Blog posts tagged with 'xenapp'

Lately main stream media picked up on the fact that we're building an ICA client for the iPhone. Several stories emerged, many pointing back to Al's blog as well as our most popular blog post ever by Chris Fleck.

Some have questioned if we were really working on a client or just some vaporware.

I can safely tell you that what you've heard is true, we're building an ICA client for the iPhone, but that's not all. We're not just building an ICA client for another mobile platform, we're redefining the mobile experience for Citrix users, we're building a Citrix Receiver for the iPhone.

iPhone is remarkable for its design and simplicity and we do not intend to change that, in fact, we find ourselves inspired by all its novelties.

Our goal in delivering a Citrix Receiver to an iPhone is to ensure a completely seamless transition from personal to enterprise, all in one device. Virtually millions business critical application run today on Citrix XenApp, and soon enough all of them will be at your fingertips in an iPhone near you.

We are following the very same guidelines every other native iPhone app follows, and to ensure that, we have teamed up with our friends at Apple to deliver nothing but the smoothest experience to our users.

The Citrix Receiver for iPhone will not only look and feel native to this platform but it will leverage many of the software and hardware advancements incorporated into this ingenious device. Expect a rich combination of multi-touch gestures, great usage of the iPhone's accelerometer and many more.

Our timeline can not yet be disclosed, however I can share with you that the first edition of the Citrix Receiver will be released to the App Store within the first half of 2009. In the meantime, we are building an iPhone community site within CDN, allowing us to contribute and share information with the industry as well as a mainline of communication between our development team and the community; this new site will be available soon, stay tuned.

The Project name is Braeburn (Project Braeburn), I'm the Product Architect, Al Grandville - Product Manager, and a highly skilled team of our finest Mac developers; we form the squad in charge of getting the Citrix Receiver released into the wild. On the new iPhone community site you will be able to chat, ask questions and exchange ideas with all of us.

Stay tuned, iPhone magic is coming soon!

best,
Gus

Citrix technologies have been around for almost 20 years, we have helped other companies to stay on their feet during time of economic crisis by implementing access and application virtualization technologies that not only helped them succeed with their business needs but also reduced their operational costs.

With the economy outlook looking so obscure, companies have begun seeking for new ways to reduce costs while challenged to provide their customers with unchanged level of services and products.

Understanding what technologies to invest in times like this can be crucial decision; while researching some market trends I stumbled upon a recent post on ZDNet by Dan Kusnetzky with the title "Can virtualization help when times get tough?"

After a brief analysis Dan pointed our six ways virtualization can help a company financially, here they are:

• Access virtualization, such as that offered by Citrix and Microsoft, can make it possible for administrative and operational cost reductions while still making needed applications available in a secure, reliable way.

• Application virtualization, such as that offered by Citrix, Microsoft and many others, can make it possible for applications to be made available to staff members in a reliable way and even make it easier to update these applications without having to visit each and every laptop or desktop computer.

• Processing virtualization, such as that offered by Citrix, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, Virtual Iron and many others can either allow many machines to work together to get tasks done more quickly to optimize staff member's time or consolidate tasks onto a smaller number of physical machines. This approach can result in hardware, software, operational and administrative cost reductions.

• Network virtualization can make it possible to reduce the costs of administrative and operating costs.

• Storage virtualization can do for storage what processing virtualization does for processing.

• Management and security software for virtualized environments may be the area having the biggest opportunity for cost reduction.
  

Citrix was mentioned not once or twice, but at least 3 times and shows how we've managed to grow exponentially our portfolio; Citrix is now more than ever the ONLY end-to-end virtualization company from Network (NetScaler, WanScaler), Server (XenServer, Provisioning Server), Application (XenApp) all the way to Desktop (XenDesktop).

To compliment the great work done by Dan pointing out the values of virtualization, I will list below some extra reading that can help you define the best strategy to save money while using virtualization technologies:

The Economic Impact of Provisioning Server Streaming Platform
This study describes the financial impact of moving from a traditional datacenter environment, where individual servers are dedicated to specific functions, to an environment where applications and content are streamed to an individual server that exists in a pool of shared servers dynamically using Provisioning Server.

Virtual Desktop ROI Calculator
Calculate your savings with a desktop delivery solution you can take to the bank!

Green IT: Reducing Your Carbon Footprint with Citrix
This white paper explains how Citrix solutions can help bring environmental and organizational objectives into alignment, by alleviating the energy impact of equipment needed to serve both the datacenter and the desktop.

For more, visit: Citrix.com/Solutions

Best,
Gus

PS. Sorry if some of the links require a sign up; I hate signing up for stuff, but these docs are totally worth it...

...And don't forget to check out Chris Fleck's posts about Cloud Economics:

Cloud Economics 101 - Part 1

Cloud Economics 101 - Part 2

In the age where Agua or Aero-glass interfaces are somewhat as important as the underlining kernel, same rules have been applying to Scripts and utilities, after all not everyone wants to be using complex scripts and endless command-line combinations.

For those who are not so keen on Scripts and CLI, our French friend Pierre Marmignon created an app that doesn't solve a new problem, but tackles it more elegantly. Pierre has created an GUI app that (bulk) imports/exports all your published applications.

If you have an useful Citrix app or utility that you would like to share with the world by showcasing it here on the Citrix communities, feel free to send an email to: gus.pinto@citirx.com with the title Community App.

Back in april I stumbled upon and brought forward a nice finding on our internal showcase farm, an application named ICAPipe later renamed to Citrix Fast Launch.

I posted some demos and an interview with the creators of the tool, shortly after announced that we had the intent of releasing the app as a utility on CDN with forum support.

As you probably know, it's been 2 months and the utility has not being released, and the reason why, is very simple.

The demand this app has generated was tremendous, but despite of the community demand, many customers would not be able to take advantage of this app simply because it's not officially supported, therefore making it not suitable for production environments.

We were set with a dilemma, release the app anyways, assuming web support would suffice or review our release process and attempt to sneak CFL in the XenApp product roadmap.

I can tell you that in the meantime we've been putting the app thru many tests, while identifying the scenarios users could benefit from it, and at the same time, talking to our engineering group trying to lockdown a possible target for this application to be introduced as part of our product.

Of course, there is no guarantee Citrix Fast Launch will be included in the future, however one thing is certain, you as customers can influence these decisions, helping us identify where does faster launch times fit on your list of priorities.

With that been said, here are some questions for you...

Community Release vs. Product Integration?	Choose
I'm OK with a community release supported on CDN forums
Integrated is preferred but a community release is better than nothing
No rush, I can wait until it becomes officially part of XenApp
I cannot implement apps in production without official support

Would faster launching times impact your decision of deploying XenApp?	Choose
Yes
No

Not too long ago, I posted an article introducing the availability of ClearType on Citrix XenApp.

Helge Klein - one of my favorite bloggers, has taken it to the next level, he wrote a technical article explaining in great details how to configure ClearType on both XenApp 4.5 and XenApp 5.0, along with their respective requirements. Here's a snippet of his post.

With the release of the hotfixes KB946633 and PSE450R02W2K3037 ClearType font smoothing is finally available on both the current and the upcoming Citrix flagship products Presentation Server 4.5 and XenApp 5.0. Remains the question of how to configure it.

Windows has a GUI for configuring font smoothing (well hidden in the display properties). XenApp does not.

Each user of a published desktop can use the Windows GUI for configuring font smoothing. But what about the majority of XenApp users who only use published applications and do not have access to a published desktop? I do not know. Of course, the admin could set the font smoothing type in the registry for them. But even then users have no means of changing their setting.

Enter XenApp 5.0 and ICA client 11. If and when those two are at the server respectively client end of an ICA connection, the whole thing works the other way round: The ICA client reads the font smoothing type of the Windows client and transmits it to the server who then activates the client's setting for the current session. This even works across reconnects: During a reconnect from a different machine the new client's setting is read and transmitted. If it is different from the previous client's setting the font smoothing type of the session is changed on the fly.

This approach clearly has its advantages: No problems with published applications. Additionally, remote applications always have the same look as local programs.

But wait: What if the client is not a Windows client? Then we are back to the pre-XenApp days: Configuration on the server.

Configuration Overview

Just in case you got confused: The following table lists all requirements and configuration options:

Continue reading Helge's blog post here.

ClearType (aka Font Smoothing) is a software technology developed by Microsoft that improves the readability of text on existing LCDs, such as laptop screens, Pocket PC screens and flat panel monitors. With ClearType font technology, the words on your computer screen look almost as sharp and clear as those printed on a piece of paper.

For the longest time Microsoft ClearType has been working properly inside an ICA session with Citrix Presentation Server running on Windows 2000 Server, but it did not work with XenApp 4.5 running on Windows Server 2003.

As previously mentioned Citrix was working on an update to XenApp 4.5 for Windows Server 2003 to utilize this new Microsoft Update for Terminal Services to provide ICA users with ClearType support.

Well, on July 7th (yesterday) Citrix released a hotfix for XenApp 4.5 on Windows Server 2003 that enables ClearType on its XenApp 4.5 Servers.

Note: This patch also rectifies several other issues in XenApp 4.5. You can find the list of fixes by clicking here.

If you want to learn more about ClearType, I can suggest two great articles on this subject:

• Jeff Muir on ClearType and Terminal Services.
• Helge Klein has written an excellent article on ClearType Bandwidth requirements on Terminal Services.

Cheers,
Gus

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.

Citrix has released a new version of the ICA client for Mac OS X users.

As pointed out by our colleague Danny Wannagat, this release includes fixes for XenDesktop connections.

DOWNLOAD CLIENT | ReadMe | Admin Guide
Version 10.00.601 - Universal Binary English 6/5/08 5.0 MB .dmg.zip

Summary

This article describes how to run Web Interface 5.0 in a 64-bit Internet Information Services (IIS) process.

Background

This article applies to Citrix Web Interface 5.0 running on Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 or 7.0 with an appropriate version of Visual J#.NET 2.0 Second Edition on a 64-bit computer.

Web Interface 5.0 is a .NET application that is compiled so that it can be used on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of ASP.NET. Web Interface makes use of Visual J# and 64-bit support is added by Visual J#.NET 2.0 Second Edition. This allows the Web Interface to run inside a 64-bit IIS process.

The ability to run inside a 64-bit process can prove particularly useful on IIS 6.0, where the entire IIS Web site is either a 32-bit process or a 64-bit process. This makes it easier for the Web Interface to coexist with 64-bit Web applications on the same IIS site.

Procedure to allow the Web Interface to run as a 64-bit process on IIS 7.0

1. Open the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) IIS Manager snap-in on the server running the Web Interface.

2. In the left pane, click Application Pools and, in the Features View, select the application pool that your Web Interface site uses (usually called CitrixWebInterface5.0.xAppPool).

3. In the Actions pane, click Advanced Settings.

4. In the General section, change the Enable 32-Bit Applications setting to False.

To allow the Web Interface to run as a 64-bit process on IIS 6.0

1. When you install the Web Interface, allow the installer to switch IIS to 32-bit mode.

2. To switch IIS back to 64-bit mode and register the 64-bit version of ASP.NET, click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.

3. From the command prompt, type the following command to disable 32-bit mode:

cscript <systemdrive>\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 0

4. Type the following command to install the version of ASP.NET 2.0 and to install the script maps at the IIS root and under:

<systemroot>\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\version\aspnet_regiis.exe -i

where version is the build version number of ASP.NET.

5. Open the MMC IIS Manager snap-in on the server running the Web Interface.

6. Click Web Service Extensions under the server running the Web Interface and ensure that the status of the appropriate ASP.NET version is set to Allowed in the details pane.

• More Information

For more information about ASP.NET on IIS 6.0, see Microsoft Support Article 894435

Deployment and installation of AutoCAD Map 3D 2009 on Citrix XenApp 4.5 requires careful planning and execution.

This step-by-step document will guide you through AutoCAD Map 3D installation, setup and tweaks in order to successfully run Autodesk's product on a Citrix XenApp environment.



You can download the document here:

Installing AutoCAD Map 3D on Citrix XenApp