 51xx series processors. They could be different speeds, so you can mix systems with Xeon 5130 and Xeon 5140 processors. The same is true of AMD processors.
Q: Can you XenMotion a VM between an Intel and AMD system?
A: No. You can only XenMotion a VM between systems with the same processor manufacturer and type.
Q: Does XenMotion require you to have the same exact configurations for your server systems?
A: While you do need to have the same type of processor in each system, other configurations can differ. You can have different amounts of memory, different storage controllers, and different network controllers in each system.
Q: What type of storage does a VM need to be stored on to enable XenMotion?
A: A VM must be stored on remote shared storage to allow for XenMotion.
Examples of this are connections to NFS- or iSCSI (through a software iSCSI initiator)-based storage.
Q: What networking speed is required for XenMotion?
A: We recommend that you use Gigabit Ethernet between your physical servers.
Q: How much downtime occurs during a XenMotion?
The actual downtime during a XenMotion is generally 100-150ms. This downtime is so slight that services running in the VM are not interrupted. Most of the 100-150ms downtime is caused by your network switching equipment moving traffic to a new port.
This document applies to:
- XenServer 4.0
- XenExpress 4.0
- XenEnterprise 4.0
For those looking to plunge off the deep end and dive down deep into the theory and thought process behind live migrations in Xen, I also found a link to the original white paper written on live migration of virtual machines on Xen by a number of the developers of the Xen open source hypervisor project, including Ian Pratt (founder of the Xen Project). You can read the entire document at this link
Below is a portion of the of the text from the introduction -
Migrating operating system instances across distinct physical hosts is a useful tool for administrators of data centers and clusters: It allows a clean separation between hardware and software, and facilitates fault management, load balancing, and low-level system maintenance.
By carrying out the majority of migration while OSes continue to run, we achieve impressive performance with minimal service downtimes; we demonstrate the migration of entire OS instances on a commodity cluster, recording service downtimes as low as 60ms. We show that that our performance is sufficient to make live migration a practical tool even for servers running interactive loads.
In this paper we consider the design options for migrating OSes running services with liveness constraints, focusing on data center and cluster environments. We introduce and analyze the concept of writable working set, and present the design, implementation and evaluation of high performance OS migration built on top of the Xen VMM.
A very interesting portion of this paper is the section covering a set of phases for live migrating the work sets in memory.
Moving the contents of a VM's memory from one physical host to another can be approached in any number of
ways. However, when a VM is running a live service it is important that this transfer occurs in a manner that balances the requirements of minimizing both downtime and total migration time. The former is the period during which the service is unavailable due to there being no currently executing instance of the VM; this period will be directly visible to clients of the VM as service interruption. The latter is the duration between when migration is initiated and when the original VM may be finally discarded and, hence, the source host may potentially be taken down for maintenance, upgrade or repair. It is easiest to consider the trade-offs between these requirements by generalizing memory transfer into three phases:
Push phase- The source VM continues running while certain pages are pushed across the network to the new
destination. To ensure consistency, pages modified during this process must be re-sent.
Stop-and-copy phase The source VM is stopped, pages are copied across to the destination VM, then the new
VM is started.
Pull phase The new VM executes and, if it accesses a page that has not yet been copied, this page is faulted in
("pulled") across the network from the source VM.
(This document is written in 2005, so many things may have changed in that time. This paper is specific to the Xen open source project itself.)
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This powerful XenMotion feature for live migration is one of the most popular capabilities of Citrix XenServer 4.0. If you have any specific questions about XenMotion, please post them in the comments. As I find more resources (especially visuals and demos) I will post them on the blog.
The new Xen Desktop will have an edition that includes three components - The Broker, XenServer, and Citrix Provisioning Server. Citrix Provisioning Server (formerly known as Ardence OS Streaming) often confuses people when they first hear about it. OS Streaming can be a difficult concept to grasp for many people at first. Once you do finally see the light, your jaw tends to drop as your eyes open wide. This video on YouTube is definitely a jaw dropper -
I heard this from a friend that this video was a huge hit at Microsoft Tech Ed in Orlando a few months ago. Justin Zarb blogged about it on Technet.com .
Its a pretty great demo, having the ability to stream individual operating systems over a 100mb LAN. The Citrix Stand at Tech Ed has been very entertaining and had some good information about the product set.
This video has been around for a while, so many of you may have already seen it. You may not have seen this next video. This video demonstrates the high availability option for Citrix Provisioning Server.
Citrix Provisioning Server is a key component of the upcoming Citrix XenDesktop release. There will be an edition of XenDesktop that includes both Provisioning Server and the XenServer hypervisor to provide a complete solution for desktop virtulization.
If you missed iForum 2007, there was a great demo of Provisioning Server at the keynote. You can watch the demo with Mark Templeton and Pete Downing here .
In this video, Pete Downing first takes two CPS 4.0 Servers and instantly upgrades them to CPS 4.5 (while removing the local hard drives). Next, Pete will drag and drop provision 9 CPS Servers, 11 IIS Servers, 5 SAP Servers and 5 Microsoft SQL Servers (all diskless) in a matter of minutes. For his finale, Pete then streams out the XenServer Enterprise hypervisor to all 30 servers and brings up all the OS images as virtual machines. Now that is OS Streaming Gone Wild!
BTW, if you missed the "Jellied Cat" video that Mark T. played during the keynote, here it is.
How long before we have jellied cat cars? <grin>
I am looking for more content specifically for Provisioning Server, so stay tuned.
UPDATE: Some additional third party content on Provisioning Server from the comments (Special Thanks to Wilco)-
Performance of CPS server based on Citrix Provisioning Server (http://sbc.vanbragt.net/mambo/white-papers/performance-of-cps-based-on-citrix-provisioning-server.html)
Explanation how tow run a CPS with Ardence OS Streaming
Beside I also have a review of the product it self:
http://sbc.vanbragt.net/mambo/deployment/ardence-os-streaming-4.html
Also take a look at http://www.virtuall.nl/videos/Ardence/ where Ruben Spruijt published some nice demo video's of the product.
One more link I have come across - http://www.Ardenceguru.com
Update2: One more link. Here is a presentation on the old Ardenc site that covers how Provisioning Server works with Citrix Presentation Server.
After my previous post on the XenServer 4 Mini-Product training , I have received some questions on the differences between XenEnterprise v3 and XenServer Enterprise v4.
Here is some background info on the differences between XenEnterprise v3 and XenServer Enterprise v4.
What New In Citrix XenServer v4?
XenMotion
Seamlessly move virtual machines between servers without downtime.
XenCenter
Unified virtualization management interface, including server, storage, and networking.
Native 64 bit Hypervisor
Scalability and support for enterprise applications
Resource Pools
Efficient configuration, allocation, and authentication for virtualization resources.
XenAPI
Integration with existing management investments, infrastructure and processes.
Here is some background on upgrading to XenServer Enterprise v4 - Upgrading to Citrix XenServer v4
I upgrade from your 3.2 products to your 4.0 product?
Yes, you can upgrade a 3.2 system to 4.0. Simply insert the 4.0 installation CD in your system and boot. When you run the installation process, it will discover your existing 3.2 installation and ask if you want to upgrade it.
Can I upgrade from your 3.1 products to your 4.0 product?
Yes, you can upgrade a 3.1 system to 4.0, but not directly. First you must upgrade your 3.1 system to the latest 3.x release, which is version 3.2. Insert the 3.2 installation CD in your system and boot. When you run the installation process for 3.2, it will discover your existing 3.1 installation and ask if you want to upgrade it. Once your system has been upgraded to 3.2, you can upgrade to the 4.0 release following the instructions in the 3.2 to 4.0 upgrade process.
Can I upgrade from your 3.0 product right to 4.0?
No, you will need to move your 3.0 virtual machines over to a 3.1 system. Once you are on the 3.1 version, you can upgrade the same system to 3.2, leaving your virtual machines and their settings intact. You can then upgrade from 3.2 to the 4.0 release.
Can the XenCenter client connect to XenSource 3.x servers?
No, the XenCenter client cannot connect to older XenSource 3.x servers.
Moving Between XenServer v4 Editions -
Moving Between XenServer v4 Products
Is there an upgrade path from XenExpress to XenServer?
Yes, you can take an existing XenExpress install and simply add a new license key which turns that instance into a XenServer instance.
Is there an upgrade path from XenExpress to XenEnterprise?
Yes, you can take an existing XenExpress install and simply add a new license key which turns that instance into a XenEnterprise instance.
Is there an upgrade path from XenServer to XenEnterprise?
Yes, you can take an existing XenServer install and simply add a new license key which turns that instance into a XenEnterprise instance.
Can virtual machines exported from XenExpress, XenServer, or XenEnterprise be moved between the product offerings?
Yes, virtual machines from any of our three commercial products are compatible with each other.
New in Citrix XenServer v4 Recorded Demo -
Here is a link to a recorded webinar by Peter Blum that covers the new features in XenServer v4.
Finally, here is some info on how to convert existing virtual machine built with a different hypervisor to a Xen virtual machine.
VM Conversion from other hypervisors and virtual machine monitors
Can you convert a virtual machine from other virtualization products to your products?
Yes, XenSource provides a free VM conversion tool that allows you to convert existing VMWare and Microsoft VMs to the XenSource import format. You can download the VM conversion tool from the link below.
http://tx.downloads.xensource.com/products/v2xva/index.php
You can also use products from Leostream and Platespin to convert other vendor virtual machines to be usable on a XenSource server.
Can you convert a virtual machine from Open Source Xen to your products?
There is currently no automated mechanism to move VMs from open source Xen to the XenSource commercial products. In a future release the OVA (open virtual appliance) format will allow VMs to be moved between different Xen environments.
If you are interested in getting an overview of Citrix product and see a quick demo, I would highly recommend the citrix demo site. http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/demo.asp
You can get here by clicking Demo link on top of http://www.citrix.com/ hompage.
can find both flash based demo and live demos. I recommend you take a look at Flash based demos first if you are new to Citrix products. The on line live demo allows you to try the products yourself and try out features not covered by the flash based demos. You also find examples of third party applications running on citrix platforms.
especially like the demos that have side by side comparison such as Presentation Server Feature Spotlight: Speed Screen Progressive Display demo.
can also download a virtual appliance here. This is a new feature. I will try to talk more about virtual appliance in a separate post.
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