Finally after only a couple weeks of development we are rolling out the Official Citrix Blog site.

• The site has a built-in blog-o-sphere feature which keeps rolling thru the latest published group blogs
• A feature that allows Citrites to collaborate in a group blog around a particular subject
• Individual employee blogs that can be published to the group blog if they have the right privileges

 This launch is considered a beta (aka work in progress) I think it's a good practice to get projects out in front of real users ASAP -- to validate the concept and allow customers to steer the refinement of a project.

 Features on the docket are metrics, search, etc.

Given this is the inaugural entry of the Citrix application virtualization blog, it only makes sense to begin at the beginning by defining exactly what we mean when we say application virtualization. This is something we know a fair bit about since we've been doing it for a long time. How Presentation Server works is the very definition of virtualization. It separates the application from where it runs. The apps execute in the data center, where IT managers can put their hands on them for fixes or updates. Only the screen displays, user mouse-clicks and keystrokes are sent back and forth. It's efficient, secure and proven.

The new Application Streaming feature just extends this centralized model out to desktops and laptops that are not necessarily connected to the network all the time. Applications are packaged up for delivery and stored in on a regular file share. Users stream them down to their local machines and run them in a protected environment that isolates them from conflicts with other apps. They are cached on the local machine and run as natively installed applications, just without all the headaches.

It's that simple. Manage the apps centrally, but give users the flexibility to use them however they want. I'm looking forward to exploring this topic with you further in this blog and will do my best to make regular contributions to the conversation. Until next time.

Hello, I'm Mike Stringer and I am responsible for the Support teams in the Americas and India. We are responsible for Supporting all of Citrix's products. I am relatively new to this role but not new to Citrix nor Citrix Support, having run our Escalation teams (which remains one of my responsibilities) for many years. I saw this avenue as a great opportunity to get closer to our Customers and Partners with the goal of gathering valuable feedback on our performance and providing insight into our direction and plans. I have asked my management team to leverage this site to ensure we are heading in the direction that YOU, our Customers and Partners need us to go in.  As the title of this post suggests, I believe Support is one of the key product features that determines Success and Customer Satisfaction with Citrix Solutions. You will be hearing from each of my direct management team members over the next week. Please feel free to start participating and I'll make sure we are very responsive. Thank you -

Between the Thanksgiving holiday and the migration to the new blog site on Citrix.com, I have fallen a bit behind on posting iForum videos with alliance partners. Here is the next one - DataCore Software. I haven't yet had any personal experience with DataCore Software, but I have heard very good things about it. It is ironic that I haven't, since their headquarters is about a block from the Citrix HQ in Ft. Lauderdale.

Virtual Strategy Magazine does this interview with George Teixeira, the CEO and Co-Founder of DataCore. George says during the interview "One of the big things we've got is a low cost entry point $1000 SAN that allows them to basically take any pc and transform it into a storage server to support XenDesktop and XenServer as well the Citrix platform." A $1000 SAN definitely piques my interest.

I found this video on their website that covers their overall solution.

I also found this podcast from David Marshall of Infoworld that covers DataCore (and DevonIT) from iForum.

According to this white paper from the Taneja Group "DataCore is the Perfect Compliment to Virtualized Server Infrastructure". I am going to work on getting some more technical info directly from DataCore and post it to the blog.

I would like to hear from any users of DataCore Software to get their opinion and hands on experiences with the software.

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I am not sure who made this video that I found on YouTube about XenDesktop, but it is pretty funny.

I will post more about XenDesktop in addition to XenServer on my blog.

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The Mac ICA Client 10.x has been completed and released to web. Thanks for all the Beta participants who provided their valuable feedback. Check out my earlier post for details on this client feature set. One new thing you will see in this client (compared to the Beta client) is a new icon for ICA. It looks way cooler compared to our previous Mac ICA icon. You can download this client from the client download page and remember that this is a universal binary client and hence can run on both Intel and PowerPC Macs.

We are continuously looking for ways to build on the Blog Home foundation.

Customer Facing Question:

If we were to localize the top ten KB articles each month for Spanish, Gernman, French and Potugese; would it help drive product confidence in countries that host those languages? How critical would it be that the translations be 100% accurate for KB articles?

I look forward to responses and opinions.

 Thanks,

Jim

After I found the XenDesktop Caveman video, I came across this video.  Again, I am not sure who made this, thought since it says "Access TV" I am assuming it was some employees in Europe. It is worth a chuckle or two.

In case you are interested, here is a link to BitBurger.

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Hello, 
 
My name is Rene Alfonso and I have been working for Citrix Technical Support for about 10 years.  During which time I have worked in many areas of support. I remember when we only had 2 products (WinFrame and WinView).  I have developed a number of support tools including RM Web Console,  Medevac, DSDaig, SQL Replication Test Tool, and CtxTrace. 

I am currently on the Knowledge Base management team.  
I am new to blogging but would like to use this as an opportunity discuss new knowledge base projects and collect feedback on what's important to our users.
 
Stay tuned for more information and thanks for stopping by.

 
 Regards,
Rene
 
FYI Very cool video I found on YouTube on Citrix technologies.
               
  

As you may have noticed, we recently launched a major overhaul to the Knowledge Center website.  This initiative was launched several months ago and was sponsored because of excellent feedback from you.   You highlighted some of the shortcomings in our existing site such as search, navigation and notification emails.  You also identified core functionality that is commonplace throughout the industry such as RSS feeds and social bookmarking.

The project started with a full usability study and information architecture review and included several infrastructure changes as well as investments in Google Search technology.  Under the hood, several changes were made to make our site even more friendly for external search engines such as Google.  After all, Google plays the part of our home page for more than 60% of visitors.  You can read more about the changes here.

Now for the real reason I'm posting... 

While most of the feedback from the new site was positive in the first few weeks, we did receive constructive criticism around the ability to find language specific hotfixes and product documentation.  It became obvious that we made a few poor decisions around usability in this area so we focused the team on correcting this in the first follow-up release.  As of last Friday, we added new language specific filters on the product pages to help track down hotfixes and product documentation for the various product specific languages.  Here are a couple screen shots of the new functionality. 

And once you choose a different language:

Please give it a shot and be sure to let us know how else we can improve.  We actively monitor the feedback mechanism that is located in the footer of each page.  This goes for this new Official Citrix Blog site as well.

Thanks,

Saul 

There seems to be some confusion about XenDesktop relating to where it can run the workstations.  The name XenDesktop implies that it can only run with Xen but the truth is that it has been designed for running on other platforms as well.  Specifically, it can run on individual workstations (without virtualization), blade servers (also without virtualization), and virtualization servers.  The key message is that other VM providers can be supported as well.

XenDesktop really is not about locking you into a particular solution but rather to give you flexibility to create an environment that you want and can support.

The model is not radically new but it is new for Citrix to be embracing this model fully with an intent to have a full solution across the whole application delivery market (including desktop delivery).

The key technology for enabling the remoting of workstations is codenamed "PortICA" and has now been in development for more than two years.  PortICA allows Windows XP and Vista to be accessed remotely using standard ICA Clients and using standard Citrix infrastructure.  The goal of PortICA has been to port elements of Presentation Server to a workstation and that goal is almost complete.

PortICA is a project based out of Advanced Products in Sydney, Australia.  The team consists of six developers.  I'm only mentioning this to convey how big things can come from small teams.  The Advanced Products team in Sydney has produced a number of products and enhancements over the years including things like the Citrix Secure Gateway, Seamless support, SmartAuditor, AIE (App isolation), SpeedScreen (various flavours), ZL (Zero Latency), ICA Client Object, and Pictor.  It is a solid team with diverse experience.  The only limit the group has is based on not having enough people to tackle bigger or more projects.

Just so this <space /> is not <     />...

Hello everybody,

My name is Frederic Serriere, i have been working in the EMEA Technical Support for almost 7 years.  I wanted to answer some common queries about Citrix Presentation Server hotfixes.

As per Citrix policy (refer to http://www.citrix.com/English/SS/supportSecond.asp?slID=5107), maintenance will only occur on the most recent version. So, you may need to update to the latest available Citrix hotfix when engaging Citrix Technical Support

What does PSE450R01W2K3X64001 or PSE400R04W2K3011 mean ?

PS => Presentation Server
E/F/S/J/G => English, French, Spanish, Japanese, German
45/40 => 4.5 or 4.0
0 => service pack level (remember XP days...)
R01/02/03/04/05/06... => requires that Rollup Pack 01/02/03 is installed
W2K/W2K3/W2K3X64 => Win2000, Win2003, Win2003 64 bits,
followed by the hotfix number

How can you quickly check if a fix is available for other languages?
Once you have found the fix in a hotfix' readme but you need a different language (or Operating System) version, get the number at the end of the paragraph (ie #159404) and run a search against this number. Why? because the hotfix versioning may not be consistent accross plateforms, languages and versions.

and a quite note to end this first post :
CTX106248 : Hotfix Inventory Management tool
CTX106237 : List Hotfixes For All Servers In A Citrix Farm

Regards,

Frederic

Rick Vanover of SearchServerVirtualization.com wrote a post called "Why You Must Evaluate Citrix XenServer" -

Rick later writes -

You can download Citrix XenServer Express Edition for free here.

Here is a graphic that shows the capabilities between the different versions of XenServer -




With XenServer Express, you can start your evaluation quickly and easily.

If you want an overview of XenServer before you start your evaluation, check out this XenServer Mini-Product Training post. 

Doug Brown of DABCC.com put together a Citrix XenServer overview video as part of his new DABCC TV. Doug goes through rthe virtualization capabilities of the Xen Hypervisor and Citrix XenServer with Chas Setchell of 2Virtualize.com . I will be bloggin more about this video later.

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There have been many good posts in the blogosphere about XenDesktop that I have bookmarked.  Since this site did not exist when all the posts were made, I decided to write write up a history of blog posts about this product to have in the archives. A lot of this is old info that has been updated as the project has evolved, but this gives you a good history on that evolution.

Jeff Muir (a Citrix Developer) first blogged about the PortICA technology in XenDesktop back in 2006.

Introducing PortICA (ICA Server on WinXP)

Here is a short excerpt from Jeff -

There is quite a lively discussion in the comments section as well.

 Jeff has made several posts about PortICA and XenDesktop.

Just Like Being There

After the announcement of the name change from Citrix Desktop Server to XenDesktop, Jeff did his most recent post "XenDesktop and PortICA" 

Other posts by Jeff include "The Citrix Clipboard (Part 1) , The Citrix Clipboard (Part2) , Citrix COM Port Mapping (Part 1) Old and New Ways, Citrix COM Port Mapping (Part2) Just the old way, and more. You can view the complete list of PortICA related posts by Jeff here.

Brian Madden did a recorded interview with Brian Nason and Sumit Dhawan of Citrix on Project Trinity (the internal name of the first release) back in December of 2006.

Sunil Kumar of Citrix blogged about his Desktop Broker webinar in December of 2006.

Once Citrix Desktop Server was released, Brian Madden posted his thoughts on his site, as did Gabe Knuth.

Brian Madden likely had the first blog post regarding the name change from Citrix Desktop Server to Citrix XenDesktop during iForum 2007. Michael Roth of ThinComputing.net commented on the name change in this post as well.

Gareth James wrote a post entitled -"XenDesktop - A First Look". Gareth included a few screen shots in his post for those of us who like visuals. Here is a bit of his summary -

Gareth followed this post up by building his own online demo in "Xen Desktop - Try it Yourself". He later added dual monitor support to the online demo . Gareth did an excellent job building this and documenting his experience, but has taken it down as of this post :

Gus Pinto of Frameworkx.com did an overview of XenDesktop called "Citrix XenDesktop Explained". Gus did a nice job of summarizing the features of XenDesktop.

Of course, this history would not be complete with linking to the post in the Citrix XenDesktop blog over on Citrix TechTalk. My understanding is all those posts will be soon migrated to this new blogging platform, but here is a quick list -  

"Live from iForum - Mark's keynote"

"Separation of Apps and Desktops"

The next post (by Chris Harget) entitled "Virtual Metaphors" invoked the Bard himself.

Chris followed up this very "literary" post with a very practical one - "Top 10 ways XenDesktop should save you money".

Ron Lot then asks the question "Will Virtualized PCs wotk better than your old PC?" . Calvin Hsu followed this up with "Just an Introduction".

The last two posts are "What's More Important: Easy for Users or Easy for IT" and the "What is VDI?"

There you have it - a "Blogospheric History" of Citrix XenDesktop. As we near the release date of XenDesktop in the first half of next year, you will find a great deal more content on this exciting new offering. Until the official release, you can get access to the Tech Preview  at www.Citrix.com/XenDesktop .

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The new Xen Desktop will have an edition that includes three components - The Broker, XenServer, and Citrix Provisioning Server. Citrix Provisioning Server (formerly known as Ardence OS Streaming) often confuses people when they first hear about it. OS Streaming can be a difficult concept to grasp for many people at first. Once you do finally see the light, your jaw tends to drop as your eyes open wide. This video on YouTube is definitely a jaw dropper -

I heard this from a friend that this video was a huge hit at Microsoft Tech Ed in Orlando a few months ago. Justin Zarb blogged about it on Technet.com .

This video has been around for a while, so many of you may have already seen it.   You may not have seen this next video. This video demonstrates the high availability option for Citrix Provisioning Server.

Citrix Provisioning Server is a key component of the upcoming Citrix XenDesktop release. There will be an edition of XenDesktop that includes both Provisioning Server and the XenServer hypervisor to provide a complete solution for desktop virtulization.

If you missed iForum 2007, there was a great demo of Provisioning Server at the keynote. You can watch the demo with Mark Templeton and Pete Downing here .

In this video, Pete Downing first takes two CPS 4.0 Servers and instantly upgrades them to CPS 4.5 (while removing the local hard drives). Next, Pete will drag and drop provision 9 CPS Servers, 11 IIS Servers, 5 SAP Servers and 5 Microsoft SQL Servers (all diskless) in a matter of minutes. For his finale, Pete then streams out the XenServer Enterprise hypervisor to all 30 servers and brings up all the OS images as virtual machines. Now that is OS Streaming Gone Wild!

BTW, if you missed the "Jellied Cat" video that Mark T. played during the keynote, here it is.

How long before we have jellied cat cars? <grin>

I am looking for more content specifically for Provisioning Server, so stay tuned.

UPDATE: Some additional third party content on Provisioning Server from the comments (Special Thanks to Wilco)-

Performance of CPS server based on Citrix Provisioning Server (http://sbc.vanbragt.net/mambo/white-papers/performance-of-cps-based-on-citrix-provisioning-server.html)

Explanation how tow run a CPS with Ardence OS Streaming

http://sbc.vanbragt.net/mambo/white-papers/running-citrix-presentation-server-with-ardence-os-streaming.html

Beside I also have a review of the product it self:

http://sbc.vanbragt.net/mambo/deployment/ardence-os-streaming-4.html

Also take a look at http://www.virtuall.nl/videos/Ardence/&nbsp;where Ruben Spruijt published some nice demo video's of the product.

One more link I have come across - http://www.Ardenceguru.com

Update2: One more link. Here is a presentation on the old Ardenc site that covers how Provisioning Server works with Citrix Presentation Server.

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I'm back from my 7-day Eastern Caribbean cruise and of course the first thing on my mind is my Multimedia Virtualization blog! We've just migrated the Citrix blog site to an updated system so I had a few transitional issues to work through, but now I'm ready to share with you Part 2 of my series on optimizing Adobe Flash performance on Citrix Presentation Server. (Click here to read Part 1.)

There's definitely more to optimizing Adobe Flash than configuring SpeedScreen Flash Acceleration ("SpeedFlash") and making sure you have any required hotfixes to handle newer versions of Flash. One of the features of Presentation Server that can have a very substantial positive impact on Flash performance (animations and video) is Queuing & Tossing. This feature shows up in the management console as "Discard queued images which are replaced by other images" or "Discard redundant graphics operations", depending on which version of Presentation Server you're running.

The Queuing & Tossing feature of Thinwire briefly queues GDI draw commands and, before sending them over ICA, inspects the stack in reverse order (LIFO) to allow tossing of obsolete commands (those which have been overwritten by subsequent commands). The queuing period is short enough (30ms) that it doesn't degrade the responsiveness of the application; in fact, performance is significantly improved because draw commands that are logically redundant are discarded.

The tossing algorithm was enhanced in Presentation Server 4.5 (Ohio) to look for more graphics constructs. The tossing algorithm now uses a 1-bit-per-pixel map of the session screen. And it can detect complete self-contained 'frames'. As a result, Thinwire will either send the entire frame to the client as a self-contained entity or toss it completely. These improvements to the tossing algorithm further reduce the amount of data that needs to be sent over the wire. Along with reduced network bandwidth consumption, network efficiency (data bytes per frame) is increased. And the user experience is better because the entire frame gets updated at once rather than in pieces.

So, just how big a difference does all of this make? I recently spoke with one of our engineers who has been taking performance measurements with Flash videos. In his testing, he found that enabling Queuing & Tossing reduced bandwidth consumption by more than 3 times!

In addition to the new framing behavior of Queuing & Tossing in PS 4.5, just-in-time output behavior has further improved Flash performance. Flash video playback with PS 4.5 is noticeably smoother. And CPU consumption is lower, which increases server scalability (number of simultaneous Flash users per server).

There's still quite a bit more to tell you about Adobe Flash performance optimization, so stay tuned for my next installment on this topic.

Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization

In my blog post from the Xen Summit, I promised to follow up on the Xen Summit once the presentations were posted. Those presentations are now available on Xen.org. Here is a list of the presentations -

Introductory Comments and Xen Status/Roadmaps

Ian Pratt (Citrix, Cambridge), Project Status and Organization

Keir Fraser (Citrix, Cambridge), Roadmap and Releases

Xen Community: A Sampling of Status and Roadmaps

Todd Clayton (Sun), OpenSolaris, Xen and the xVM Project

Clyde Griffin (Novell), Novell Xen Roadmap

Jeremy Fitzhardinge (Citrix, Cambridge), Linux parvirtops status

Aron Griffix (HP), IA64 Update

Add One-half Xen and Stir Briskly

Mick Jordan (Sun), JavaGuest

Gerd Hoffman (Red Hat), Introducing Xenner (Abstract Only Available)

John Zulauf (Intel), Xen Extensions to Enable Modular/3P Device Emulation for HVM

Daniel Berrange(Red Hat), Directions for development & integration of Xen and QEMU

CPUs updates, scheduling, mobile

Tom Woller (AMD), AMD Update

Jun Nakajima (Intel), Intel Update

Scott Rixner (Rice University), Scheduling Pitfalls for I/O-intensive Guests

Sang-bum Suh, Secure Xen on ARM

Xen Networking

Greg Law (SolarFlare), The Convergence of Storage and Server Virtualization

Jose Renato Santos (HP), Netchannel2: Improving Xen Networking Performance

David Edmondson (Sun), OpenSolaris xVM Network Architecture

Xen Memory and Storage

Grzegorz Milos (Cambridge), Memory CoW in Xen

Hitoshi Matsumoto (Fujitsu), SCSI Support Status

Dutch T. Meyer (University of British Columbia), Parallax, A VM Storage Infrastruture

Xen Security

Vedvyas Shanbhogue(Intel), VIS:Virtualization-based Integrity Services

Derek Murray (University of Cambridge), Improving Xen security through domain-zero disaggregation

Joseph Cihula (Intel), Trusted Boot - Verifying the Xen Launch

Xen Deployment

Roman Marxer (Google) - A Xen Based High Availability Cluster)

Dave Lively (Virtual Iron), Running Xen Diskless

Brendan Cully (University of British Columbia), High Speed Checkpointing for High Availability

Donald Dugger (Intel), Updating Xen for the Client Environment

Padmashree K Apparao(Intel), Characterization and Analysis of a Server Consolidation Benchmark

Frank Martin (Oracle), Virtualization of Enterprise DataCenters Using Xen

As you can see from this list, there is wide industry participation in the Xen hypervisor open source project. In this Xen Summit alone there were six presentations from Intel, three presentations from Sun and Red Hat, and two from HP and three from Citrix. In the Spring 2007 Xen Summit, there were eight presentations by IBM, three presentations by HP, two presentations by AMD, three by Red Hat, and seven by XenSource/Citrix. The Xen Open Source hypervisor is pulling in the creativity, innovation, knowledge and experience of a wide range of industry heavyweights. This effort is completely focused on building a highly scalable, stable and a powerful 64 bit virtualization engine.

I will be blogging about some of the individual presentations form the Fall 2007 Xen Summit later.

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In my blog post from the Xen Summit, I promised to follow up on the Xen Summit once the presentations were posted. I put together a list of the presentations and presenters in this post. Now I would like to dig down into a few of the more interesting presentations. The first one I will discuss is the Project Update by Ian Pratt.

The first presentation of the Xen Summit was by Ian Pratt, founder of Xen. For those of you who are not familiar with Ian Pratt, here is bit of his bio -

In addition to being on the faculty at Cambridge and leading the Xen hypervisor open source project, Ian Pratt is also VP of Advanced Projects for the VMD division of Citrix.

UPDATE: This project status and road map is specifically for the Xen open source hypervisor, not the Citrix XenServer product. While Citrix XenServer is built on top of the Xen open source hypervisor, it provides numerous additional management features on top of the Xen open source hypervisor.

Here is a bit of info from Ian's Xen Project Status Presentation at the Xen Summit -

UPDATE: I have received some questions about the status of the Xen Open Source project since the aquisistion. This project is going forward under the Xen Adfvisory Board, as mentioned above. The project is extremely active. As I mentioned in this earlier post, the Xen project is getting a great deal of industry wide participation.

Another slide covers Xen Architectural's Advantages -

Ian briefly covers the Xen Project Roadmap as well -

  

Xen vs ESX  Performance

The last few slides from Ian's presentation include updated performance graphs from a recent XenServer Enterprise vs ESX performance test. XenSource did receive permission form VMWare to publish the ESX numbers, and you can find the compairson to XenEnterprise 3.2 here . Ian's slides have some newer graphs that included testing on an early beta of XenEnterprise v4 (though the chart legends were not updated).

Here are three graphs from the presentation -

XenServer Enterprise Compared to ESX 3.01 with RHEL5 running a Sun JVM

Unable to render embedded object: File (XenvsESXRHELJVM.jpg) not found.

Windows 2003 Passmark CPU Results

Unable to render embedded object: File (XenvsESXW2K3Xen.jpg) not found.

Windows 2004 Passmark memory Results

Unable to render embedded object: File (XenvsESXW2K3Memory.jpg) not found.

As you can see, the performance of XenServer Enterprise v4 vs. ESX 3.01 is very similar, and in several cases, slightly better (at about 40% of the cost).

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Momentum around application virtualization continues to build. Natalie Lambert, an analyst with Forrester recently wrote an excellent article on the virtualization landscape. It does a good job of laying out the challenges that organizations are struggling with and how more and more of them are turning to virtualization as an alterntive. If you have access to the report, it's worth the time. Check it out here.

Nick Rintalan from Citrix Consulting Services has pulled together some hard-earned lessons learned from the field into a Best Practices guide. Check it out on the Knowledge Base.

Update: 

The utility has been released to CDN. Here is the link

----

Hi my name is Ray Yang. I am a senior technical business development manager at Citrix. The new official Citrix blog site displays my name as Ruiguo Yang. But most people at Citrix refer me simply as Ray Yang. That was the name I used for the old community blog.

I haven't posted anything new recently because I've been busy working on an exciting new project called "Citrix Power Smart".

So what's "Citrix Power Smart"?

Nowadays, server power consumption and associated cooling cost have been a hot issue. Many people in Citrix and Citrix customers are asking what Citrix can do to help addressing this issue.

During a discussion with some members of the CTO Office team, a small group of us conceived the idea of powering off idle presentation server during off peak hours.  Here is our thought process.

Just imagine you have 10 presentation servers.  During the business hours they are fully utilized. However at nights or on weekends hardly anyone connects to them. These servers however still consume power needlessly during such "off business hours".  Simply powering off such servers during "off business hours" can save you up to 30-50% of your presentation server farm power consumption based on our rough estimate.  It sounds easy. But why haven't we found many people doing so? Many of them do want to save money and are environmentally conscious. We think one of the reasons is that it has to be made easy and reliably before such practice is widely adopted. Can you imagine the following scene?

A presentation server administrator stays late every night.

Wait for the last person to log off.

Shut down each idle server.

Get up early to power on all servers before everyone else comes to work.

It's a bit tough to do, isn't it?

Well, such repetitive work is best left for computers. And they can be programmed to do it reliably!

In fact, we realized that the existing presentation server and the underling server platforms have the necessary ingredients already. The existing Presentation Server SDK provides the ability to see what user sessions are running on a given presentation server. There are existing standards such as IPMI and infrastructure such as Windows Remote Management available to power on/off servers reliably. What's missing is a small piece of software to tie them together.

But wait a minute. What if some poor fellow do have to check emails or get some work done during the "off business hours"? You can leave some Presentation Servers running to serve them. However without additional work, the default Presentation Server load balancer will typically distribute the load evenly across all the servers preventing many servers to be shut down. To give you an example, say you have 10 servers in your farm. Each server is capable of supporting 50 concurrent user sessions.  Based on historical data, you expect at most 30 concurrent user sessions will be needed during "off business hours". So I only need to keep one server running after business hour then. But wait. You have set up your presentation servers to balance user load evenly across your servers. These 30 user sessions will be spread across all 10 servers during "off business hours" preventing you from shutting them down. After all you don't want to lose your job because you disconnect your CEO's session when he is checking an important email at home.

So how can we improve our simple algorithm? Well, it turns out that Presentation Server has a "scheduling rule" for all the currently supported versions. You can define the time periods when certain servers are available. Perfect, we thought. If we add a simple scheduling rule, to make sure the servers we want to shut down aren't going to accept new connections in "off business hours", chances are much greater that these servers will have zero active sessions as people log off.

"Sounds great and simple. We have App Delivery Expo coming up next month. It's going to be a great talking point. Can you have it done, like tomorrow?" Marketing guys asked.

"Well, we like it but it is likely going to take XXX man weeks to go through the release cycle. And we are fully booked" answered development team.

Finally, the technical folks in the business development group volunteered to deliver the first version via Citrix Developer Network with forum support. Because of my developer background, I volunteered to lead the project. We volunteered because we love doing something good for the environment, sooner than later. And we believe once we showed the leadership and initiative, the community (users and partners) will help us get there even if the initial functionality is limited. And it is easier to convince the product team to include such features in the future releases once we have positive feedbacks from users. Personally it is gratifying to be able to contribute to something I believe in while getting paid 

Thus "Citrix Power Smart for Presentation Server" project is born.

At this year's "App Delivery Expo" (AKA IForum), we announced "Power Smart" initiative. Here is the link to the press release. If this project is successful, we may bring more exciting projects under this model. For example, a Power Smart Utility for Xen. Since then we've got many interests from partners and customers. I may be able to share some more information on that subject later.

We know Presentation Server very well. But we are not the experts in controlling the physical servers such as powering on/off servers. Luckily we found some like-minded folks at one of our great partners HP to help us. HP's development team is busy too. But they gratefully provided advices and test equipments to allow us deliver a solution that will work with HP servers. And they happily agreed to do joint marketing with us. It's been a pleasure working with the HP team involved with this project so far.

I've been itching to share more information with Citrix community about this project. But I felt I had to get the utility working and release it on schedule first.  I am still running some last minutes testing and getting feedbacks from selected beta users.  It now looks promising that we will have the utility delivered to the community as a New Year gift from Citrix.

I will share more details with you as we make progress.

In the mean time, I'd love to hear from you, good or bad. If you prefer, you can also send an email to me at Ray.Yang@citrix.com. I can't promise to respond to every email. But I will try. For this reason, I would encourage you to comment on my blog or soon to be setup user forum to exchange your ideas with the broader community. Let's do something good, together!

I hope you find this blog interesting. And if you do, please help us spread the message.

Thanks!

Nowadays, server power consumption and associated cooling cost have been a hot issue. Many people in Citrix and Citrix customers are asking what Citrix can do to help addressing this issue.

Here comes "Citrix Power Smart Utility for Presentation Server". Coming soon to CDN.

To read more about the project background and the thought process, please read more at my blog.

Stay tuned 

We recently conducted some tests to confirm that Office Communications Server 2007 can be delivered via Citrix Presentation Server 4.5. While these are not "official" test results, I thought many of you might appreciate an early look at what we found in case you're considering rolling out OCS 2007.

Office Communications Server, the successor to Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005, is Microsoft's entry in the Unified Communications space. It brings together Voice-over-IP (VoIP), Instant Messaging (IM), audio and video conferencing, and integration with Microsoft Office. OCS includes presence information so you can see at a glance whether someone is available to receive your phone call or instant message.

We didn't test video conferencing. That would require USB webcam support on Presentation Server. Our focus was on the Instant Messaging and Microsoft Office integration features of OCS 2007.

We published the Office Communicator client on Presentation Server and successfully used its Instant Messaging and presence functions. OCS integrates presence information from multiple sources including the Outlook calendar and Out-of-Office Assistant. From an e-mail message in Outlook, you can view the presence information for each addressee and then initiate real-time communications from within the message without switching applications.

Office Communicator can also be used to control a physical telephone set. For example, you can instruct Office Communicator to place a call in your behalf and, leveraging your telephone system, it will ring your phone (office, home, or mobile) and then call the other party and bridge the connections. You can't yet use Office Communicator on Presentation Server as a pure softphone with voice-over-ICA; one of the reasons is that softphones need to open the audio driver more than once (ringtone/busytone, voice) and the current audio driver in PS 4.5 FP1 doesn't support that. (We previewed an enhanced audio driver for softphone support and voice-over-ICA in the Tech Lab at iForum in October and I'll blog on various aspects of voice-over-IP in the new year.)

If you have any experiences running Office Communicator on Presentation Server that you'd like to share, please write a comment on this blog post. And I'll keep you informed as we learn more about delivering Unified Communications via Presentation Server and XenDesktop.

Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization

The views expressed here are mine alone and have not been authorized by, and do not necessarily reflect the views of, Citrix.

Typically, an admin that implements the Access Gateway Enterprise Edition(AGEE), find themselves deciding how to lock down the environment that the users will connect to.  I have been asked many times what the "Best Practice" would be to restrict or allow access to their users.  What I like to explain is that the normal security guidelines come into play first, however each environment can differ based on company security policies and application delivery goals. 

What I like most about the AGEE, aside from multiple vServers, automated failover, enterprise scalability, policy control, etc.. is the flexibility to provide secure remote access to Presentation Server applications without using a "VPN" client. The AGEE's is called the Secure Access Client(SAC).  The SAC is there if needed, and all of the granular access policies can be applied to the full "VPN" tunnel.  The flexibility to give users access to just Presentation Server application and/or a full desktop experience is only outdone by the ease and flexibility of the policies that can determine the users logon session environment.......  This is called SmartAccess and it gets performed via the AGEE appliance itself.

Bottom line with using policies is to make sure you start with a solid design.  Included in that design should be what kind of users will be connecting and what resources they will need access to.  From there, you will need to decide on if you need to run Pre-Authentication Policies to grant/deny access to the logon page as well as determining other features that the users will have during their session.  In addition, you will need to determine if you need to setup any policies to run End-Point Analysis after their credentials are entered to filter Presentation Server applications and/or grant/deny access to other resources, including the entire session.

This is just the beginning, there are many other features provided by the AGEE as well as many different combinations of how to apply policy and dynamically create the users logon environment when connecting via the AGEE.  I hope after reading this, you too will be excited about the power and flexibility of the AGEE and remember to keep in mind how important an initial design is to maximize the AGEEs full potential. 

The views expressed here are mine alone and have not been authorized by, and do not necessarily reflect the views of, Citrix.

When implementing a "VDI" solution, most admins focus on the "Desktop".  What should the desktop look like, how many will be the same, who can access them, where do I run the desktop from and store my images.  Moving forward, the admins think about items like how they need to update the desktops with OS updates and or security patches.

I find that many times, applications are not thought about in the whole solutions from the admin point of view.  How are the applications going to be delivered to the end-user, how are the applications going to be managed.  Typically when this question arises, the answer is to install the applications on the desktop images just as they would be at the user's desk.  So let's look at the benefits of this so far........   Centralizing the desktop in the data center give you full control and security over of the desktops.  By installing the applications on the desktop images, you are also centralizing the application installs to the data center.  The downside to both of these would be when it comes to managing and maintaining the implementation(updating the desktop and the applications).

XenDesktop gives the admin a great way to reduce the headache and time associated with updating both the desktop and the applications.  XenDesktop can be fully integrated with Presentation Server.  This means that you can deliver a desktop from the data center to an end user, wherever they may be, and then deliver their applications to that desktop from Presentation Server in that same data center.  For companies currently running Presentation Server most application may already be setup and ready to be accessed from that centrally deliver desktop.   So now the applications are dynamically delivered to the desktop that is presented to the end user.  This allows the desktops images to be more flexible since the applications are not installed locally and no matter which desktop from a pool is presented to the user, the user can get the applications they have access to via Presentation Server and the ICA client residing on the delivered desktop.  These applications can be updated in the datacenter via a package that is being streamed to the Presentation Server or installed on the Presentation server.  Either way, the updates are done only on the package or the installed application on the Presentation Server.......not on every desktop image.

In addition to the applications, the desktop can be created as a single image or a few images based on your needs.  This image or images can then be streamed to the hypervisor on-demand when needed for a requesting user, via the Provisioning Server.  This way, you would only need to make updates to the "gold" image and then have it stream the updated desktop image to the user.  This method allows the admin to save space, time and pain of maintaining a desktop image for each user.

I hope that after reading this, you will have a good understanding of how much XenDesktop and Presentation Server can work together to provide an entire Desktop and Application Delivery system.  To allow users access to this system via a Secure Remote connection........ Implement Citrix Access Gateway Enterprise Edition.

Simon Crosby, the Chief Technology Officer of the Virtualization and Management Division of Citrix, recently did a podcast with Virtual Strategy Magazine called "10 Minutes to Xen". Here is a list of the topics discussed -

For those of you running Citrix Presentation Server, Simon mentions in this podcast that the plan for the next release of Citrix XenServer is to included some CPS specific optimizations. I am gathering more background info on this topic, and will post on more on these CPS optimizations later. 

http://www.virtual-strategy.com/article/articleview/2439/1/73/

This week, Simon also did an interview with Information Week entitled "Virtualization's Crusader". Here are a few excerpts -

Read more here

Simon also did a recent interview with DataMation

Here are a few excepts -

For further background on the Xen open source hypervisor and the industry wide participation in that project, see my earlier posts here and here .

I have received a lot of questions about the relationship between Microsoft, XenSource, and Viridian. The two companies announced several agreement well before the Citrix acquisition of XenSource. Here are some excepts from the Microsoft press release from July of 2006-

Here is a bit from the original XenSource published FAQ on the Microsoft agreement from July 2006 -

The Xen open source hypervisor project is a vibrant growing community with a new Advisory Board with wide industry participation. Citrix XenServer benefits from the creativity and innovation of this effort.

The Microsoft Hyper-V release is built on a structure very similar to that of the Xen hypervisor. This architecture gives Microsoft a strong architectural standing for the future, and gives Citrix the opportunity to take all the lessons we have learned from supporting that architecture and apply those lessons to building valuable management products on top of Hyper-V. This is very similar to the current relation Citrix has with Microsoft in respect to Terminal Services and Citrix Presentation Server. Citrix can draw upon our many years of experience of building value on top of a Microsoft platform and working closely with Microsoft to do it.

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CIO Magazine recently did a story entitled "10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2008". This story focuses on up and coming vendors who add significant value to the virtualization stack.

I am very familiar with some of these companies, and others I only have heard of in passing. I did some research on each to ensure I am up to date. I would like to share what I found on each in the blog. I will do one post on each of the ten.

The first company on the CIO Magazine list is Cirba.

Cirba has an interesting product for helping an IT team determine plan a new server consolidation or move to server consolidation (or both). Here is a overview from their site -

I found a flash product overview on their site - View it here.

There was a podcast earlier this year on the Virtual Strategy Magazine site with Andrew Hiller from Cirba.

Here is a summary of the discussion -

This article from SearchServerVirtualization.com highlights the problem Cirba's Data Center Intelligence software solves -

David Marshall of VMBlog.com points out many of the accolades Cirba has received -

I was intrigued by the demo I saw of the Cirba DCI tool, and I can certainly see that value in doing such detailed analysis before a server consolidation and virtulization project.

Next up on the list is VizionCore. I will post that info later this week.

I am happy to announce that Citrix PowerSmart Utility is available for download at the new Citrix Developer Network web site now. Please visit this page for more information and to download the utility. Be sure to check out the related page section for the FAQ page and new idea page.

Many thanks to everyone who have contributed to this project!

We'd love to hear from you. The new Wiki based Citrix Developer Network is cool. Please check it out.  I've even left the FAQ page open so that you can edit directly yourself. 

Merry Christmas and  Happy New Year!

Ray Yang 

The wait is over. I am happy to announce that Citrix PowerSmart Utility is available for download now at this newly designed Developer Network site. Please visit this page for more information and to download the utility. Be sure to check out the related page section for the FAQ page page and new idea page page.

The new site makes it so much easier to post new projects. I love it. Please try it out. I hope you like it too. I've even left the FAQ page open so that you can edit directly yourself.

A great platform is of no use if no one is using it. We'd love to hear from you and we hope the new platform makes it easier.

I've also posted the same information at my blog post at official citrix blog site. Going forward, I guess I will post more CDN specific information here and general information at Citrix blog site and cross reference. It's the power of the web...

Many thanks to everyone who have contributed to this project!

Merry Christmas and  Happy New Year!

Ray Yang

During a recent presentation I gave to one of our alliance partners, an interesting question came up during the discussion - How can a commercial software company build a business based on open source software? After the question was asked, I saw many heads nodding in agreement. On the surface, this question may appear to be difficult to answer.

An excellent way to answer this pressing question can be found in a very intriguing book called Wikinomics. There is a story in the opening chapter about GoldCorp, a gold mining company. The story of the GoldCorp Challenge highlights the power of working with a very diverse group of people to take innovation and creativity to new heights. Rob McEwen of GoldCorp used that innovation and creativity to build a very successful business.

Read this short excerpt from the opening chapter - 

Don Tapscott, one of the authors of Wikinomics, gave a presentation to Google on his book. You can see the video of that presentation below -

As I posted earlier, the Xen Project is benefiting a great deal from the mass collaboration of developers from Intel, AMD, IBM, HP, Sun and Oracle working on this second generation hypervisor. We are able to build on top of this creativity and innovation in much the same way GoldCorp did.

Open source, wikis, blogging and other new forms of mass collaboration like MIT OpenCourseWare, Innocentive, NineSigma, and YourEncore are discussed in depth in Wikinomics. Reading this book gave me a much firmer grasp on the real power of building a business by massively collaborating with others to mine for the golden nuggets of innovation and creativity .

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Shawn Bass wrote a good blog about the new PowerSmart Utility

In his blog, he explained his take on our choice of of using WinRm and server vendors's out of band management products. It's a good read.

One thing I need to clarify is that it is fairly simple to configure this version of PowerSmart to power on HP servers if you follow the user guide. We'd like to hear your experience and improve the tool and its documentation.

Shawn was right that if you just want to give the tool a quick try without reading much, the out of the box default configuration will allow you to try it without much restriction. It will even work in a virtualized environment.  Please see the minimum requirement section of the download page. The trade-off however is that this default configuration won't power on servers. A good default power on mechanism is hard to find because user environments are likely to be very different.  The included HP script won't work with IBM servers for example. We thought this default is a safer option and it can lead the users to think about the best way to power on servers. Plus this default makes it easier for users to have an alternative mechanism to power on servers. For example, users can use windows scheduler to schedule a script to power on servers. Yes, the HP scripts we provided can be easily modified to do so.

We thought about using Wake On LAN as default. But we soon realized that it has many limitations too. Please see the FAQ page for more details. However If you know WOL well or you can get some experts such as Shawn to help, it may very well work for you.  I heard a large company had successfully used WOL to save millions of dollars by powering off idle desktops. In the data center, I expect administrators may have more control over the servers and thus WOL may have a higher chance to be useful.

Please share your experience with others so that we can benefit from each other.

VMware, in a fit of generosity, has announced it is slashing prices for SMB customers purchasing 3 licenses of VMware ESX. I thought a quick head-to-head comparison with XenEnterprise v4 might help to convince you what a steal this deal really is, and remind you to keep your hands on your wallet.

First, the deal offers 3 ESX licenses with Virtual Center thrown in for free. But the Virtual Center version they offer is limited so that it can only connect to 3 ESX servers. And the ESX servers are just ESX servers recycled from their VI3 Starter package, already priced at $1000 per host today, and with a severely hobbled feature set.

Of course, when you want to buy your 4th ESX Starter server it will cost you $6,000. That's $5,000 for a full version of Virtual Center plus another $1,000 for an additional ESX Starter license. And here's what that ESX starter license won't offer you:

- No SMP support for VMs (1 CPU per VM)
- Limited to using 8GB of host memory
- Limited to 4 sockets per host
- No resource pooling, VMFS cluster file system, VMotion or other fancy features

By Comparison, if you wanted only 4 VMs per server, then XenExpress is completely free and has built in management. But for a true head to head comparison compare their offering with XenServer, our product that offers 8-way SMP support for Linux and Windows, no per-socket limits, certification with up to 128GB memory, up to 32GB memory per guest and up to 32 physical CPUs, and with built in management of multiple servers via XenCenter, for $3240 including support.

Here are the bundle details:

- A single sku for 3 VI3 Starter licenses for $3k.
- Includes a limited VCMS, allowing for management of 3 licenses.
- Does not include S&S (21% of license cost) = $630.
- Support needs to be purchased for all 3 licenses. = $1,890.

No upgrade: VMware has said no upgrade skus will be made available at launch. Channel partners I've been talking to really dislike that. Instead, if the customer wants to upgrade to VI3 Enterprise they need to upgrade all 3 licenses rather than upgrading piecemeal. This would also require a full featured upgrade of Virtual Center at full price.

In addition, to upgrade a customer from GSX you need to use their Converter to convert the VMs to the ESX 3 virtual hardware - at an additional charge. Other drawbacks of this package include the following: No VMotion, No SMP, No Drs, etc; No SAN support - it requires local storage to be used. (This appears to be viewed as a drawback from the channel partners who want to sell the profitable shared storage solutions).

Overall, rather underwhelming.

For those of you who are new to the world of XenServer, welcome to our blog! Those of us former XenSource folks, along with many of our new compatriots at Citrix, will be bringing you information about our products and solutions, what's going on in Xen and the rest of the virtualization marketplace, and tips and advice on how to have the most successful and rewarding virtualization experience possible.

To give you a little background on where we are and where we've been, I've brought over most of our posts from our blogs that were formerly at blogs.xensource.com.

 A little bit about me, from The Official Bio:

Roger has driven product and marketing strategy for some of the most successful infrastructure software technologies of the past decade, including VMware ESX Server and VERITAS Volume Manager, and introduced and developed the application-aligned storage management solution space at VERITAS. He served as vice president of marketing at Trigence and Sychron, and in a variety of marketing, product management, and product support roles at Hewlett-Packard, Consera, Sendmail, MIPS, Celerity, and Prime Computer. Roger studied Critical Studies (English/Film) and Computer Science at Dartmouth College.

And, all that aside, what do I do today?

Communicate.

Along with other members of the XenServer product marketing team, I'm responsible for bringing you the documentation (other than our product manuals) that tell you what XenServer does, what it does for you, how it does it, and why you'd want it.

More to follow.

Roger Klorese recently announced the creation of the new XenServer Group blog. This new XenServer virtualization group blog will have several participants from inside Citrix, including many who came from XenSource and some of us who have been with Citrix many years. The latter group includes me.

I have been a Citrix employee since 2000. I spent four years in field sales as a Systems Engineer, then moved into Business Development as a Global Technical Alliances Manager. With the aquisistion of XenSource, I am moving into a new role as a Technology Evangelist focusing on XenServer, XenDesktop, and Provisioning Server. My target audience for this role is Citrix Alliance Partners. This new role will allow me to leverage my past experiences with both customers and Alliances Partners. I will be joining the conversation on the XenServer group blog with Roger, Simon Crosby and others. Many of my existing XenServer related posts will be cross posted on this new group blog, and I will continue to contribute to this conversation with our customers and partners in the future.

My XenServer blog posts will dive down into solutions I encounter as I meet with Alliance Partners (such as this post and this post on Marathon Technologies, this post on PlateSpin, or this post on the CIO Magazine 10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch ) and cover the responses I have compiled to common questions from those Alliance Partners (such as this post on a XenServer Mini-Product training or this post about building a software business on open source). I will also write about my personal perspective on events like Xen Summit (here, here and here) and other Citrix customer and partner events.

I look forward to sharing my experiences and listening to your feedback on server virtualization on this new group blog.

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