At Citrix Synergy Berlin you will have the opportunity to learn specifics about how to setup your multi-forest domain with Citrix Provisioning Services 5.6 where you have the Provisioning Services infrastructure and target devices in separate forests. Learning labs will guide you through this topic and also other new features of Citrix Provisioning Services 5.6 such as vDisks updates with read-only stores. You will fall in love with its key features and to see how easy is to implement the XenDesktop’s Provisioning Services feature in your enterprise environment. Your initial step is to click on the link below and add SYN404D – Operating System delivery to desktops session to your agenda. This is a 3 hour session about the Citrix Provisioning Services and how to simplify your job.

Register for Synergy 2010 Berlin

Session: SYN404D – Operating System delivery to desktops


October 04, 9:00 am – 12:00 pm
October 05, 9:00 am – 12:00 pm
October 07, 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm
October 08, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm 
Elisabeth Teixeira
Principal Engineer - Worldwide Technical Readiness
Follow Me on twitter: @lizteixeira

Workflow Studio 2.5 was released last week and is currently available for download to our customers on MyCitrix. You can get more information and find a link to the download page at http://www.citrix.com/wfs.

This release includes the following new features:

• Expanded platform support (Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2; SQL 2008; PowerShell 2.0; .NET 4.0)
• New activity libraries for Hyper-V and SQL
• Numerous improvements to existing activity libraries
• Expanded security roles
• Performance improvements
• Enhanced usability for workflow properties

The Evaluation Virtual Appliance has not been updated yet, but I will post an update when it is.

Calling all Citrix users and administrators located in or around Dallas, Texas…




There’s still time to sign up for the next Dallas Citrix User Group Meeting on Wednesday, September 8th!




Date: Sept. 8, 2010 (Wed)
Time: 11:30 AM – 2:00 PM CDT




The goal of a User Group is simple: To foster dialogue and an exchange of ideas within the Citrix community, allowing users and administrators to share information and best practices, hear from the experts, and grow their body of knowledge and expertise.

Register Now

Agenda:

During this meeting, you’ll learn more about Citrix XenDesktop including:

• Adding XenDesktop to a Citrix XenApp environment
• Getting a technical overview of Flexcast
• Discussing a comparison of key features against the competition

Citrix experts will be available for questions and answers after the meeting.

All attendees will receive a TopGolf game card!

Location:

TopGolf Dallas
8787 Park Lane
Dallas TX 75231
(214) 341-9655

Register Now

If you are located in or around Dallas, TX, I hope you can attend! Stay tuned to the Citrix User Group Community site for news and information about upcoming meetings and activities.

Laura Whalen
Citrix Systems, Inc.
Follow me on Twitter

Profile Streaming is a great new feature introduced with Profile management (Pm) v3 so lets take a look at the performance gain the old fashioned way…

Using the following upm managed profiles lets use perfmon to get an idea of load times.

upm100mb (standard upm profile)
upmstream100mb (streamed upm profile)

First, lets log onto a managed W2K3 server with the standard “upm100mb” profile. Using perfmon & the Pm logon duration counter we can see that a 100MB profile takes around 5 seconds to load. Not bad I hear you say?

Now, lets follow suit but this time lets log on with the streamed “upmstreamed100mb” profile.

hmm, .5 seconds.

I’m sure you’ll agree – the results are impressive.

Michael
Citrix Support on:
Twitter – @citrixsupport & @citrixreadiness
Facebook
LinkedIn

In my last blog entry Profile Streaming – Performance Gain? we looked at the performance increase when using the new profile streaming feature that ships with Profile management (Pm) v3.

We know it works because we tracked the logon time using perfmon but curious minds might ask the following question:

“ok,so how do I know this streaming profile stuff is actually working?”

well luckily enough – there is. 3 ways in fact!

1.The quickist and easiest way to do this is to look at the properties of the user profile. In the example below you will notice the size of the profile is >100MB but the size on disk is <7MB.

2.You can also use the dir /al command to list all files with reparse point attributes (Remember, the key to our profile streaming/fetch on demand design is the use of reparse points on files. Reparse points fool applications and users alike into thinking that the files are downloaded as part of the user profile at logon).

the screenshot below shows the L swith listed when running dir /? from a win7 machine. This is a hidden switch on XP, W2K3 but the functionality still exists.

Bottom line, If profile streaming is disabled, running dir /al on a folder containing files within the user profile, will return “file not found”.

3.Finally, you can confirm profile streaming is enabled for a particular user by reviewing the Pm log file (If enabled). To verify that the profile is being streamed look for the following:

2010-03-16;20:17:30.401;INFORMATION;<domain name>;<user name>;2;2364;ProcessLogon: User logging on with Streamed Profile support enabled.

You convinced yet?

Michael
Citrix Support on:
Twitter – @citrixsupport & @citrixreadiness
Facebook
LinkedIn

So a week has past since our last update and some things have changed and some “lessons” have been learned.

First change:
Our timeslot has changed due to some agenda conflict (apparently Rob and I can not be doing this session and host a Learning Lab at the same time ) So the new time slot is Wednesday @9:00 AM. Now I do understand this is early, it’s even before the grand opening keynote but he, the early bird catches the worm. In other words, if you want to see some nice demos and listen to Dutch guys show off the beauty of the vAlliance I am sure you will manage to find us.

Update on the build of the session:

Lessons learned 1:
Well, let’s just say that some things did not pane out as planned. For one apparently Windows 2008R2 does not like to run from eSATA disk. This meant I had to delete my XenClient install and install W2K8R2 natively on the local SSD instead of the planned external SATA disk (bummer). FYI it does show the external disk it will just refuse to install onto it. Perhaps if the internal disk would have been formatted with NTFS it would have but XenClient does not use NTFS natively so XenClient RC2 will have to wait for me until after Synergy (time lost: 4 hours).

Lessons learned 2:
When you plan to install MSSQL + SCVMM + SCCM + SCOM on 1 server be very carefull when installing IIS related features. We had to reinstall WSUS on the alternative ports due it conflicting with one of the other services running on the server (time lost: 4 hours).

Lessons learned 3:
When you think about cutting corners and re-using the Hyper-V vhd file with an updated Windows 2008 R2 install (aka just copying the vhd and assigning it when creating the new VM) make sure you run Sysprep and tick the box “Generalize”, this will give it a new SID and will ensure a succesfull install of SCVMM (time lost: 4 hours).

On a brighter note these last 3 days have taught me a few more things as well:

• QoS is a wonderfull thing when you want to listen to online radio when also updating your WSUS servers.
• Routers have a session limit so be careful what else is going across the wire
• Make sure you have downloaded all the correct ISO’s, sometimes the latest is not always the right one so always check the release notes of the products you will be installing (MSSQL R2 was not yet certified).

So where are we now? Well we are down to combining the multiple components, we have the System Center products working, we have XenApp working as well as XenDesktop so now it’s time to tie SCCM to App-V to XenApp, Edgesight into SCOM and anything else we would like to show off.

If you have suggestions or would like to see specific thing twitter me @andreasvw or Rob @robsanders or just leave a reply below. We will see what we can accomplish.

Citrix Support is focused on ensuring Customer and Partner satisfaction with our products.
One of our initiatives is to increase the ability of our Partners and Customers to leverage self-service avenues via our Knowledge Center.

Find below the Citrix Knowledge Center Top 10 for August 2010.

Top 10 Technical Articles

Top 10 Whitepapers

Top 10 Hotfixes

Top 10 Presentations

Top 10 Tools

David
Citrix Support on:
Twitter – @citrixsupport & @citrixreadiness
Facebook
LinkedIn

Lately, I have been getting questions around how to “size” a XenDesktop deployment. I have an AskTheArchitect webinar scheduled on How Scalability Impacts your XenDesktop Deployment that will help answer most of the common questions. However, with the recent release of the Hyper-V / Windows 7 / XenDesktop whitepaper I thought it would be a good time to go over just a few points on how you can leverage the scalability reports that have been released by Citrix and other vendors.

Citrix intentionally follows the same process for scalability testing so that the results can be used for comparing hardware and hypervisor platforms. Since it is impractical to create tests that match each customer’s environment, a standard configuration is selected and the performance data published. The choice of the Login VSI medium user workload allows for a consistent, repeatable, and slightly random workload to be run across different configurations to determine performance. Also, by using a readily available third-party tool for the workload, customers can easily reproduce the test results with an unbiased workload.

Sizing a XenDesktop environment should neither be done blindly nor should it rely solely on published scalability results. If you want to size your environment correctly, you must conduct a pilot with actual desktop users and their applications. The pilot results can then be used in combination with published data to determine the expected number of desktops a given hardware platform can support in your environment. Most initial pilots should focus on two key areas: CPU and storage activity. These two areas have a significant impact on a desktop virtualization project and are historically the ones that are undersized in larger environments. Certainly other areas can be monitored such as RAM and network activity, but these areas are not as difficult to size as CPU and storage.

In most cases, scalability results published by any vendor will not meet the requirements of your environment making it impossible to size your farm using the reported numbers. For instance, the Login VSI medium workload which uses Microsoft Office, IE, and Adobe generates about 5 IOPS per user when running in the steady-state loop. What is also true is that in order to prevent any network latency from affecting the response times, IE is using cached web pages for viewing. If a user was actually browsing web pages, both the network and storage activity would increase as the pages are read and cached by the browser. Recent tests have shown that a heavy IE workload can generate as much as 20-30 IOPS per session. Therefore, testing with your anticipated workload is paramount to obtaining realistic sizing data.

With a bit of logic, you can integrate the results from published reports with your pilot results to anticipate how the proposed XenDesktop environment will perform. For instance, the published results from the Citrix whitepaper show a BL460C G6 blade with 64GB RAM is capable of hosting about 75 Windows 7 users on Hyper-V with the Login VSI medium workload. Suppose you run a pilot with a similar hardware configuration but with your user workload and at the end of the pilot determine the optimal number of users per server is 50. Taking both pieces of data into account you can derive that your pilot workload requires approximately 50% more server capacity than the Login VSI medium workload.

Knowing this relationship allows you to leverage the studies published with the Login VSI medium workload. To determine how your workload would perform using the environment in the study, whether it be a different hypervisor or hardware, just adjust the Login VSI sizing results reported by 50% for your environment. Similar conclusions can be drawn regarding CPU usage or storage I/O operations (IOPS) when comparing published reports to pilot results.

To learn more, come join my webinar on Wednesday September 22nd at 1pm Eastern time. In an effort to provide more relevant content to attendees, I have requested a change to our registration process. During the registration, you can provide a single question that you are expecting to have answered during the webinar. If you register far enough in advance and the question is relevant to my presentation, I will work the answer into the webinar.

If you found this information useful and would like to be notified of future blog posts, please follow me on Twitter @pwilson98 or visit my XenDesktop on Microsoft website.

At Citrix TechEdge Berlin 2010, you’ll get a chance to meet some of Citrix Support’s top engineers. One of these is Karen Sciberras. Karen is a Escalation Engineer based in our Dublin office in Ireland. Check out the video interview below.

You can also view some of the previous interviews with Nicolas Ogor, Lalit Kaushal, George Dunlap and Tomasz Czajka.

Learn more about TechEdge Berlin 2010, www.citrix.com/techedge, and stay tuned for more weekly close-up interviews with the TechEdge presenters.

Leave a comment

Let Karen know any thoughts, questions or feedback you might have for her session.

David
Citrix Support on:
Twitter – @citrixsupport & @citrixreadiness
Facebook
LinkedIn

Summer is almost over and that means Synergy Berlin is nearly here!  We’re busy making final arrangements for our first pan-European show to be held from October 6-8.  In advance of the program,  I want to draw your attention to my favourite part of the program – the Citrix Innovation Award. 

Every day, companies experience the tangible business benefits of virtualisation, networking and cloud computing. Benefits include savings in operating expenses, enhancing productivity and flexibility, cutting power consumption and reducing carbon emissions, to name a few. But there are also a number of organizations that have embraced the power of virtual computing to think about, and to do, business differently.  These include companies like Cocamar in Brazil that have used virtualisation technology to expand their market reach;  government agencies like Fairfax County, Virginia, that have used the technology to offer cloud-based computing services to cities and townships within the county; and ND SatCom that expanded its offerings to include a satellite-based solution for business continuity and connectivity. These are but a few examples of business innovation, and I know that there are thousands of stories about organisations around the world that have embraced virtual computing to spearhead change.

The Citrix Innovation Award highlights the stories of enterprises that are using virtualisation, networking and cloud technologies in exciting ways to drive innovation in their businesses. As we did for Synergy San Francisco, we’ve thrown open the doors for Synergy Berlin and invited everyone in the industry – partners, customers and employees – to nominate companies that are using virtualisation, networking and cloud technologies in innovative ways  to create a dynamic, agile business environment.

Once again, I’m amazed at the diverse range of businesses that implement these technologies, and use them in new and innovative ways.  Dozens of nominations were received from all over the globe; from those nominations twelve companies that best embody the spirit of the Innovation Award were shortlisted.

The winner is chosen by popular vote of peer organisations (that means all of you!) and members of the IT industry and will be announced at Synergy Berlin.

The full list of Innovation Award finalists is:

• Chemtura Corporation
• Codan Trygg-Hansa
• CZ Healthcare Insurance
• Derby Public Schools
• LG CNS
• MATERNA
• Medical University of South Carolina
• O’Neill Europe
• Perfetti Van Melle India
• Telecom Italia
• TeleComputing
• The Co-operative Group

Check out their stories of innovation and vote for your three favourites today.

And don’t forget…you can still register for Synergy Berlin!  For more info go to www.citrixsynergy.com.