Archive for VMware

Citrix MCS, Citrix’s best kept secret for server virt guys?

The last couple of days I had some great discussions with co-workers and some (VMware minded) guys on Twitter. The subject? The complexity of setting up Citrix XenDesktop, most of them refer to some demo they saw or things they’ve read on blogs/twitter etc while they know View is pretty easy to configure. But the thing is that those demo’s are mostly from a VMware View point of view and in the comparissons I’ve seen, Citrix PVS is used instead of Citrix MCS.

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Citrix: XenDesktop and vSphere Reference Architecture

Citrix releaed a new whitepaper yesterday containing the XenDesktop and vSphere Reference Architecture Overview, you can find the article here

 

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Citrix: Setting up Merchandising Server, Task canceled by a user

Today I was setting up a Citrix Merchandising Server. This is the virtual appliance that you can download from MyCitrix and the one I downloaded was the OVA file for vSphere. When I tried to import the OVA file I got an error: Task canceled by a user at 99%. After some research I found the following article: CTX128895.

This contains the following:

Symptoms

When importing .obf files to Merchandising server running on VMWare 4.1.0 ESXi, the user receives the following error message:

“Task was canceled by a user”

The following report is returned when importing:

~~~Deploy OVF templateCitrix Merchandising Server 2.1The task was canceled by a user.Waiting for host <FQDN> (1/1) port data update task to complete<domain name>\<username><FQDN> ~~~

Resolution

Extract the .obf files with WinRar and import them.

So I downloaded WinRAR, opened the .OVA file and extracted them to a seperate folder on my hard drive. After the extraction I followed the instructions to import the .ovf file from the Citrix eDocs pages.

Remarkable: In these eDocs pages the following is stated “Note: Unzipping and manually importing the .ova file is not supported.” But because the CTX article clearly states differently I just followed the instructions mentioned and in my case it did work.

Citrix: Virtualization Best Practices for XenApp

Daniel Feller posted another great blogpost on Virtualization Best Practices for XenApp at the Citrix Blogs

 

One of the first questions when virtualizing XenApp is how many VMs to put on a server. Well, that was discussed in the Virtualize XenApp blog. Once you figure out how you plan to carve up the physical server, one of the next common questions is deciding which features of the hypervisor to enable/disable. For example, if I use XenServer, should I use the “Optimize for XenApp” setting? What about vSphere’s Transparent Page Sharing feature? And the big whopper, how should I allocate memory to my virtualized XenApp servers? Is it safe to use dynamic memory or am I safer to stick with fixed memory?

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Citrix XenApp on VMware Best Practices

Recently I found a blogpost from Alex Fontana at the VMware community blogs with Citrix XenApp on VMware Best Practices:

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