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The Windows 7 Beta is out in the wild and what better way to try it out than running it as a virtual machine. While the latest version of XenServer shipped well before Windows 7 beta in this month's first XenServer Tips and Tricks you can learn how to get it running on Citrix XenServer 5.
Let me start out by saying this is totally unsupported and experimental. You could blow-up your server, your server room, your building, your car, you know the drill. If you call support they would likely laugh and hang up the phone.
There are two ways to do this, the easy way and the hard way. Just do it the easy way unless you want to know the details.
The Easy Way
The easy way is to download the Windows 7 Beta x64 Experimental Template.
After downloading and unzipping the template follow the steps below.
Getting it onto your XenServer system:
1. In XenCenter right-click on your server and select Import VM
2. Browse to the file and select Exported Template as the Import Type
Building a Windows 7 Beta VM:
1. Once the template is installed just click New VM button and the Windows 7 Template will show up at the top of the first screen
2. The rest is business as usual just be sure to add a disk drive and a NIC as you are creating the VM
The Hard Way
The hard way is to create a new VM using the existing Windows Server 2008 x64 template. Create a new VM and point to your Windows 7 Beta install source. On the last page of the New VM wizard in XenCenter unclick the "Start VM Automatically" option. Also make a note of the VM name as you will need this in a second.
We run Windows 2008 enlightened on the XenServer 5 platform. Enlightened means the VM knows it's running virtual and we can make it run faster! Microsoft is still working on the Windows 7 Beta so we just need to turn off the enlightenment support for now to get it working.
So to do this we need to use the XenServer CLI. Just click on your XenServer system in the left hand tree view of XenCenter and select the console tab and get ready to type a few command lines. Hit <enter> to get to the command prompt and then type xe vm-list name-label=<Your VM name Here>, just type the first few letters and hit the <tab> key to save having to type the whole name. Now you will get a display showing you the unique ID (uuid) of your virtual machine. Make a note of the UUID and then type xe vm-param-set uuid=<uuid of your VM> platform:viridian=false. Then you can go startup the VM and start installing Windows 7 Beta.
Workflow Studio leverages product SDKs to accomplish automation, so I want to take a moment to remind everyone that each of the Citrix products has their own SDK page on the CDN:
- XenApp - http://community.citrix.com/cdn/xa/sdks
- XenServer - http://community.citrix.com/cdn/xs/sdks
- XenDesktop - http://community.citrix.com/cdn/xd/sdks
- NetScaler - http://community.citrix.com/cdn/ns/sdks
Notice the similar link on the Workflow Studio page? Stay tuned...
VM Exports in XenServer are a great way to make a backup of an existing virtual machine (VM) as a single file. The file contains your VM settings which includes everything from the name to the amount of memory you have given the VM. It also contains all of the data from the virtual disk drives that you have associated with your VM. One you have exported your VM you can take this file and then import it easily to other XenServer 5 systems. So it's not only good for backups but you can also move VMs between different environments or even create your own virtual appliances. As space is always a premium here are some tips on minimizing the size of your exported virtual machines.
Don't Export what you don't Need
A physical or virtual disk drive is made up of a bunch of blocks. As you save new data on your disk it gets written to these blocks. Brand new blocks are empty but over time as you add and delete files the blocks get filled with data. And in the interest of making file delete operations fast when you delete a file the operating system does not actually clear all the blocks used by the files it just marks the space as free for future use.
Now when XenServer starts exporting the virtual disk it looks and sees data in these unused blocks and in the interest of not tossing anything away on the off chance you need it XenServer exports any blocks with data in them. This can end up making your export files larger than the need to be.
So what you want to do is a process called zeroing out the unused blocks. This will take any space that is no longer used and clear it out. Then when you do your export this data does not have to be exported and you get a smaller file. The process to clear or "zero" out the unused blocks is a little different between Linux and Windows.
NOTE: If you are using VHD backed file systems with XenServer such as NFS storage this has a side effect of maxing out the size of the VHD file on the XenServer box.
Freeing up Windows Blocks
Microsoft has a nifty little utility called SDelete that will run through and find any unused blocks with data and clear them out. You can download SDelete at the link below.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897443.aspx
Once you download the program open up a command prompt and run the command sdelete -c and it will do its magic!
Freeing up Linux Blocks
On Linux you can run a command and get the same result. Open up a shell prompt on your system and then run the following command for each of your file systems:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/deletemesoon; rm /deletemesoon
The first part of this command will fill up any free space (including blocks with unused data) with zeros. It will stop once it runs out of space. Then the second part of the command just deletes the big zero file.
Compress That Exported File
In the interest of not overloading the system that is exporting the virtual machine we don't compress the data that is exported. So to really save on space after you do an export you can then use your favorite compression program to shrink down the exported file even more. I have been using winrar on Windows since it seems to handle large VM export files well and then using bzip2 or gzip on Linux.
For those of you who were not able to attend the live event or wish to re-watch it, you can get to the recording by going here: http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/events/event.asp?eventID=1685355
Q: Where can I get NeScaler training
A: You should check out the Citrix Training website for information on classes and locations. (http://www.citrixtraining.com/courses/courses/index.cfm)
Q: Is there Web Interface and XML Broker Monitors part of Citrix Access Gateway Ent.?
A: Access Gateway Enterprise Edition is a component on the NetScaler platform. In order to use Access Gateway functionality along with the load balancing functionality, you will need to have the correct license for the NetScaler platform. Please take a look at the Citrix NetScaler Editions description (http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/subfeature.asp?contentID=1683492)
Q: In the demo being shown, if the application is only available via the Minneapolis datacenter, but the user is closer to the Ft Lauderdale datacenter, is it possible to configure the NS/AG to redirect the connection to the Minneapolis NS pair instead?
A: Excellent question. The challenge with your question is that NetScaler does not know which application you intend to launch when it decides the most appropriate data center. Even if the NetScaler sends you to the Ft Lauderdale data center, you will still be able to launch an application only available in the Minneapolis data center, but you still have your SSLVPN session going to Ft. Lauderdale.
Q: If you have redundant WI and/or XML Broker servers set up does NS determine that the Primary has gone down and alert the admin that redundancy is no longer there?"
A: These should be SNMP traps that you could pick up with a management tool to alert the administrator.
Q: What happen if we have two sites with different subnets and we have two DNS over NAT?
A: Two sites with different subnets, NAT, etc is fine. Your configuration will just be different and include different addresses. With multiple DNS servers, you just need to make sure that the fully qualified domain name you setup as part of Global Server Load Balancing is configured on both DNS servers to point to the NetScaler devices, which are the authoritative DNS servers for that domain name.
Daniel
I had some really great questions based on the TechTalk of "Simplifying the Migration to XenApp 5 with XenServer". Many of the questions focused on the actual aspects of using Provisioning Server. As many of you are unfamiliar with the solution, i created a video that would help you better see what this solution can do for you. Hopefully, the video will help answer your questions.
Watch this Video to see how Provisioning Server delivers XenApp
Also, if you want to replay the TechTalk, you can access it from here.
During the TechTalk, i mentioned a few white papers that were created focused specifically on this topic. Click on the item for the doc.
Q: I didn't understand how you take an existing server and turn it into a virtual server?
A: You have to reinstall the physical server with XenServer. After that, you can provision new virtual XenApp servers. The XenServer install takes 10 minutes(very easy) and streaming a new XenApp server takes about 30 seconds, which is the server boot time.
Q: After a server is provisioned with the OS, how can it be automated to install/setup Citrix and then publish apps ? Are these manual steps ?
A: The provisioned server is completely configured. It will have XenApp and the applications installed. The XenApp integration utility for Provisioning Server takes care of all of the lower-level changes to add the new provisioned servers to the XenApp farm. The only thing you have to do for a newly provisioned server is to publish the applications on the server.
Q: How can Citrix XenServer or Provisioning handle differences in hardware when deploying ?"
A: XenServer is a virtualization layer sitting between the hardware and the operating system. The provisioned, virtual XenApp servers will use the XenServer drivers. This means a single driver, the XenServer driver, can be used across a wide range of different physical hardware.
Q: Can you run XenApp 5 on Windows 2003 Server environment?
A: Yes, the same process explained within the TechTalk can also be used for XenApp 5 on Windows 2003. Actually, this process can be used for future versions of XenApp.
Q: Will the XenApp run on a VMware environment? We currently use VMWare."
A: Yes. It will run on VMWare ESX and also on Microsoft Hyper-V. However, I would recommend you take a look at performance results from INDEPENDENT tests. XenServer was optimized for XenApp workloads. As you are very aware, XenApp is very unique in that many users are physically on the XenApp servers, which causes huge spikes in context switches due to the sheer number of applications and processes running. To get the best performance, you need a server virtualization solution that understands the workload and adjusts accordingly. This is done by a single configuration option in XenServer. I'm concerned that if you simply select VMWare because you already use it for other workloads that you will be very disappointed in the results and turn away from the benefits of virtualization. I encourage you to take a look at these items:
- Simon Crosby's blog regarding VMWare's "Scalability Tests": http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/simoncr/2009/02/02/VMware+Wins%21+%28Bad+Science+Required%29
- Independent Tests from Project Virtual Reality Check: http://www.virtualrealitycheck.net/
- Tolly Report on Virtualizing XenApp: http://www.tolly.com/DocDetail.aspx?DocNumber=208304
Q: Does vDisk support multiple drives? C:\ and D:\ or just the system drive?
A: Yes
Q: Explain the drag and drop of published apps...Example. Does this install the published apps?
A: Depends. If you are using streamed applications on the XenApp server, it will. If you are using installed applications it won't. However, I'd recommend that your base vDisk image from Provisioning Server contains the installed applications. That way, when you provision servers, you can go into the management console and drag the published application onto the new server. So if you have a XenApp farm with 3 different silos of XenApp servers, based on the applications they host, you will probably want to have 3 different Provisioning Server vDisks (images).
Q: How do you determine the MAC address for the Virtual server? how do you avoid existing MAC address of other hardware address.
A: Within the XenCenter console, you can see the MAC address for each virtual server without being required to go into the virtual server's console. It shows up in the networking tab.
Q: If we upgrade to XenApp5 will the version 10 of the Citrix client still work?
A: Yes, but the users will not be able to utilize new XenApp features that require a newer client.
Q: If your vdisk Image on the provisioning server is taken from the test server, how does it get a new name and IP information each time it is applied to a different VM server?
A: This is the magic of Provisioning Server. This got me when I first was introduced to Provisioning Server. It uses the target device name you create within the Provisioning Server console. The provisioned image will use that name. That name will also be in Active Directory with full membership in the domain. As for IP, that is all via DHCP. If you want your provisioned servers to have static IP addresses, you can create reservations within the DHCP based on the MAC address.
Q: Is there a way to Provision actual XenServer?
A: Not at this time.
Q: It is very disappointing that you are not addressing the client portion of conversions and that you advocate including applications in the base images. I know that you believe that clients are not impacted, but the reality is that that is not the case. Until you figure out a way to address the server hardware dependencies, the required client coordination, and the inability to layer applications automatically after the base image, I don't expect to be able to migrate to a new version without it taking months. It's also highly unrealistic to expect that we could upgrade our environment without having a dual-version environment.
A: I'm not sure I understand this question. During the migration, you will most likely have two versions running at the same time. You need to use Web Interface to enumerate applications from both farms. Recommended that you migrate entire XenApp silo's over at once. If you can't do that, then you need to have applications in one farm published to some users and the same applications in another farm published to the other users. That way you have enough resources in both farms.
As for the including applications in the base image, that is really based on the application. If you can use XenApp Application Streaming, then you don't have to include the applications in the base image. A XenApp image, with no applications could take on any role you wanted and host any application you wanted just by publishing the appropriate applications.
Q: Regarding the cloning, does XenServer take care of the post clone steps for XenApp and also does it modify the servers' SID to prevent duplicate SID's in the environment
A: Yes, as long as you setup your VM Template correctly. Cloning is a complete duplicate of the original. If your template VM that you will use for cloning is setup in a SysPrep'ed state, then all clones from it will have a new SID, name and identity. However, using Provisioning Server, you don't use the SysPrep-type utility. Provisioning Server changes the server's identity based on the name you specify in the Provisioning Server console.
Q: am I correct in thinking that XenApp has its own VM and does not 'sit' on a separate VM product (like VMWare)?
A: XenApp would sit on a separate product that is called XenServer. However, because XenServer and XenApp are owned by Citrix, great lengths have been gone into making sure you get the best performance possible, and that it is as easy as clicking a button.
Q: We're already doing this with VMWare VMs. Are there any advantages to switching to XenServer VMs? (Especially performance / ease of management improvements.) We're currently running ESX 3.5 and XenApp 4.5; we're definitely upgrading to XenApp 5.0 (in process) and considering switching to XenServer.
A: I strongly encourage you to take a look at these items. In ages past, I would not have recommended virtualizing XenApp because the performance hit was too great, basically you are throwing hardware away. However, that changed in XenServer 4.1. XenServer has a special optimization setting for XenApp workloads that greatly improves performance. Take a look at the following for more information (some are from independent, non-Citrix, sources):
- Simon Crosby's blog regarding VMWare's "Scalability Tests": http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/simoncr/2009/02/02/VMware+Wins%21+%28Bad+Science+Required%29
- Independent Tests from Project Virtual Reality Check: http://www.virtualrealitycheck.net/
- Tolly Report on Virtualizing XenApp: http://www.tolly.com/DocDetail.aspx?DocNumber=208304
Q: What about the server name being the same as the image.
A: Provisioning Server will use the target device name you enter in the Provisioning Server console. Each server will then have different identities.
Q: When is Dan coming back to Cleveland to buy more Chinese food?
A: LOL, I all of the sudden have a huge craving for it.
Q: Does all the ""automation"" require Workflow Studio? If not, what value does WFS bring above what's part of provisioning server?
A: No, Workflow Studio is not required or used on any of the items I spoke about. Think of Workflow Studio as a way to automate tasks that you have to do on schedule (like server reboots) or when a trigger is hit (like if the load on a silo of XenApp servers is too high to spin up a new XenApp server). That being said, you can automate just about anything, you just need to decide if the time required to build your workflows will save you time in the long-run.
Q: Does dynamic VHD resizing negatively impact performance of the target server?"
A: Yes and No. I love answers like that. First, it will because you have to keep expanding the disk and that takes resources. But no because when the vDisk is in production, it is in a read-only mode (Private image). That means changes are not kept within the vDisk, so the vDisk will not expand.
Q: Where and how are all the parameters for the specific machine stored: machine name, domain name and SID, domain password of the domain machine, etc.
A: Provisioning Server takes care of it. The name is based on the target device name you set in Provisioning Server, which is kept in the Provisioning Server database. The domain information is also configured in the Provisioning Server Console. Provisioning Server also maintains and manages the machine's password and keeps it updated with Active Directory.
EasyCall Conferencing
One of the larger expenditures for enterprises is the cost of voice communications, specifically conference calling. Most enterprises use an outside vendor to host the conference calling capabilities for global communications between internal employees and external participants. You can completely do away with that cost with EasyCall Conferencing. Here is how it works...
EasyCall Conferencing, which is a feature of EasyCall, allows EasyCall users to quickly set up ad-hoc conferences by sending participants an EasyCall Conferencing URL. Participants join a conference call simply by clicking a URL instead of having to dial a conference phone number and complex access codes. The calls are hosted on the EasyCall Gateway, providing toll-free access at much lower cost than commercial audio conference services.
To enable external users to join EasyCall Conferences, join requests must be proxied to the EasyCall Gateway from the internet as the EasyCall Gateway is always installed inside the corporate firewall. This is similar to many web applications that require protected external access, and the HTTPS proxy is simple to configure on the Citrix Netscaler to provide the necessary SSL Offloading and Content Filtering.
The Citrix NetScaler System provides continuous service availability through application-level protection by blocking attacks and delivery of the EasyCall application securely. The Citrix NetScaler Content filtering prevents unwanted requests from reaching the EasyCall Gateway.
The EasyCall Conferencing configuration template for the NetScaler policies is provided free of charge right here on our community website. Just import it, and your NetScaler is setup for EasyCall Conferencing.
Together, the EasyCall Gateway and NetScaler provides a low-cost, non-recurring charge, to host global conference calls with your own equipment, making it easy for participants to join just by clicking a URL ... no cryptic meeting codes or passwords.
Download the EasyCall Conferencing / NetScaler Deployment Guide Guide.
Download the EasyCall Conferencing - NetScaler AppExpert Configuration Template.
Watch how easy this is:
How it will look in your network:
Download the EasyCall Virtual Appliance here.
Get the NetScaler here.
Tap into the power of AppExpert!
The Xen.org community, creator of the open source Xen hypervisor, is hosting our North American Xen Summit event this February 24 - 25, 2009 at Oracle's HQ in Redwood City, CA. This event brings together developers, users, and researchers of the Xen hypervisor for a 2 day conference on all things Xen. The topic abstracts are now available for review with the final agenda to be published later this week at http://www.xen.org/community/xensummit.html. Some of the speakers at this event include:
• Ian Pratt - Project Leader of Xen.org
• Keir Fraser - "Gatekeeper of Xen.org"
• Dan Magenheimer - Xen guru of memory form Oracle
• Jeremy Fitzhardinge - PVOPS Xen master (includes a demo!)
• Eddie Dong - Status of SR-IOV from Intel
• Ben Serebrin - Cross-vendor migration from AMD
• Andrew Warfield - Dual Citizen of Citrix & Univ of British Columbia
• Chuck Yoo - Korea University on Real-Time VMM
• Many others...
Even if you have never participated in the Xen.org community, I strongly encourage you to consider attending this event. As an open event, you will have the opportunity to learn first hand what the Xen community is planning for future releases, what researchers are doing with Xen to enable future industry trends, and how users are leveraging the powerful Xen hypervisor to solve critical and complex problems. For Citrix XenSever customers, this event provides a glimpse into the "behind the scenes" efforts for the Xen platform that supports the XenServer product family.
Registration is only $215 including a great Xen Summit jacket, evening out at the Computer History Museum, and the chance to mingle with the Xen community. Registration is at https://www.regonline.com/xs_oracle.
I look forward to seeing everyone later this month for Xen Summit North America at Oracle 2009.
Under the guise of science (lots of graphs, configuration parameters and techno speak must mean they are impartial, right?) the "performance team" at VMware has published compelling performance data for ESX 3.5 versus XenServer 5.0 and native, for virtualized XenApp workloads.
Congratulations are in order. The VMware team has done a fabulous job of searching to find a single instance of a set of parameters for ESX & XenServer that, under a carefully crafted set of "simulated user behaviors" shows ESX outperforming XenServer for the XenApp workload.
As a former academic, I'd give this mumbo jumbo an F grade. Bad science, bad scientists, uneven playing field:
- First, the VMware claims are not independently reproducible. Like every claim on performance that VMware makes, only they can make it and nobody can refute it, because nobody else can publish results for comparative tests between VMware and any other product.Their EULA forbids it. So, these results are true by definition, from your pals at the VMware ministry of truth. By contrast, an open, independent set of tests run by Project Virtual Reality Check, a benchmarking project conducted jointly by two Citrix/VMware solution providers in the Netherlands finds results wholly at odds with VMware's. Our own performance tests have also been independently validated by the Tolly Group (to whom VMware also denied permission to publish comparative results against ESX). Project VRC concludes that
- XenServer supports between 118-128% more users per host than VMware ESX for XenApp VMs configured with 1 vCPU. For example: Test 5 on XenServer and Test 8 on ESX (which were identical tests) tested 4 VMs with 1 vCPU and 4Gb of memory per VM, and shows that XenServer's optimal user workload is 86.5 users whereas ESX is just 38 users
- XenServer supports between 42-68% more users per host than VMware ESX for XenApp VMs configured with 2 vCPUs. For example Test 8 on XenServer and Test 16 on ESX (which were identical tests) tested 4 VMs with 2 vCPUs and 4Gb of memory per VM, and shows that XenServer's optimal user workload is 124.5 users whereas ESX is just 82.5 users.
- Second, the VMware "study" is not a thorough exploration of a valid set of parameters for the Terminal Services / XenApp workload. Instead, it is a narrow look at a particular set of configurations which are not reasonable in practice:
- No test of 32 bit workloads - the primary candidates for server consolidation for this workload because a 32 bit OS exhausts its memory at 4 GB and a modern server can pack hundreds of GB and many cores. Our work in this area has shown a compelling benefit to virtualizing TS/XenApp 32 bit workloads on XenServer, and an equally compelling set of reasons not to use ESX for this purpose.
- Unrealistic configuration - The server used in the tests is certainly punchy - the machine had 64 GB RAM and 4 processors--each with 4 cores (16 total processor cores). Anyone familiar with 64b TS/XenApp knows this machine could easily support hundreds of XenApp sessions. But the "scientists" at VMware don't. They instead chose to run exactly one VM (with only 2 vCPU's and using only 25% of the available memory) and XenApp at minimal levels of concurrency (i.e. 10-40 users). No multi-VM scenarios, no tests at useful user-counts. Based on their measurements they appear to gleefully extrapolate deeper into the realm of fiction to proudly pronounce their horse the winner.
** In our own work in this area, we found XenServer and other virtualization platforms to be roughly equal for this rather absurd set of parameters. But for high user counts, the numbers are radicaly different. We suitably anonymized the non-XenServer results, which are reproduced from the Tolly report. Quiz of the day, which result do you think is ESX?:
- Third, even VMware's users and partners are challenging their "results". This study is so one sided that the majority of the blog followups on VMware's site from its partners and customers point out how ridiculous they are. Since the "performance team" may well redact them, here are a couple, saved for posterity:
VMware's continued blunders in the performance arena are nothing short of embarrassing. So I've decided to issue an open challenge to VMware CTO Stephen Herrod: Steve, it's time to rein in the monkeys behind the keyboard, end VMware's indefensible EULA restrictions and allow independent performance comparisons of your products with others, by third parties with a vested interest in accuracy and independence. This sort of nonsense does nothing for VMware's brand credibility, its customers, channel partners or competitors other than give us all a hearty laugh at your expense.
The simple javascript example I wrote about last time is actually a great deal more interesting when it's combined with Firefox and Firebug. Using Firebug it's possible to both view the xmlrpc requests and also to browse the fields in the objects returned by the API calls. This becomes particularly enlightening when we have a up-to-date local cache of API objects, enabling the browsing of all of the fields available to API users. This is really useful for everyone developing against the XenServer API, not just web application developers. However, first of all we need to know how to get and maintain this cache, so I'll describe that first.
Using the methods in my last post, to find out about changes in the fields of objects we'd have to poll the XenServer every so often. This would involve large amounts of data transfer, especially when the objects of interest are VMs, which are by far the largest objects in our datamodel. There is a much nicer method of keeping track of the changes on the XenServer, and that is by using two API calls: 'event.register' and 'event.next'.
The basic idea is that you register for xapi to keep a note of changes in classes in which you're interested, e.g. VMs, hosts, or just everything, and when you call 'Event.next' it will give you back all of the objects in those classes that have changed since last time. When there are no events ready to send back, the call will block until one happens, which makes it perfect for an asychronous XHR request. Using the modified jquery.rpc library, making an asynchronous call just involves putting the callback as the last argument to the API call - for example:
rpc.VM.get_all_records(session)
is synchronous, and returns the VM references and records, whereas
rpc.VM.get_all_records(session,callback_fn)
is asynchronous, returns nothing, and the callback function is called with the result when the RPC completes.
In order that we don't miss out any events, we register for events before populating the local cache. So the sequence of calls is:
rpc.event.register(session,["vm"]); // case insensitive cache['vm']=rpc.VM.get_all_records(session); rpc.event.next(session,eventcallback);
Here we've registered for events on VMs - you can specify multiple classes to listen out for or use "*" to mean all classes (except those we don't generate events for, like sessions!) The event callback then updates the cache whenever it receives data, and then in turn again calls event.next:
function eventcallback(evts) {
for(var i=0; i<evts.length; i++) {
evt=evts[i];
if(cache[evt['class']]) {
cache[evt['class']][evt.ref]=evt.snapshot;
}
}
rpc.event.next(session,eventcallback);
}
For the demo application, we register for all classes, but only pay attention to the modification events to VM objects - in this case we simply print out the names of the VMs in <div>s styled according to the power state. To see the event system working, just start or stop a VM, and the page will be updated accordingly. The demo is available here. Once again, to install it, it's easiest to have it served up by the XenServer itself, so ssh in and mkdir /opt/xensource/www - then copy the files from the demo zip in. Edit the 'demo.js' file to put in the correct username and password, then just point your web browser at the server.
As I mentioned at the beginning though, it's much more interesting to look at the demo with Firebug installed, where you can see the xmlrpc requests (note that to take this screenshot I changed the 'use_json' param to 'false'):
Using the DOM browser, you can see the contents of the local cache, including the names and values of all of the fields available to XenAPI clients:
Summary
This article describes how to create a local NFS-based ISO Library on a XenServer host. This procedure will destroy the Local Storage Repository and replace it with an NFS share.
**DISCLAIMER**
CHANGES TO THE DOMAIN 0 VM ON A XENSERVER HOST MAY RENDER THE HOST UNSUPPORTED. This procedure describes several changes to the XenServer host's configuration that may cause it to become unsupported.
Better Option
A better option to obtain this same functionality would be to build a hosted NFS server VM and connect the shared ISO Library to the hosted VM.
References:
- How To Change the Default Storage Repository to File-based VHD-on-EXT3 http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx116324
- Allow NFS through iptables on a RedHat system http://pario.no/2008/01/15/allow-nfs-through-iptables-on-a-redhat-system/
Procedure:
Step 1.
First, install XenServer Enterprise on the system with the default Logical Volume Manager (LVM)-backed storage repository (SR).
Step 2.
Next, we need to remove the LVM-backed Local Storage repository.
*NOTE* If you have virtual machines (VMs) on your existing local LVM-backed SR please backup (export) and afterwards delete them before continuing.
a. Find the default SR device ID, universal unique identifier (UUID), and remove the default SR.
i. Log on to the XenServer server console.
ii. Type the following command to display information about your default SR.
# xe sr-list type=lvm
Make a note of the default UUID.
In this case, the SR UUID = 63276e9a-4d15-dd2e-f437-599d6c01e4b4
iii. Determine the UUID for your default SR's physical block device (PBD) using the following command:
# xe pbd-list sr-uuid=your SR UUID
Make a note of the PBD UUID.
In this case, the PBD UUID = 28f63f05-a5b4-96df-072a-f7232acefb24
iv. Disconnect the Local Storage SR using the following command:
# xe pbd-unplug uuid=your PBD UUID
At this point, the Local Storage SR should show as disconnected in the XenCenter console denoted with a red exclamation point.
v. Now remove the Local Storage SR using the following command:
# xe sr-destroy uuid=your SR UUID
At this point, the Local Storage SR should show as removed in the XenCenter console.
Now if we issue the #xe sr-list type-lvm command, we can see that the Local Storage SR no longer exists...
...but if we issue the # fdisk --l command, we can see that we have a nice empty partition on which to build our NFS share.
b. The next step is to ready this partition for an NFS share by installing a file system on it.
i. Install file system on /dev/sda3
# mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sda3 
Step 3.
Now let's make sure the NFS service is started and set to export our share. NFS exports from a server are controlled by the file /etc/exports. Each line begins with the path of a directory to be exported, followed by a space-separated list of allowed clients.
a. First create a mount point and mount the new disk.
# mkdir /mnt/nfs
# mount --t ext3 /dev/sda3 /mnt/nfs
b. Confirm that it is mounted with the mount command. 
c. Edit the /etc/exports file and add something like the following:
This will allow all clients on the subnet to attach to the share.
d. Next start the NFS service.
Step 4.
Now we can work on opening up the firewall. XenServer ships with a firewall enabled and running. There are a couple of ways to 'open' the firewall.
a. The Lazy Man's way is to turn off the firewall altogether. (THIS IS NOT RECOMMENDED)
i. Simply stop the iptables service 
b. The better way is to open the ports on the firewall.
This command will show the ports that are actively being used by services that NFS will need. 
c. We can now make entries to the /etc/sysconfig/iptables to open those ports to allow communication. (In my case I only needed to open ports 111 and 2049 - portmapper and nfs)
Step 5.
We can now attach our NFS share to the XenServer pool as a NFS based ISO SR. 
...and there she be! 
Copy some files up to the share and you're ready to go.
I've long been opposed to the VMware ESX EULA restriction on publication of performance comparisons between VMware's products and those of its competitors. VMware clearly believes that "it's all too complicated for normal users" so you can only publish comparative results if you first get VMware's approval, which tells me that (a) they underestimate their users and (b) they likely have something to hide. And judging from the VMware VMTN forums, many of their users agree. By contrast, our view is that if we (either in xen.org or in XenServer) have a performance or security issue, then we'd like to see it publicized as loudly as possible, because it will get fixed sooner that way. Even VMware IHVs and ISVs can't publish their own performance comparisons with VMware (let alone other products).
When we launched XenServer 5, we used independent performance consultancy The Tolly Group to verify our claims of vastly superior performance for XenApp/Windows Terminal Server environments virtualized on XenServer, by comparison to other virtualization platforms. Both Citrix and Tolly Group requested permission from VMware to publish comparative results. Those requests were denied. Nonetheless, we claimed on the basis of the Tolly tests that XenServer is up to 70% more efficient than other virtualization platforms for this workload (a mere million or so servers, worldwide it turns out). But we still really needed an entirely independent, technically qualified validation of our claims - and other virtualization performance claims in general.
In that spirit, it is a great pleasure to welcome the contribution of two of the smartest virtualization practitioners in the value-added reseller community, Jeroen van de Kamp of Login Consultants, and Ruben Spruijt of PQR have launched Project Virtual Reality Check to provide independent, thorough, validated and vendor neutral performance data for virtualized environments. To quote Ruben:
"This is an independent research joint venture between our companies Login Consultants and PQR. The primary purpose of VRC is to release multiple whitepapers to provide information about the scalability and best practices of virtualized Terminal Server and Desktop workloads. The first phase of Project VRC on virtualizing Windows XP and 32-bit Windows 2003 Terminal Services on ESX, XenServer and Hyper-v. The whitepapers can be downloaded freely from www.virtualrealitycheck.net. The goal of Project VRC is to investigate, validate and give answers to the following questions:
- How do various Microsoft Windows Client OS's scale as a virtual desktop?
- How does a VDI infrastructure scale in comparison (virtualized) Terminal Server?
- Which performance optimization on the host and guest virtualization level can be configured, and what is the impact of these settings on user density?
- With the introduction of the latest hypervisor technologies, can we now recommend running large scale TS/CTX workloads on a virtualization platform?
- How do the two usage scenarios compare, that is Microsoft Terminal Server [TS] only, versus TS plus XenApp?
- How do x86 and x64 TS platforms compare in scalability on bare metal and virtualized environments?
- What is the best way to partition (memory and vCPU) the Virtual Machines the hypervisor host, to achieve the highest possible user density?
All together over 150 test have been carried out. However, project VRC is not finished, and probably never will be. Additional publications are planned about virtualizing x64 workloads and the other (Vista and Windows 7) client OS's. Also, we look forward to evaluate new innovations in the hypervisor and hardware arena."
Hats off to these guys for making this a freely available resource and for contributing their expertise for the benefit of the virtualization user-community. They will doubtless be talking about this in more detail at the upcomingVirtualization Congress - the industry's firstvendor neutral virtualization showcase.
It will be fascinating to see the VMware response. If they're smart they'll embrace this effort. So who knows what to expect?
Did that grab your attention? It sure grabbed ours!
As highlighted in a recent announcement the Sullivan Group selected a joint solution of Citrix XenServer and Marathon everRun VM over their existing VMware infrastructure to virtualize and protect their SamWare application suite from fault tolerance issues.
"We considered VMware, but for the cost and what we needed, a XenServer Enterprise license plus everRunVM were fine." Plus, earlier this year, "when we looked at VMware High Availability (HA), it was not at the same level as everRun VM; there wasn't an automatic failover feature to prevent downtime," Rob Jones, Director of IT, The Sullivan Group said. "Since we liked Xen and Linux, instead of investing in VMware we decided to go with XenServer and use Marathon (everRun VM) for fault tolerance."
Marathon is hosting a webinar with the Sullivan group this Wednesday, January 28th to discuss their selection and experiences with our joint solution. Join this webinar to learn more:
Customer Spotlight Webinar: How the Sullivan Group Got Reliable High Availability without Breaking the Bank
Date: January 28, 2009 Time: 8:30 am PST, 11:30 am EST, 4:30 pm GMT
Duration: 60 minutes
Speakers: Rob Jones, Director of IT, The Sullivan Group
Erika Simpson, Network Administrator, The Sullivan Group
Michael Bilancieri, Sr. Director, Products, Marathon Technologies
If you are an IT administrator who has been intrigued by all the cost benefits of XenDesktop, then you have probably created a XenDesktop proof of concept environment. Your exposure to XenDesktop has shown the maintenance and security benefits such as centralizing the desktop infrastructure, enhancing the ability to control desktop security, and simplifying the desktop maintenance. Not to mention you now have exposure to the enormous cost savings associated with a complete XenDesktop solution. After some first-hand exposure to all of the perks of a XenDesktop proof of concept environment, you are probably looking to take the proof of concept to the next level and begin the production deployment process.
The biggest obstacle most administrators face when transitioning a proof of concept architecture into a production grade environment is determining how to scale the environment. The Citrix sales team has heard your request for a sizing guide and turned to the Worldwide Consulting Solutions team to help establish recommendations for scaling a XenDesktop environment. The Worldwide Consulting Solutions team built a XenDesktop environment with the Consulting Solutions lab to conduct scalability testing to analyze server and user performance across various test scenarios. Within the lab, each core component of the XenDesktop environment was installed on a dedicated single server (Citrix Provisioning Server, XenServer, and Desktop Delivery Controller). The performance of each server was monitored to determine the optimal number of XenDesktop users for a single server environment. The details of the testing environment and test results have been compiled into the XenServer Scalability document along with the XenDesktop Environment Sizing Guide available at http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx119775.
This XenDesktop Environment Sizing Guide that was created to provide IT administrators with guidance on the approximate number of XenServers, Provisioning Servers, and Desktop Delivery Controllers necessary to scale a XenDesktop environment between a range of 1500 to 250000 XP desktop users. The data for the Sizing Guide was extrapolated based on the single server lab scalability testing conducted for this project.
A XenDesktop environment can be implemented in a variety of architectures and configurations to support the end user demands. Given the variation in end user needs and deployment configurations, the Consulting Solutions team stressed the environment under different circumstances to identify the testing variables that had the most impact on end user performance. The Scalability Results and Analysis section of the document focuses on examining the server performance for each of the three core components under various scenarios and highlights the performance constraints as the upper thresholds of server performance were attained.
As an added bonus, Citrix EdgeSight for Load Testing (ESLT) was used to generate the user load associated with this environment. The specific details of the ESLT test environment and script configurations were documented and are also available in a separate ESLT for XenDesktop Scalability document at http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx119498.
Tom Valovic posted an interesting article about an interview with Stuart Robinson of Teradici on the purported benefits of Teradici's PC over IP protocol licensed by VMware. Tom reports on a Teradici claim that PC over IP has a lead over ICA in that it has an ability to dynamically adjust the bandwidth needed by the remoting protocol, in response to available network bandwidth. Specifically, Robinson (who actually knows better) claims that ICA has no such ability.
Wrong. Citrix ICA has had an ability to dynamically adapt its coding algorithm not only in response to availability of network bandwidth, but also in response to available encode/decode capabilities at the server and client side respectively, for over two years. This allows ICA to deal with complex rendering problems with grace and to deliver high fidelity across a highly disparate set of server/network/client combinations, dynamically adapting as system conditions change.
Of course PCoIP is interesting, but it's "just another protocol" with small user base. It's not even particularly useful as a software based encoding algorithm, which seems to indicate that VMware is rather desperate. Moreover, conversations I've had with the OEMs who adopted Teradici chips to hard code PCoIP into the server, that approach is proving to be a difficult sell to customers, since it ties the server forever to a particular (version of a) delivery protocol from a particular vendor in a narrow proprietary architecture, and moreover it is really only useful in tethered enterprise LAN based configurations today. In contrast, in both XenApp and XenDesktop ICA is an optimized software only solution and runs superbly on any server, meaning that the server can be repurposed at any time. Moreover, when running Microsoft TS / XenApp virtualized on XenServer, the architecture has been independently shown to be 70% more efficient than any other virtualization platform. Just the benefits in terms of number of users per server with XenApp on XenServer would completely obviate the need for any hardware based encoding. Bottom line: if your hypervisor can't offer the raw performance needed for remote delivery protocols such as TS/ICA, licensing a hardware-optimized protocol in the hope that it will work well in software definitely is not going to change the game much.
I think that being in the tech industry for so long has started to make me a little jaded to new technology. But once and a while some new project comes along and I think it's just the coolest thing since sliced bread! Recently I've been lucky to be involved with a new technology we are working on here at Citrix and it's got me and anyone I show it to saying the same thing, "That's fricken cool, how can I get it on my system". It's our new bare metal client hypervisor we just announced based on Xen virtualization technology codenamed Project Independence.
I've been working with the Xen products both open source and commercial for over three years now and even in the very beginning I had people ask if they could run this stuff on their laptop. And at the time the story was yeah but it's not going to work the way you want. You see initially we were really focused on making a world class server virtualization platform so the focus was making everything work great for server virtualization. We were focused on making network and storage I/O fast and keeping the CPU overhead really low for server apps. This was all needed and it actually laid a lot of the ground work for what we are building now.
But running this stuff on a laptop opens up a whole new set of challenges. Building a client hypervisor requires supporting really fast 3D/2D graphics, you have to get sound in and out of the system, allow people to plug in USB webcams and printers, burn DVD's, plus you have to deal with undocking, power optimization, getting battery information from the hardware, I could keep going. It's a lot of work, but lucky for us we are not building it alone. Intel and others in the Xen community are all helping build an awesome client hypervisor. The goal in the end is that the user should not have to give up anything they do today with their laptop computing experience just gain flexibility.
Sure there are products on the market today that let you run a second OS on your laptop but guess what they are all applications that run on top of your existing OS. So you startup Vista or XP and then you launch an application to boot up a second virtual machine. And then it's slow, not everything works quite right, and it relies on your first OS working right. It's not the best user experience.
So here is the user experience with the Citrix client hypervisor. You hit the power button on your laptop and it boots up into Vista, XP or whatever you choose as your personal computing environment. What you don't see is that the Xen hypervisor actually came up first and then started up a primary virtual machine plus while you are watching Vista boot it's also booting up a second VM in the background. Once you load up in your personal environment everything just works same as usual on a personal laptop. You have your own apps, your own files (lots of music and movies for me), and I can do anything I want. But here is the cool part you hit a few keys on the keyboard and bam you're in a totally separate virtual machine running all your work applications. It's totally isolated from your personal setup. IT gets to lockdown the corporate setup and keeps everything nice and clean, and I get to have my own personal environment where I can do whatever I want.
I can tell you right now on my standard corporate laptop it's a nasty mix of my personal stuff and corporate stuff. Alongside Office I have iTunes and all my personal and business files are mixed in My Documents. It's not pretty, it's not safe, it's hard to manage, and there is a better way. And it's coming soon to a laptop near you.
You can check out this demo I made if you want to get a feel for what the user experience is like.
2008 ended with a resounding call for change. It became the slogan as we entered 2009 and continues to hold true across political, social, and technological themes.
Over the past few months since my last post, I'm beginning to see more and more change occurring; customers adopting virtual desktop technology as they look to really drive down the cost of desktop ownership associated with users.
But let's be honest, isn't the utopia for companies to deploy technologies that can reduce costs and still provide flexibility and business agility anyway? And, corporate desktop has overtime become the biggest culprit – expensive, slow, & rigid.
In September 2008, I posted "Virtual Desktops, Mobile VDI and Client Hypervisors - Oh My!". As I reread that earlier post, I may have accidently over-polished my crystal ball back then. This week saw us release two very strategic announcements that I'd like to share a few of my own personal thoughts – very similar to my predictions in September, don't you think? 
Here's a link to the two announcements on Citrix.com in case you hadn't seen them: Citrix Collaborating with Intel to Deliver Xen-based Client Virtualization Solutions, Citrix Unveils Vision to Transform Desktop Computing with Project Independence.
I may not be the next Nostradamus, but in this post, I'll give my take on what I believe will change fundamentally in desktop computing - something that is over-due. At Citrix, we are hard at work at enabling this change. I believe that Citrix Delivery Center and now Project Independence will become the catalyst for this change.
Change #1 - Your company will no longer own your laptop.
Finally, as a user I can buy the machine I want, not just assigned by corporate! Whether it's a 12" mini or a gaming powerhouse, I get to pick and choose based on my personal tastes and needs.
At Citrix we implemented a BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) program and we are on track to have 20% of our laptop users on the program in the next 12 months. Sure, as a user I'm happy but our CFO and CIO are ecstatic – instead of dealing with constant capital expenditure we can have predictable expense on our income statement just like any other service or employee benefit on a regular basis.
We are marching forward with this but our goal is to broaden this with our leading customers. The client hypervisor developed in collaboration with Intel will become the foundation of our solution.
Change #2 - Your company will spend more on coffee and office supplies than they do on desktop management.
Companies have been talking about reducing IT support and management costs since the days of the first networked PC. Today's desktop management is like creating a house of cards and giving one to every employee everywhere. To make any change is like moving a wall in thousands of these houses of cards distributed everywhere. Citrix's approach to enable IT to manage OS, apps and user data/settings separately and centrally changes the economics entirely.
We've already seen customers reduce total cost of ownerships in early XenDesktop implementations for office-based workers, specifically around the areas of IT helpdesk costs, updates/refreshes, and administration.
Project Independence gives IT the flexibility for mobile workers. Add/move/remove become mundane, updates & rollbacks can be done by anyone centrally and packaging/compatibility testing can finally scale. Not to forget many tasks such as data backup/recovery and PC inventory management are entirely eliminated.
In this independent world, cost of desktop management will be similar to any other expense that a company makes for serving an employee – such as coffee or office supplies.
Change # 3 - You will access your corporate desktop from whatever device is most convenient at the time.
I truly enjoy the opportunity to travel around the world to meet customers and partners and talk about Citrix's vision around both application and desktop delivery. During these trips, I get to test our technology from all locations, various connection bandwidths, and increasingly across multiple devices. With hosted virtual desktops, I'm able to securely access my corporate desktop on any Internet connected device – whether it's my own laptop, an Internet kiosk, or a mobile device (click here to view iPhone demo.)
Project Independence extends this so an employee can access their personalized desktop from any device, online or offline. And if their personal laptop is unavailable for any reason then they can use whatever PC/Mac/iPhone they may have access to and still get their personalized desktop deliver to them instantly.
Gone will be the days when we still think that we can get our personalized desktop from only one laptop that we were given from our company.
Change #4 - You will switch back-and-forth between work and personal desktops on the same device without thinking twice.
I was just thinking about how only a few years ago, corporate and commercial users were waiting for an all in one device that delivered on email, phone, music, photos, etc with simplicity. A device that enabled me to unify work and personal items together to make life easier. From Blackberry devices to the iPhone, manufacturers delivered.
I see a similar convergence of my personal and corporate desktop as well. If I'm buying my own PC for work and personal use, I would expect access to both desktops to be seamless and still deliver on computing flexibility and usability. I have read that 75% of users use their corporate machine for personal use (OK, so we all have iTunes install and aren't comply with corporate policies... let's keep it our little secret).
The current environment is not just rigid but also hard to enforce and insecure. Project Independence will address this – you could be working on your own media gallery during the weekend and switch to quickly refer to their customer information excel worksheet with a single click to respond to a quick business call.
Change #5 - You will never complain about your PC being too slow again.
I can't remember the last time I had to call IT because my machine was running slow, since running on a virtual desktop – I love the smell of a fresh machine in the morning. It's great to get a nice clean, fast image running knowing that I can't really get myself into trouble.
That's the experience any user should expect from any virtual desktop solution whether it's local or hosted. Project Independence will free those laptops with all the gunkware – all the mish-mash of OS, apps and personal data/downloads that makes the PCs slower within few months.
IT is under a lot of pressure – budgetary, user satisfaction and new technology adoption. Virtualization has helped IT in the data center already – it is time to give IT some freedom for desktop computing. Project Independence is not just about giving IT freedom to centrally manage desktops with a single instance, but it will liberate businesses from huge capital expenses on their balance sheets, and give employee the flexibility of picking the best devices possible.
I can't wait for the Independence Day – I know it is coming, 2H'09...
Cheers,
Gordon
To start off my blog here, I've put together a small example of how to use javascript to interact with an unmodified XenServer using the XMLRPC API. Mostly of the work is done by the awesome jquery library and a slightly modified jquery.rpc plugin. To illustrate the basics this demo will simply list the names of the VMs and templates that XenServer knows about - in subsequent posts I'll put together some more interesting examples. A zip file containing the code can be found here.
The demo consists of an index html page which more-or-less just includes the two jquery files and the demo.js file. The simplest way of trying it out is to is to put the files onto the XenServer to be served by the integrated web server. This is done by creating the webserver root directory '/opt/xensource/www' and copying the files in. Alternatively, and more usefully, the files can be loaded locally from a file:// URI. However, this is more tricky because there may well be cross-site scripting protection built into the browser - certainly Firefox has this feature and there are commented-out lines in the demo files explaining how to deal with this.
I'll just describe here the demo.js file. To talk to the XenServer, we must first create the jquery rpc object. In versions of XenServer prior to 5.0 the system.listMethods method was not implemented, so we have to explicitly list the methods that we'll be using when creating the rpc object.
rpc = new $.rpc( actual_uri, "xml", nextfn, null, ["session.login_with_password","VM.get_all_records"] );
In this case, we're only going to use two API calls. Of the other parameters, 'actual_uri' is the URI of the XenServer to connect to, and could be e.g. "http://<ip>/" if the files are not being hosted by XenServer, or simply "/" if they are. 'nextfn' is the function to call on successful creation of the rpc object. Once the object is initialised, we can call API functions:
var session_result = rpc.session.login_with_password(username,password); if(session_result.Status=="Failure") { raise("Failed to log in"); } mysession = session_result.result.Value;
When we first started investigating the javascript route to the API, we found that the parsing of the XMLRPC results was often very slow indeed. We tried a couple of methods for dealing with this - one interesting idea was to use an XSLT transform to turn the xmlrpc response into json, which worked well and significantly speeded up the processing time of calls that produced large results (e.g. VM.get_all_records). However, it was decided as a tradeoff between complexity and effectiveness that inside xapi itself we would put a little converter that translated the XMLRPC 'result' field into json, leaving it embedded in a small amount of xmlrpc to avoid adding an entirely new layer of logic into xapi. This had a huge impact on the speed of processing for very little code change. In order to access this semi-json API it's a simple case of appending '/json' to the URI used for the standard XMLRPC calls. I've added a 'use_json' field to the demo javascript as an example of how it's used.
Next time I'll explain how the event mechanism works, and how it can be used to keep an up-to-date cache of the entire XenServer database.
Now that a new year has begun, it is time to think about change. What did you do well in 2008, that you would repeat in 2009? What will you do differently?
Forecasting bad economic news for 2009 is old, and we all know it is going to be a tough year. I can think of several people I know personally that have already been affected. Among the predictions and forecasts from analysts is that IT spending will slow down. 2009 will be a tough year, and with spending on hold, if I was an IT infrastructure guy or a service provider, with all of the virtualization technology available, I would take more than a few minutes to rethink my strategy.
2009 Forecasts that cloud computing and virtualization will grow. It is not just a prediction that I believe in because I work for a virtualization company, I believe in it because I am an operations guy at heart and this virtualization stuff is real.
One of the things I am going to continue to do in 2009, is make use of XenServer and its tangentially related products. At Citrix, I spend a lot of time with my head buried in a lab working on several projects at a time. At any given time I may need to bring up Windows servers and clients, *nix Servers, install a partners product into a server, or install some enterprise application for testing. All of these I did in 2008 without spending any money on hardware. I had an existing Dell 2950 III that I use for XenServer. I can bring up, bring down any number of hosts at any time, for any purpose, without having to fill a rack with hardware that sucks the power grid dry, and depreciates in value the second I order it.
Not only have I done a great job of saving money on capital expenditures in my lab, I have also saved a lot of energy and rack space. In addition, with faster time-to-deployment and more resources at hand, I have increased my productivity immensely.
I work with our internal Citrix IT and Training departments who both make use of Citrix Virtualization technology – this has proven to increase their productivity as well, while reducing cost.
Looking forward, I know I will be able to keep costs and spending down to almost nothing this year as I make continued use of Citrix Virtualization technology. As an operations guy at heart, nothing brings greater joy in slashing a budget and saving money going into 2009 while increasing productivity.
Do you use XenApp? Thinking about it? Heard of it? Want to make it better? Are you alive? If you answered Yes to any of those questions, then I highly encourage you to attend the XenApp Deep-Dive TechTalk series. Each TechTalk focuses on one aspect of making your XenApp environments easier, better and more available.
Part 1: Simplifying the Migration to XenApp 5 with XenServer (Register)
The first TechTalk on February 2nd at 1PM Eastern Time is focused on a task I did not like doing when I was an XenApp admin (although it was called MetaFrame back then)... XenApp Migrations. Each release of XenApp has some pretty cool features to help make the users more productive or make the environment easier to manage and XenApp 5 is no exception. So the big question is why aren't you migrating? Is it because it takes too much time? Is it because it is too difficult? A few months ago I blogged about the possibility of simplifying XenApp migrations with the use of XenServer (here and here). This TechTalk will tell you if it is indeed possible. Who knows, I might speak for 1 minute and say it doesn't help at all, but I highly doubt that will happen 
. If you want to find out if XenServer helps and how, you will just have to tune into the upcoming TechTalk to find out
Part 2: Simplifying Desktop Delivery with XenApp (Register)
A lot of talk lately is virtual desktop this and virtual desktop that. Well, this TechTalk is also focused on the virtual desktop, but not in a way you would expect. Most people talk about virtual desktops as a new way of managing the desktop infrastructure and how XenDesktop is the best solution. This TechTalk, on February 3rd at 1PM Eastern Time is focused on the XenApp portion of desktop delivery. How can and should we use XenApp to make the virtual desktop solution easier? What best practices are there for application delivery and integration into XenDesktop? Tune in to find out.
Part 3: High Availability for XenApp with XenServer and NetScaler (Register)
Is your XenApp environment delivering mission-critical applications? What happens if a physical server fails, or a hard drive crashes, or a internet link dies or an entire data center goes offline? As we all know, XenApp contains many different components and each one is critical to the proper operation of the environment. This TechTalk, on February 4th at 1PM Eastern Time, will provide some of the best practices for providing fault tolerance and high-availability to XenApp environments. Don't leave your XenApp users in the dark if the lights go out.
I'm sure everyone will learn something or at least come away with a new perspective or idea on how to use and improve their XenApp environments. I know I'm looking forward to getting some of your comments on your environments and how they can be made better. Hope to see many people there.
Daniel
I ran across this article from Alex Barrett over at SearchServerVirtualization.com yesterday and found it succinctly reflects the current competitive environment and today's customer decision processes around server virtualization.
Specifically for a long time, most pundits and market watchers have been convinced that the size of the price tag really didn't matter when choosing a virtualization provider. The prevailing view was that demand for cool new features would continue unabated at the early market pace (can anyone say 'housing bubble'?). While I would agree that initially price didn't matter, in my opinion, that view overlooks the natural evolution of products in any marketplace.
Since that time, the competition in the virtualization market has heated up considerably, the demand curve for new features has flattened (as expected) and customers are struggling under reduced budgets in the face of a global economic slowdown. In this environment, the only remaining basis for competition is price.
As the customer and analyst in this article point out, today XenServer stands toe to toe with VMware when comparing the most important - or driving - technical features that a customer uses to base his or her decision. As the article intimates, it seems that not only are customers increasingly interested in virtualization as a cost saving tool, but they are also more apt to adopt the full featured, enterprise class and most cost effective virtualization platform.
With regards to the last paragraph, the ISV support issue - I couldn't agree more. VMware ran into the same concerns initially as well, but over time ISV's were cajoled to support the virtualization by their customers. I believe that same dynamic is playing out with XenServer. Luckily for us, this ground has already been plowed so support should come even faster this time around. Stay tuned - I think you will be pleasantly surprised.
In the interim, to accelerate the support process Citrix recently set up a Community Verified Site whereby customers can put their own stamp of approval on any third party product they are using with any Citrix product. I encourage everyone to check it out and submit their applications -this sort of community support ultimately benefits you.