Citrix Project Satori is the result of a collaborative agreement between XenSource and Microsoft, and was carried forward after XenSource was acquired by Citrix Systems. The base Satori components are released by Microsoft as the Linux Integration Components for Hyper-V, and provide support for paravirtualized XenLinux guests running on Hyper-V. The Linux Integration Components can be downloaded here.
The complete source code and license information (GPL version 2) on this project is now availalbe at http://www.xen.org/download/satori.html.

Have you seen the error "You have chosen not to trust XXX Server CA, the issuer of the server's security certificate (SSL error 61)." on Citrix Linux Plugin for XenApp (formerly known as ICA client)? It may be because the certificate authority from whom you get your server certificate is not trusted by your client.

I've got questions from users about this error. And I've made a request to product team to mitigate this issue. Please see comments from my earlier blog.

There are articles you can find on the Internet which describe a solution. However some users found videos more helpful than text only version. So I decided to create a video version of it.

You will need to download the right certificates. If you have questions, you may want to ask your server administrators or your certificate authorities who issue your server certificates. Alternatively you may be able to export the certificates you need from your firefox browser on the same Linux machine.

Here is an article I found that contains useful text based instruction and has a script that automates the process. You may need to customize the script to fit your needs.

I hope in the future, the product team can find ways to mitigate this issue. One step is to trust more certificate authorities by default. It's not difficult to implement. But I was told it might require some legal work to redistribute certificates from third parties. Another possibility is to share the trust with Firefox which will require more develop work. What do you think? Do you know how other Linux applications solve this issue?

Here is my earlier blog that explains how to install and use Linux ICA client.

I'd love to hear your feedbacks.

Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
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Interested in Multimedia Virtualization? Here are some new capabilities that we are now announcing:

• HDX MediaStream for XenDesktop. HDX is a set of technologies designed to deliver a high-definition user experience for virtual desktops and applications. HDX MediaStream accelerates the delivery of a variety of multimedia formats including WMV (and WMV HD), WMA, MP3, and MPEG-4. This is done by leveraging the power of the endpoint device to render the multimedia content. HDX Adaptive Orchestration (see my SmartRendering blog post) provides for automatic fallback to server-side rendering if the client is not equipped for local rendering.

• HDX MediaStream for Linux. Version 11.0 of the Linux client will soon be available for download, introducing multimedia acceleration just as in our Win32 and WinCE plug-ins. This client supports both XenDesktop and XenApp.
  
  

Also, the new 11.1 version of the Citrix Desktop Receiver, introduced in conjunction with XenDesktop 3, offers improved performance for LAN users by making better use of available network bandwidth. This enhancement, part of HDX Broadcast, is especially valuable when working with graphics and multimedia.

And there's more to come . . . I just need more time to blog!

Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization

In my previous post on the subject of storage (Is SAN really NAS spelt backwards), I introduced a fundamentals whitepaper. Behind XenServer Storage, builds on this and shows how XenServer leverages the different kinds of storage. Feedback welcome!

If you are interested in running ICA client on Linux, I've created two short videos showing the step by step instructions. Unlike windows ICA client, installing Linux version of ICA client requires more steps although it is relatively straight forward after you watch the video I hope. I used Ubuntu Linux as an example. Other Linux distributions may work slightly differently.

How to install ICA client

How to use ICA client

Click here to see all of my videos.

Here is my earlier blog that is related to installing ICA client on Ubuntu. 

I hope you find the videos useful. Love to hear your feedbacks. For example, your experience with other Linux distributions will be interesting.

Acknowledgment:

I found many articles on the Internet about installing ICA client on Linux. Here are some good examples I referenced

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CitrixICAClientHowTo 

http://bin-false.org/?p=13

http://www.hanckmann.net/?q=node/13 

Ray Yang

The PowerShell open source reimplementation for "others" (Mac, Linux, Solaris, etc...) and Windows (including Windows Mobile and Windows CE)

With what we can do with Citrix Workflow Studio and the Citrix Delivery Center already, can you imagine the possibilities of what we can do with PASH, as Windows Poweshell has already become the language of choice for administration, intergration, and automation.

Here are some screen shots of PASH in action:

Continue at Source: Pash - cross platform PowerShell is out in the wild! Announcement

As a follow up to Sridhar's post about Future of XenApp for UNIX I'll like to dig a little deeper on what options there are for publishing Linux applications and desktops though the existing Citrix UNIX product offerings.

There are a variety of methods on how this can be achieved and they are all generally variations on the use of XAU/CPSU as a broker to serve the Linux applications/desktops to ICA clients from the environment they are run in.

The simplest way to achieve this is to use separate Linux servers to run the applications/desktops and publish the mechanism to access these on the XAU/CPSU server. Any of the existing platform versions of XAU/CPSU (Solaris x86/x64, Solaris SPARC, AIX POWER or HP/UX PA-RISC) can be used in this method. The publishing mechanism is commonly a shell script that uses remote shell access (eg rsh, ssh) which is made easier if network user accounts are available but this is not a requirement. Other things to think about is session load balancing, if a multi-server XAU/CPSU farm is used to broker session there are advantages to tying individual Linux servers to particular XAU/CPSU servers. If there are differences in the performance characteristics of the Linux servers this can be evened out through XAU/CPSU load balancing tools.

A variation of the above is to make use of Solaris 10 x86/x64 Linux Container technology. This is a capability introduced in Solaris 10 where Linux applications are run in a Linux container on the Solaris 10 system. A Linux Container is effectively a Solaris kernel with Linux kernel interfaces (system calls, /proc, etc) with standard Linux distribution user-land components (utilities, etc) and Sun claims a high-level of binary compatibility with Linux distributions. In this variation XAU/CPSU can be installed on the same Solaris 10 x86/x64 server that hosts the Linux Container and through shell scripting mechanisms already mention access to the Linux applications/desktop can be achieved. Now that Solaris 10 x86/x64 is officially supported on HP, IBM and Dell hardware as well of course on Sun's own x86/x64 hardware there is a range of hardware vendor supported options here.  

Another variation is the use one of the x86/x64 server virtualization solutions to virtualize both the XAU/CPSU and Linux servers. The requirement here is the support for both Solaris x86/x64 and Linux x86/x64 virtual machines. The example below shows how it might be achieved with XenServer virtalizing Linux and Solaris 10 servers once Sun completes their paravirtualized kernel and drivers. However, any other server virtualisation technology that can virtualize the Linux and Solaris servers can be used to provide a similar solution.
 

 

Options in this area are appearing all the time and and some may well warrant investigation.  One recent announcement from Transitive offers capabilities to run Solaris SPARC binaries on Linux x86/x64.
 
So I hope I have shown there are ways to architect a solution to publish Linux Applications/Desktops with existing XAU/CPSU offerings but do please do tell us what you think.

As a follow up to Carlo's post on XenApp for UNIX, I would like to discuss our future for the UNIX product. XenApp for UNIX is a fully supported, maintained and enhanced product. Since we released Presentation Server for UNIX 4.0, the product has been following an incremental feature delivery model. Since the 2005 release we have added over 80 feature enhancements like seamless improvements, session query utility, enhanced diagnostic logging, roaming user support, adding support  for Solaris x86/x64 platform, Solaris SPARC license server, Virtual Channel SDK, Enhanced keyboard and wheel mouse support, Solaris zones support, enhanced server farm publishing options etc. Instead of coming up with a brand new release (like PS for UNIX 4.5 or 5.0), we have opted to get these enhancements as public hot fixes and feature packs. e.g. we added Solaris x86/x64 support when we released PS 4.5 Feature Pack 1. And we will have the next feature pack update for UNIX that will align with the upcoming Delaware release.

The reason for using this delivery model is it speeds up our feature development and helps our customers easily adopt the functionality they need. The customer can install these updates as either hot fixes or as feature packs based on their needs. Of course, you need to be current on SA in order to use the features.

Regarding support for Linux platform, we still don't see a huge market for Linux apps. Also, we might not have native Linux support but some of our customers use XenApp for UNIX as a proxy to serve Linux applications. We will soon have a KB article explaining how you can do that.