This post has no valuable technical information but it was worth mentioning ;-). I had some spare time this evening so I thought I would update our demo environment with a Citrix XenApp 6 server. While installing the following screen passed by which contains an obvious typo:
Curious to see if Citrix will fix this in a next release.
Today we tested the difference between XenApp 6 and XenApp 6.5, these installations are out of the box (same hardware as they are virtuals). See the difference between these two desktops, the XenApp 6.5 install beats the XenApp 6 install without problems. Seems the +150 additional HDX improvements that are made pay off.
I recently update some Citrix servers at a customer site with SP1 for Windows 2008 R2 and ran into some problems which I blogged about earlier but I forgot one of the problems I ran into untill this morging when I saw a tweet from CitrixReadiness with the CTX129241 article about the CtxAltStr Filter Driver:
I recently build a Citrix XenApp 6 deployment using RES Automation Manager but encountered problems with some (not all) installations. After a default installation the IMA service couldn’t start. When looking at the eventlogs of one of those specific servers I found the following errors:
Failed to load plugin C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\System32\Citrix\IMA\SubSystems\ImaAppSs.dll with error IMA_RESULT_WRITE_TO_LOG_FAILED
Failed to load initial plugins with error IMA_RESULT_WRITE_TO_LOG_FAILED
and further on in the eventlog the following error was presented:
When searching on the internet I found the following fix:
Well apparently this is a Citrix common item because the Citrix tech went straight to this registry key and changed it.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Citrix\IMA\RUNTIMEThen blanked out the following keys:
CurrentlyLoadingPlugin
ProductPluginsAfter that, IMA magically starts and all services come back up and running.
So based on this I took one of the XenApp 6 servers and blanked those keys:
After this I could start the IMA service again and I was able to launch a published desktop on this server again.
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?
I’ve been to BriForum London this year and one of the sessions I attended was led by Claudio Rodrigues and Louise Taylor with the subject of BYO(D). The first thing that was mentioned was that the concept of BYOPC isn’t up to date anymore. It should be BYO or BYOD. Claudio even questioned if it should be Bring your own device or Buy your own device, he did a lot of interviews with customers and they said that most of them provide budget to their employees to buy a device to bring to work.
