Blog posts tagged with 'xenapp'

In the last part of Choosing an Automated Deployment Strategy for XenApp I will discuss installing XenApp via images.

This is the first episode of the Citrix Delivery Center podcast. Vishal Ganeriwala and I interviewed Daniel Feller of Worldwide Consulting Solutions on the topic of deploying XenApp on XenServer. In part 1 of this topic, Dan talks about where, why and how XenServer and XenApp integration makes sense to deploy in your environment. Scalability will be covered in part 2.

Thanks to Jim West in Citrix Technical Support for voicing the Citrix Countdown and Steve Greenberg of Thinclient.net for the CTP Minute. A special thanks also goes out to Doug Brown for his podcasting advice and help.

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Here are the documents Dan created regarding XenApp on XenServer -

Reference Architecture: Explains why a 100% physical architecture was reconfigured to include both physical and virtual systems and deciding factors of why XenServer is the best server virtualization solution for XenApp servers.

Implementation Guide: A step-by-step guide showing how to incorporate a XenApp Farm into a XenServer Platinum environment. Demonstrates how to create a golden XenApp image to be provisioned to any number of virtual machines.

Design Considerations: To meet the needs of the business, a solution like XenServer for XenApp must allow for design decisions. This article focuses on a few of the major considerations when integrating these solutions together.

Part 3 of Choosing an Automated Deployment Strategy for XenApp gives an overview of deploying XenApp via Active Directory.

In Part 2 of the Choosing an Automated Deployment Strategy for XenApp series I will talk about installing XenApp with the UnattendedInstall.exe tool from the server CD.

In the next few days at shannonma.wordpress.com I'll be blogging about the different ways you can install XenApp in an automated fashion. Part 1 is online, Part 2 will be coming tomorrow, and the whole series will be online by Wednesday. Check it out and if you have any questions or feedback don't hesitate to drop me a comment.

In case you haven't heard or seen , I'll be hosting a live TechTalk on Wednesday, July 23rd at 1PM Eastern covering the virtualization of XenApp on XenServer. For those of you who have read my blog, I know there are 5 of you, will know that I've been working on this aspect of server virtualization for some time.  I plan on covering what you should virtualize, how you should do it and how to make dev/test environment better with this solution. So if you want to hear me talk on a great topic, don't forget to register here.

July 23, 2008

1:00 PM Easter

1 hour duration

Daniel

Shipoopi!!

(Homer Simpson Quote of the Blog: "Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.")

If you could wave a magic wand and have any one single feature in the next release of Citrix XenApp, what would it be?

While XenApp has literally hundreds of features that have been added over the last 10 years as the product has evolved from MetaFrame 1.0,1.8, XP, FR1 though FR3, 3.0, then 4.0 and now 4.5, is there one feature you really want to have but have not seen yet?

I pulled in a few ideas I have received into a poll. If you would like to add others to the list, post them in the comments and I will add your suggestion. I am looking for big home run features, but ideas that help you in your day to day job are fine as well.

From my past experience, many of you just do not have the time to keep up with every feature added to XenApp/CPS over time, especially if you are migrating to every other release. I have a theory about that as well (but I am saving that theory for a later post). It will be interesting to see if any feature ideas are submitted that have already been added in a past release.

Of course, there is no guarantee anything on this list can or will be included in the future (since I am not on the XenApp product team). I do guarantee I will communicate the results of this poll to that team.

This is a very preliminary list based on an informal survey I took recently. Instead of editing it, I am just posting it to get the discussion (and voting) started. If you want to add a feature to this list, post it in the comments and I will add it. Focus on the problem you need to solve.

If you could wave a magic wand, what feature would you put into the next release of XenApp?	Choose
SpeedScreen Multimedia support across all client platforms
Enhanced smart phone integration
Enhanced Mac integration
Live migration of individual sessions
Diff tool for Microsoft and Citrix patch levels on all servers
Integration with third party app virtualization solutions (MAV or SVS)
Greatly enhanced scalability
Security Analysis and Lockdown Tool
Pool of Pre-Launched Sessions for Faster Launching
Management through an Active Directory OU

UPDATE:Two Additional Choices offered based on comments.

If there is a lot of interest in this poll, I will post follow ups on the features requested and similar polls for other products. My goal here is to get unfiltered feedback from you about what you want to see in the product and how we can improve the product to solve the problems you face.

UPDATE:The response to date on this poll has been excellent. Votes are still coming into the poll. I have sent a screen shot of the results to date to a member fo the XenApp team to ensure the product team is aware of these requests. I am working to get some members of that team to discuss of these requests and the comments posted here.

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.

Previously I covered an overview of User Profile Manager as well as how it addresses last write wins.  Now I will cover profile bloat which is one of the more common user profile pain points.  Profile bloat creates unwieldy growth in user profiles and resulting storage and management issues (and the performance impact as profiles continue to grow in size).  So let's take a closer look at how User Profile Manager gives you control over this challenge.

Typically when using Folder Redirection or a roaming profile, the user's profile folders follow them as they move from system to system.  In a perfect world all your applications would behave properly and there would be no profile bloat. We know this is not the case and thus certain folders lend themselves to becoming very bloated fairly quickly.  Application Data is one of those folders, as applications may use it as a temporary folder (instead of the system's temp folder) and do not clean up the folder after the application ends.  This folder can become a graveyard of files no longer wanted or needed.  Or become a repository of files not really needing to be kept from one session to the next - temp files or cached data.  This folder can quickly become 100s of MB in size.

In a roaming profile scenario, this is a lot of data to be dragged around with a user.  With folder redirection, this becomes a lot of data to have to store somewhere - particularly if it's not really needed.  This becomes a painful process since the data may be getting copied back and forth with every logon and logoff event (although some optimizations within the profile contain the copying back to only files that changed).  In the case of XenApp servers where profile caches are almost always deleted upon logoff, all this profile data will have to be copied down again upon next logon.  Situations like this compound the pain we experience with unwieldy profile sizes.

With User Profile Manager you configure to exclude this 'extra baggage' causing that data to be ignored.  The payoff will be better management of the central storage resources (not storing extraneous files back to the user's central store) and this can translate to improved logon times since this extra baggage is not processed with the user's profile (which unless it is already cached on the machine the user is logon into, it will be copied down).

User Profile Manager provides the capability to fine tune the files and folders in a user's profile.  Now an administrator can explicitly include or exclude folders and files within a user's profile (and the ability to combine these such as to include a specific folder and exclude a subfolder within that folder).  For example, you might have an application called MyApp that creates and stores a multitude of supporting files in the \Application Data\MyApp directory (of which the subdirectory called '\MyAppStuff' is not needed).  You could include the root MyApp_ directory but then define an exclusion of the _\Application Data\MyApp\Stuff folder and upon logoff these files are left behind and not transferred to the user's central store.  If you have configured local profiles to not be cached, this extraneous data is just deleted at logoff with the cached profile.

By fine tuning and adjusting over time what is kept and not kept in the profile enables the profile size to be managed more efficiently.  For a start have a look at the INI files installed with User Profile Manager (in the target install directory) provided with UPM as they provide some good initial settings. And of course the profile size being reduced and less data being copied back at logoff can contribute to improved logon and logoff time.

Since launching XenDesktop, one of the most common questions I have heard from XenApp customers is "Why would I use XenDesktop with my current XenApp implementation?" Well, there are a lot of reasons and this white paper helps answer them. According to the document's description:

The white paper explores these areas:

• Best Practice: Separate Apps and Desktop
• Step 1: Is it an app or desktop problem?
• Step 2: Which workers have this problem?
• Step 3: Identify the solution
• Step 4: Justify with Cost Analysis

Take a read and let us know what you think.

 XenApp and XenDesktop: Using Application and Desktop Virtualization Together