I recently helped building a PoC containing Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp with RES Workspace Manager and Microsoft APP-V, while testing the applications on the different platforms we discovered that a certain application had some strange looking artifacts and display errors when started on XenDesktop. These artifacts didn’t show up when started on XenApp or when using the VMware Console and start this specific application. After some research I found the following posts on the Citrix Forums:
Tag Archive for XenApp
Citrix: XenDesktop, artifacts and display errors
Category: APP-V, Citrix, XenApp, XenDesktop |
Tags: Artifacs, Citrix, Display, MMHOOK, XenApp, XenDesktop
Citrix: How to Configure Access Gateway 5 Standalone for Use with XenDesktop 5
I just found the following article which is helpful when configuring a Citrix Access Gateway 5 with XD5; http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX128869
Category: Access Gateway, Citrix, XenApp, XenDesktop |
Tags: Access Gateway, Citrix, XenApp, XenDesktop
Citrix: Hanging XenApp 6 servers
XenApp 6
Yesterday I was at a customer to troubleshoot the two newly added Citrix XenApp 6 servers to their existing farm. The existing farm worked without any problems but the two new Citrix servers wouldn’t accept sessions. If a session was started directly the logon process would stop at the ‘Welcome’ screen from the ICA client. I tried to troubleshoot this problem but the logfiles couldn’t point me in the right direction until I noticed that SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 was installed.
The Citrix farm runs on a VMware vSphere platform and the Windows hosts where created based on a template and the Citrix XenApp servers in the farm where based on a pre-SP1 image but the two new servers where based on a SP1 image. After installing CTX125388 (Hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64001 – For Citrix XenApp 6.0 for Windows Server 2008 R2 – English) the problems where solved.
So leasons learned: Install this hotfix after you deploy XenApp 6 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 machine and make sure you communicate these kind of changes, it prevents unnecessary problems.
XA600W2K8R2X64001
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.
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
Citrix: Logon Optimization
Citrix released another good read on how the logon process and logon optimization in Citrix XenApp and/or XenDesktop works and how to optimize this:
Category: Citrix, EdgeSight, XenApp, XenDesktop |
Tags: Citrix, Logon, Optimization, XenApp, XenDesktop
