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Citrix Support is focused on ensuring Customer and Partner satisfaction with the support of our products. One of our initiatives is to increase the ability of our Partners and Customers to leverage self-service avenues for logging issues with Technical Support.
A key self-service feature is the My Support Portal available from http://MyCitrix.com.
The My Support Portal allows Customers and Partners to create, view, update, close and manage service requests as well as view your support agreements and associated entitlements online. The My Support Portal has replaced the Online Problem Reporting and Tracking (OPRT) features previously on My Citrix.
To help you get started on the My Support Portal, see the video demonstration below.
Citrix Support is focused on ensuring Customer and Partner satisfaction with the support of our products. One of our initiatives is to increase the ability of our Partners and Customers to leverage self-service avenues for finding answers and resolving problems. A key area that the Support teams focus on is development of troubleshooting and health checking tools.
***Until now we have primarily leveraged our internal support teams for innovative ideas. I'd like to get more feedback from our community on what tools you would find valuable, targeting prevention and early warning alerts of problems and reduction of problem resolution times. Additionally, we'd like to know what third party tools you leverage for your Citrix environment and to highlight tools you and your teams have developed.
I have listed some of our top self-service support tools and the Citrix Knowledge Center links below:
- CDFControl
o Link: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX111961
o # of downloads to date: 19324
o Initial release date: Jan 10, 2007
o Latest version release date: Mar 9, 2009
o One line description (i.e. what would we use it for)
§ Tracing and analyzing various Citrix products
- PrintDetective
o Link: http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx116474
o # of downloads to date: 4,762
o Initial release date: Nov 11, 2008
o Latest version release date: Jan 13, 2009
o One-ish line description (i.e. what would we use it for)
§ Enumerating all printer drivers from local or remote machines, including driver specific information, which can be used to find problematic print drivers (such as Non-Microsoft providers), as well as providing the option to delete drivers
- CTXReports Tool Version 1.0
o Link: http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx119955
o # of downloads to date: 823
o Initial release date: January 30, 2009
o Latest version release date: January 30, 2009
o One line description (i.e. what would we use it for)
§ Farm and System Information Acquisition
- MedEvac Tool Version 2.5
o Link: http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx107935
o # of downloads to date: 14,277
o Initial release date: September 20, 2006
o Latest version release date: February 11, 2009
o One line description (i.e. what would we use it for)
§ Farm and monitoring and health check utility
- TestDefaultDebugger
o Link: http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx111901
o # of downloads to date: 7,156
o Initial release date: 12/06/2006
o Latest version release date: 11/08/2007
o One line description (i.e. what would we use it for)
§ Tests a machines ability to capture user memory dump files, when an exception occurs
- WindowHistory
o Link: http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx109235
o # of downloads to date: 4,721
o Initial release date: 06/14/2005
o Latest version release date: 02/15/2007
o One line description (i.e. what would we use it for)
§ WindowHistory constantly monitors windows in the system (session) and allows you to save information about windows for further analysis
- MessageHistory
o Link: http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx111068
o # of downloads to date: 7,015
o Initial release date: 08/20/2006
o Latest version release date: 01/18/2007
o One line description (i.e. what would we use it for)
§ Logs window messages sent and/or posted to windows in a session
- StressPrinters
o Link: http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx109374
o # of downloads to date: 74,550
o Initial release date: 03/30/2006
o Latest version release date: 12/11/2008
o One line description (i.e. what would we use it for)
§ This tool can be used to simulate multiple sessions autocreating printers using the same print driver
The top 10 XenApp issues reported to Tech Support during May 2009 included Database Corruption, Seamless and Streamed Applications. See the full list in the presentation below.
Each section includes the following:
- Issue Statement
- Environment Details
- Troubleshooting Performed
- Solution
Download the full presentation from here.
Citrix Support is focused on ensuring Customer satisfaction with the support of our products.
• A year ago we implemented a Customer satisfaction and loyalty survey for Customers and Partners who have a Citrix Support contract directly with Citrix. Upon closure, all support cases receive a survey from a third party surveyor, CustomerSat®. If any surveys come back as dissatisfied a member of the Citrix Support management team follows up immediately with the Partner or Customer to ensure the problem is corrected. This has allowed us to drive our Customer satisfaction measures higher but we need more participation from the community. If you haven't received or responded to a survey please feel free to follow up with me directly.
• We also want to know how satisfied ALL Citrix Customers are as well. If you are not a direct Citrix Support Customer we still want to hear and act on your feedback.
Please feel free to reach out to me at Mike.stringer@Citrix.com or let me know on Twitter @citrixsupport - We can help!
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.
Software as a Service. Sounds like it would be a pretty easy concept to understand. But when we look under the hood we find that there are three differing perspectives.
At a hundred thousand feet SaaS is a buzz word for Wall Street and investors to get excited over. It is the intersection of off premise hardware managed by others at a location (either virtual or physical) with dedicated resources which may also be a part of the larger Internet Cloud which combines Web Hosting with shared applications. Wow! That's a mouthful. No wonder so many tech savvy analysts are so excited about it. There are enough "high hit" Google terms there to start a search engine frenzy.
The investment community represents the first of three perspectives for SaaS. Trying to predict what the future will hold and which companies have the technology to capture more customer wallet share in the ever growing information age. The view from this perspective is about the value of software. Specifically will software continue to hold its value and thus hold up the value of those Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who produce it?
The second perspective is that of the software industry itself. The opportunity is with those software companies who are blessed with no legacy code and have built their product for a distribution that takes advantage of the open Internet. From this perspective the sky is the limit and exposure or awareness of the product is the key to attracting revenues from the mass market. On the other hand ISVs who have invested millions of dollars in their code base and it has evolved from dedicated operating systems are not so lucky. From their perspective SaaS could be the next crushing blow that renders their code obsolete.
Lastly we have to look at the guy who pays the bill. The end user and for the purpose of this article, I'm going to limit that to the small and medium business. After all, if the SMB actually makes up 80% of the total number of end points in the world, one would think that this is the most important segment to address, right? From their perspective, SaaS doesn't matter. All they want to know is, "how am I going to get my software applications running without an IT staff or with limited IT capabilities". In fact if Geek Squad could figure out a way to supply physical services to every small business in the universe and manage applications on-the-fly, this would be the definition an SMB would use for Software as a Service.
If we start from the guy who pays the bills, the world of SaaS looks something like this. A simple, secure and cost effective way to access applications and data from any device in any location. Some ISVs understand this definition and are becoming wildly successful, because they understand the first order of business is satisfying the end customer's needs. After all, he is paying the bill. In the world of communication and collaboration we see products such as GoToMeeting and Microsoft Live. The hard truth is that these products sell the best by circumventing the current IT professionals. They are completely end user focused, have a specific use and are easily accessed from any device in any location. In the world of Customer Relationship Management, Salesforce.com is the 800 lb gorilla. Once again, simple to use and accessible.
But what of the thousands of applications that were built specifically for the desktop or dedicated server Operating Systems? Are these guys just out of luck? Will the millions of users who currently use these products suddenly stop and go to their web application cousin created by these new and emerging software vendors? Maybe. Eventually. But not tomorrow. Not in a year and maybe not for the next 5-10 years. There are a hundred reasons why this is true. The most compelling is risk and reliability. The mass market by definition is not a part of early adoption. In fact, according to Geoffrey Moore, we have an entire chasm to cross before there is mass market adoption of something as disruptive as a web app only business model. If this were not the case, Google would be the name on your phone bill today instead of AT&T, everyone would be driving a Prius and Cable TV would have been killed by IPTV. But these things take time and what is needed is a way to bridge the gap.
Most people in the IT industry don't think of Citrix as a mass market product company. And since SaaS is typically associated with the mass market, don't think of Citrix playing well in this space. That's because we have spent the bulk of our sales expertise and adoption in the large enterprise market. Why? Because it has taken 20 years to cross the chasm of server based computing for the mass market. But what most people don't realize is that Citrix started out by creating products designed for low bandwidth, high latency, and low power CPU environments. These are the basic tenants of the mass market. Our core product, XenApp has only been enhanced for these tenants over the past 20 years. That's why we have deployments of up to 50,000 end points within our current customer base. No one else in the world has this type of delivery system to match the needs of the end user in the mass market for the thousands of applications that are not web based. So as ISVs continue to look at the mounting problem of servicing the end customer in the SMB segment, Citrix will provide a simple, elegant solution to the perspective of the guy who is paying the bill... A simple, secure and cost effective way to access applications and data from any device in any location.
I wouldn't be surprised if Citrix is seen in a new light over the next couple of years. After all, we can bridge the gap that crosses the chasm.
How many times have we watched our favorite super heroes cornered into a situation that appears hopeless when they reach into their utility belts and pull out a tool that saves the day?
We would like to equip our customers with the tools that can help them face challenging circumstances. In the past few weeks we have released a number of new and updated support tools.
Examples
Print Detective CTX116474
Medevac 2.5 CTX107935
CtxHideEx32 CTX110341
Citrix ICA File Creator CTX113472
ScreenHistory 1.0 CTX113046
JetTest CTX116532
DSInfo 1.2 CTX114916
We are working on some additional support tools to increase your arsenal but we would like to hear from you. Please email us at supporttools@citrix.com and let us know how we can help you become a Citrix Super Hero.
Yesterday, we released the Application Streaming Profiler SDK version 1.2, and it is now available as a free download.
This SDK allows creating applications or scripts that automate the management of streaming profiles. The API allows creating, updating, reseting and deleting profiles, and can be combined with automatic starts of unattended installers. Without this SDK, these tasks could only be done through the Streaming Profiler user interface and would require the physical presence and monitoring of an administrator.
Here follow a list of improvements in this second release of the SDK:
- New APIs for Inter-Isolation Communication profiles: The New IRADEPackage2 classes include support for defining links between profiles.
- Includes the TLB file that allows the easy creation of COM client applications with C++.
- Includes and explains multiple working samples in both C# and C++.
- The files included in this SDK are better organized for easy navigation.
For more information about Application Streaming see the product documentation or search for "Application Streaming" on the Citrix Blogs, and for detailed questions about the SDK, visit the dedicated Community Forum. Also, keep monitoring the Citrix Blogs because Joe Nord, our Product Architect for Application Streaming, will soon post entries to further explain the Streaming Profiler, the SDK, and this release.
Very important: we want to know about your experience with this SDK:
- Have you been able to use the SDK effectively?
- What else would you like to see in the SDK?
Lastly, XenApp 5.0 was announced earlier this week. If you want to learn more about it, you should not miss Citrix Delivery Center Live. This live virtual event will take place on September 9th. Make sure to register now!
We have just released the XenApp Management SDK (MFCOM) for XenApp 5.0, and it is now available as a free download.
This SDK allows creating programs or scripts that automate the management of XenApp. Examples of use for this SDK range from simple scripts to the implementation of full-fledge custom consoles for fully managing a XenApp deployment.
This release of the SDK adds support for Health Monitoring and Recovery, for reboot schedules, and for session policies. For additional details see the SDK and the XenApp documentation. You can also visit the very active Community Forum for this SDK.
XenApp 5.0 was announced earlier this week. If you want to learn more about it, you should not miss Citrix Delivery Center Live. This live virtual event will take place on September 9th. Make sure to register now!
We are reviewing the Support Programs for our Americas Partners. I have two questions for the Partner community:
(1) Do we need to change anything?
(2) If you believe we could all benefit from changes, what are the top three changes you would want to see?
The Online Problem Reporting and Tracking (OPRT) tool is now open to all Citrix Support Customers and Citrix Partners. This site can be accessed from the Support link on the https://www.citrix.com front page or via the following URL: https://www.citrix.com/English/SS/supportSecond.asp?slID=38676. OPRT allows you to open a Support case online, add new information and see the status and new information that Citrix Engineers have added.
I'm looking for feedback on this tool that has recently been opened to all Citrix Partners in addition to having always been open to our Customers. Citrix Support will be moving to a new CRM over the next couple of quarters and the online tools will be updated. I'm interested in understanding what is good, what needs improvement and what needs to be added to the next version of OPRT's replacement.
We have recently released an update for the Health Monitoring & Recovery SDK, and it is now available for download.
The popularity of the Health Monitoring & Recovery (HMR) feature, included with XenApp 4.5 Platinum and Enterprise editions, has greatly increased during the last few months among Citrix customers. This feature monitors the health of XenApp by periodically executing multiple tests and by starting a recovery action if any of those tests fails.
Citrix provides multiple HMR tests out-of-the-box for the administrators to configure, but customers and third parties can use this SDK to develop additional tests.
Some of the improvements in this update of the SDK include:
- Improved error handling.
- Support for additional test formats.
- Additional sample tests.
- Support for Windows Server 2008.
We are planning a future video blog regarding HMR in general and about the SDK in particular. So, stay tuned!
In the mean time, you can check the Citrix Presentation Server Administrator's Guide or a prior posting about the feature for more information.
Enjoy!
Aureliano Lopez-Martin
Senior Product Manager, XenApp SDKs
Hi,
I wanted to make everyone aware of this very useful feature of windows and that it will not only provides us feedback to improve our software quality but may provide you possible solutions to known issues. We have linked a number of knowledge base articles and responses to common crashes reported to WER.
More information about WER is available here
Hopefully you will not being seeing the dreaded BSOD but if you do hope maybe only a click away 