Archive for XenDesktop

Citrix: Edgesight for loadtesting best practices

I’ve been involved with quite a few Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop projects and a reoccurring phase in all of these projects is scaling/load testing.  When starting a project there’s a initial phase where you try to give an answer to all of the questions concerning scalability and sizing. So I’ve build a load test a couple of times now, the problem with these load tests is that no load test is equal to another. Every company has it’s own applications, settings and user types thus these load tests are custom made and can be re-used only partly for other customers.

 

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Citrix: Configuring the Logoff Behavior of a Desktop Group in XenDesktop 5

While building a PoC with Citrix PVS and XenDesktop 5 I noticed that my VM’s didn’t reboot after I logged off, so I found CTX127842 to change the Logoff behavior of a Desktop group in XenDesktop 5:

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Citrix: XenDesktop 5 Logon Process and Communication Flow

Martijn Bosschaart just posted CTX128909 on twitter, this article contains the following information on XenDesktop 5 Logon Process and Communication Flow:

 

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Citrix: Communication Ports Used By Citrix Technologies

Citrix just posted an updated version of the PDF that describes the communication ports used by Citrix technologies. It’s a good reference document when talking about communications and for example which ports to open on a firewall in order to get proper communication between different technologies.

The introduction from the PDF:

This document provides an overview of ports that are used by Citrix components and must be considered as part of Virtual Computing architecture, especially if communication traffic traverses network components such as firewalls or proxy servers, where ports must be opened to ensure communication flow.

The PDF can be downloaded here.

Microsoft and VDI; “Why Hyper-V for VDI whitepaper” and “Jump Start: Microsoft Virtualization & Hyper-V”

Microsoft is publishing a lot of information about Hyper-V and VDI, last week they did a three day “Jump Start: Microsoft Virtualization & Hyper-V” online event. There was a lot of information about the hypervisor, vm’s, user density, manageability and of course VDI.

The description from the Borntolearn page:

Corey Hynes and Symon Perriman are in the middle of a great day one to this Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professional Jump Start event. After providing a short Virtualization Overview and spending some time differentiating between Microsoft and VMware terminology, they started a great session on Hyper-V. After lunch, they’ll spend another hour on this topic then finish the day with almost two full hours on High-Availability & Clustering. The afternoon and the next two days will be packed with real-world scenarios and tons of demos

For the people who didn’t sit the whole session out, the content is published online here.

As addition Microsoft also released a white paper “Why Hyper-V for VDI”, the description for this whitepaper is stated as following:

Choosing a hypervisor for deploying a VDI solution involves a number of important considerations, each of which can be fulfilled by using Microsoft’s Hyper-V 2008 R2 SP1 hypervisor-based virtualization technology. When implemented together with the Microsoft System Center family of products and desktop virtualization technologies from partners like Citrix, organizations can build integrated VDI solutions that can meet the needs of your business while keeping costs under control.Based on the results obtained from internal testing and because VM density has a significant influence on datacenter cost structures; an integrated Citrix/Microsoft VDI solution that includes Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2 SP1 and System Center delivers unique end-to-end business value for organizations planning on implementing VDI.

The white paper can be found here.

Both sources contain great information about hypervisors (in general but of course about  Hyper-V),  manageability and  VDI. The documents also contain more information about scaling and user density which still is difficult ground to cover so these are useful documents.

Update:

Microsoft just posted the video’s online: http://bit.ly/MSVirt-JUMP

 

Citrix: Citrix PVS and BSOD when booting target VM from vDisk

Yesterday I spend the day setting up a PoC for Citrix Provisioning Services (5.6.1 SP1) with XenDesktop, XenApp 6 and XenApp 5. But we discovered that all of the target VM’s would give a BSOD (0x0000007b meaning: inaccessible boot device) when booting from the vDisk while the master didn’t have any problems.

citrix pvs

image source: Lako-Home

After investigating this we cloned the master and removed the hard drive. After creating the device in the Citrix PVS console we where able to boot successfully from this vDisk. So the VM was created manually and somewhere along the road there was a misconfiguration. We took the clone and converted it to a template. After this we installed CTX128726 for PVS so we can use the wizard to create XenApp VM’s with this vDisk from the PVS console