Citrix Support is focused on ensuring Customer and Partner satisfaction with our products. We are working on multiple items to help make it easier to find answers and solve problems via self-service avenues, all of which are available to all our Partners and Customers to leverage.

Last November we launched the How To video initiative and to date have over 130 videos covering 13 products available on Citrix TV.

To make it easier for you to find these videos, we have added technotes on the Knowledge Center linking back to Citrix TV.

The following is a list of the articles per product series.

• XenDesktop
• XenServer
• XenApp
• NetScaler
• Provisioning Services
• Access Gateway Standard Edition
• Access Gateway Advanced Edition
• Access Gateway Enterprise Edition
• EdgeSight
• Password Manager
• Web Interface
• Workflow Studio
• Citrix Receiver/Merchandising Server/Dazzle

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

According to computing.co.uk, the Cooperative Group has essentially abandoned their VMware virtualization infrastructure to standardize on Citrix and Microsoft for an aggressive desktop virtualization rollout.

• World’s largest consumer-owned business with 123,000 employees

• Initial rollout of 3,000 XenDesktop users

• Joint Citrix/Microsoft solution displaced incumbent VMware ESX infrastructure

The Cooperative Group, based in Manchester, UK, is a United Kingdom consumers’ co-operative, and, after the acquisition of Somerfield supermarkets, is the world’s largest consumer-owned business, with over 4.5 million members and 123,000 employees across all its businesses.

According to the report, Co-operative will begin its rollout in its new Manchester headquarters, deploying 3,000 thin clients and laptops that will run virtual desktops based on Citrix XenDesktop. This approach was proved in with a successful 250 user pilot on HP thin clients. The Co-operative also made a strategic decision to switch from all-ESX infrastructure to a combination of Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008.

“We started off with VMware but it (VMware) started playing games on discount levels which we were not happy with,” said Dave Murrell, head of servers, storage and desktops at The Co-operative Group. “XenServer became a no-brainer for financial reasons as well as support, and we have a big datacentre licence for (Windows 2008) Hyper-V going forward anyway, so we will move away from VMware.”

By deploying the joint Citrix/Microsoft solution across the company, the Co-operative expects to drive significant savings on desktop support and “up to £1.53m per year on desktop PC upgrade costs, plus £459,000 a year on lower server, storage and desktop PC energy bills,” according to the computing,co.uk report.

Make sure you read the full article here. We are seeing more and more reports like this one, from companies both large and small. The Co-operative Group deployment is significant, in my opinion, for one, coming from a cost-conscious consumer-owned company competing in a tough retail market and, secondly, given the huge number of endpoints involved long-term.

Hosting IT as a Service has been around for 20 years.  Just ask the guys from Connections for Business, a Managed Service Provider in Fort Lauderdale, who has been in business for the past 30 years.  Yeah, I said Fort Lauderdale.  You may ask, I thought the only business in South Florida is tourism?  What is a technology company doing there?  Well, they are making a business… a good business and have been around for many, many years helping the SMB get out of the IT business. 

According to Jonathan Garber, VP of Business Development for Connections, they were The Cloud before there was one.  When I tapped him for more on this statement, he merely replied that they have been providing IT as a Service to the state of Florida before the “Cloud” ever existed.  That companies across the state have been using Connections as a way to off load all of their IT needs and focus on the things that make them money.  In one particular case, Jonathan told me about a firm who was more than willing to cut a check each month for thousands of dollars to Connections because the flexibility to use an outside service provider increased his profitability by leaps and bounds.  Connections provides services to scores of companies with the same value proposition.

It was refreshing to hear from a service provider who not only knows their stuff, but has the background and customer references to show what a top notch IT as a Service company looks like. In fact, they have been so dedicated to this business, they actually developed their own Network Operations Center software front end.  It’s called Connect Smart and it worked so well for them, they decided to put some shrink wrap around it and sell it to other service providers.  Now Connections for Business runs their own IT as a Service business, sells their NOC software and is poised to be a market maker in the southeast region of the U.S.

They have the ear of a large U.S. telco as well who is looking to use them as an incubation center for SMB IT services.  You can imagine that with all of this success, Connections was elated to hear about the Citrix Service Provider program. In fact they were one of the first to sign up. Jonathon told me, “Citrix provides us with the scalable solution to deliver Enterprise level power to the SMB market and access via the widest range of end devices. We are looking forward to expansive growth as this market continues to emerge. The SMB is ready for IT as a Service and we believe that together with Citrix, we can deliver.”

Connections is one more example of a company who is seizing the opportunity to meet the demand of the SMB in the IT as a Service space.  If you’re looking for a company who can do the same for you, just check out our partner locator.  Once you’re on the landing page, just click on the “Hosting Providers” tab. You can find Connections for Business and over five hundred other CSPs worldwide to help you out.

When configuring Citrix provisioning services for HA (feature of Xendesktop) you first need to decide on the type of storage you will use to host your VHD images. PVS provides active-active HA meaning each server will need to have access to the same set of VHDs simultaneously. NTFS will not tolerate multiple servers accessing the same LUN in a read-write mode, even if you are not actively making changes from the other servers. This just happens to be a limitation of NTFS.
The way PVS is designed allows us to not only host the VHDs in a central store location but also in a distributed model where we can have locally attached storage on each server and a copy of that VHD located on each server. PVS HA White Paper
A lot of our customers have typically leaned toward the distributed model of local storage or LUN-per-server because of simplicity, cost and scalability. This model does not require a SAN or clustered file system and it works on virtual as well as physical pvs server farms. It does comes with some additional administrative overhead requiring the administrator to copy new VHDs to all pvs servers in the farm and also making sure not to do it in the middle of production hours. Getting to the point of this post … a while back one of our customers and now Citrix TRM Jeff Laughter let me in how he used Microsoft’s DFS-R (Distributed File System Replication) to reduce some of this administrative overhead and also reducing the network bandwidth required and thought I would share it.

WHAT IS DFS-R?
Microsoft’s DFS-Replication (not DFS-namespace) is a replication engine with multiple features including replication scheduling, bandwidth throttling, and Cross File Remote Differential Compression (CF-RDC) which uses a heuristic to determine files that are similar to the file that needs to be replicated, and uses blocks of the similar files that are identical to the replicating file to minimize the amount of data transferred over the network.

HOW CAN I USE IT WITH PVS?
If you are using a Local Store HA configuration you can manually copy new VHD updates to each server’s local store or create a script to automate this copy but as a nice alternative you can use DFS-R to efficiently replicate these updated VHDs. For example if I am sending out a updated version of my VHD image and I make 100 MB worth of changes to my 20 GB VHD image instead of copying the full 20 GB file it would just replicate the differences in the file. It compares identical blocks at the file level.
We then can combine this with the pvs automatic update feature which will detect the new VHD image version and reassign your endpoints with the new VHD.
This is great for local HA configurations but can also be used for centrally distributing VHD updates for branch or remote servers.

SETTING UP DFS-R FOR PVS HA?
I have also recorded a video of setting up a 2008 R2 DFS-R replication group. Click here
These instructions are for 2008 R2-
1. Under Server Manager>Roles>File Services Click Add Role Services and choose DFS Replication. You do not want to choose DFS namespace just DFS Replication. (this step needs to be done on each PVS server in the farm)
2. Under Server Manager>File Services>DFS Management> Right Click on the Replication node and choose New Replication Group Wizard
3. Select Multipurpose replication group>Next
4. Provide Name of Replication Group and the Domain information>Next
5. Add each PVS server into the group>Next
6. Choose the “Hub and Spoke” topology>Next
7. Select your HUB server>Next this will be the PVS server that you will use for image creation and updates.
8. Optional hub member>Leave defaults>Next
9. You can choose to Replicate continuously with specified bandwidth or specify days and times that it is allowed. I have set it to continuous because I will not be moving the updated VHDs into the HUB directory until I am ready for them to replicate but you could use the scheduling so it doesn’t replicate until after hours. >Next
10. Choose Primary member(in our case the HUB server)>Next
11. Select your primary replication folder>Next this will be your main HUB directory that will be Read/Write.
12. Select Edit for each member spoke server and choose a local directory path (select the Read-only checkbox)>Next>Create this will be the path you have defined in PVS for your “local store”.
13. You will now need to increase the quota size for each member server. The default is 4 GB.

Now that you have configured DFS-r you can test it out by moving a VHD image into the HUB directory and let it replicate(you can force replication with Dfsrdiag SyncNow) then make a copy of that same VHD make some changes then move it into the HUB directory. You should see a major decrease in the time it takes for the second replication to complete.
If you are not using the PVS Automatic Updates feature (page 123) you will want to enable this on each of your PVS servers so you will not have to manually add new VHDs into the console and assign to endpoints.

Electronic Medical Records (EMR) implementations have their own, unique challenges. Healthcare organizations are concerned with selecting a vendor, complying with a myriad of regulations, and basically transforming the way healthcare is delivered to their patients.
Given the transformative nature of an EMR implementation, virtualization is often just a side thought for health CIOs. Therefore, I’d like to shed some light into the topic and share my personal top 5 reasons to pursue this topic further- starting with the centralization of medical records data.
For a quick definition of the term itself, please refer to yesterday’s blog.
I assume that the backend database for your electronic health records reside in a single, centralized datacenter. Through global server load balancing, you may have already implemented site-to-site redundancy, but that’s beside the point for today’s discussion.
So, traditionally, you would have rich client applications or web browsers on the user’s endpoint to consume and manipulate the medical records data. This automatically implies that a lot of health data moves to and from the datacenter and often to remote locations where it is challenging to maintain a tight grip on security.
Application or Desktop Virtualization can solve that problem. Both of these techniques move the client software piece (or web browser) to the datacenter, where it executes securely inside your facility. The health data never even leaves the datacenter. The user interaction happens via a secure, high performance protocol (such as Citrix’ HDX in the XenApp and XenDesktop product lines) and gives the user a snappy interaction with the software, while only exchanging screen updates and keyboard/mouse events between the end user and the datacenter. Additional data streams pertaining to peripherals, printers, USB devices, scanners, and client hard drives are possible, but can easily be disabled to promote further security.
No data ever makes it to the end point, and therefore reducing the risk of HIPAA/HITECH covered security breaches. In addition, user sessions can be audited to establish an independent trail of information in case the regulators or courts require a closer look.
If you’re curious, I encourage you to check out Dan Feller’s Ask the Architect site. Dan has a wealth of information on desktop and application virtualization and associated whitepapers and reference architectures.
Florian Becker
Twitter: @florianbecker
Virtualization Pulse: Tech Target Blog
Ask the Architect – Everything Healthcare

Someone once told me that the road to the Microsoft Global ISV of the Year award goes through Fort Lauderdale….this year, once again, they were correct. Citrix has won, for the fourth time, the Microsoft “Global Infrastructure Partner of the Year” award. This award recognizes the Microsoft Global ISV who is a proven technology innovator and is best aligned with Microsoft at all levels.
So why does this award matter? (Outside of the fact that my BusDev team is ecstatic on this great award win…these award applications are a lot of work and nothing beats winning!) For Citrix and our business partners, this award is recognition, by Microsoft, for a year of joint collaboration and success working together to create successful customers.

Our combined partnering effort to develop a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) go-to-market strategy around our award winning XenDesktop product and the Microsoft VDI Standard Suite and has been positively received by customers, and the pipeline continues to grow exponentially. Microsoft and Citrix combined resources over the last year to promote virtual desktops with an organized campaign including road shows, collateral, and a jointly funded proof of concept program that proved highly successful in customer infrastructures of all sizes.

In addition, Citrix has developed a deeper integration plan with the Microsoft System Center technologies. Over the past year, we have embraced MDOP (App-V) as an integral component of XenDesktop virtual application delivery. The Citrix XenApp Connector for Configuration Manager enables Microsoft® App-V virtualized applications to be delivered to any user on any device anywhere, extending the benefits of Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack to reach a broader set of devices including lightly managed and non-Windows® endpoints across local or wide area customer infrastructures. Our joint solution lowers the cost of delivering and maintaining Windows applications for all users in the enterprise.

In the field, investments by both companies have resulted in global teams of professionals dedicated to joint account planning and engagement that are sure to propel the relationship to the next level. Citrix and Microsoft had been successful partners in many areas throughout the world, and our recent investments are aimed at spreading that success globally to create more successful customers in every region in the world.

Citrix is proud to be the 2010 Microsoft’s Global Infrastructure Partner of the Year award winner. Thank you Microsoft and thanks to all our mutual customers throughout the world for this recognition. Our partnership is 21 years old and counting and we look forward to the years ahead, and the amazing things we will accomplish together. Over the next year we will continue to raise the bar not only for Citrix, but for all Microsoft partners…. I don’t believe anyone has ever won this award two years in a row…

Below is a link to the Microsoft Announcement for the 2010 Partner of the Year Awards Finalists and Winners

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/jun10/06-23MSPOTYPR.mspx

EDIT: I admit the original blog post was too much of a slant towards product group testing, without much context (and probably not fair), so the anonymous comments were well deserved without that context. I had been doing some investigation on SVGA interaction with ESX 4 Update 1, and discovered a pattern that other vendors as well as Citrix must use workarounds (not installing the SVGA ESX driver) in order to get products functional. By the end of the trail, I wound up at the Update 2 issue listed below.

This is where I started out on the trail.

XenDesktop workaround with Update1:
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX123952
Workaround: Uninstall the SVGA driver

Other investigation led me here:

Pano Logic workaround with Update 1:
http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/2010/05/28/my-panologic-evaluation/
Workaround: Uninstall the SVGA driver

Which then led me here:

If you didn’t know, ESX 4.0 Update 2 was released on June 10th. Here are the public release notes:
http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esx40_u2_rel_notes.html

On June 15th, a blog was released informing of this Update breaking PCoIP.
Here’s the blog reference:
http://blogs.vmware.com/kb/2010/06/vmware-alert-view-customers-using-pcoip-are-advised-to-not-apply-update-2-to-esx-40-yet.html

On June 17th, they released a workaround stating how to get it working again:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1022830

Basically any product that used the XPDM display driver in Windows 7, no longer functioned as of Update 1, as the vmtools replaced it with WDDM drivers. In the case of Update 2, it also broke PCoIP, somewhat similar to how Update 1 did for the other vendors.

This is because Vista/Win7 can only use one display driver or the other.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/display/multimonVista.mspx

So it’s up to the vendors to create products that leverage the VMW-supplied WDDM driver, or uninstall and use their own. Of course if they uninstall, the /console experience may not be desirable for the admin. XenDesktop does have the HDX 3D Graphics Pro agent that leverages WDDM, but that was meant for physical blades and harnessing high powered CUDA-enabled systems, not vanilla desktops.

The following is a blog I posted on my “other” site – Virtualization Pulse, hosted by Tech Target. Most readers on these pages are already very knowledgeable, so please forgive the simplistic view. In the near future, I will publish additional blogs on virtualization and specifically focus on the the healthcare IT space. Consider this one a relatively simple level-set for the audience. Enjoy.
———————————

Given that there are a lot of incentives associated with the adoption of Electronic Medical Records, medical CIOs and their teams are inundated by vendor messages these days. Phrases like “Meaningful Use”, “HITECH”, “HIPAA” are on the forefront of everyone’s mind, but you may also hear about virtualization. Given that there is still some confusion on the topic, I’d like to clear a couple of things up:

“Virtualization” is a term that has been traditionally used in the context of server virtualization. The technology involved is often referred to as “Hypervisors” which basically allow a modern server with plenty of CPU and Memory resources to share those resources between multiple “workloads” or “virtual servers”. So, instead of having one physical server with 16 CPU cores and 128 GB of RAM, this server can often house 40-60+ individual workloads that act on your network just as if they were much smaller individual servers. The benefits are obvious. Today’s servers are relatively cheap to acquire and most server workloads don’t require nearly as many computing resources to do their job. IT departments can lower cost by running fewer physical servers, consume less rackspace, lower power consumption and cooling costs. Advanced virtualization solutions also allow for virtual servers to automatically move to a separate physical host in case of a hardware failure. The failover process is often seamless and therefore provides resiliency, but typically requires a separate, redundant storage area network for this to work on the fly. Workloads with less criticality can be moved in a semi-manual fashion where they are simply restarted on another physical host by the administrator.
Vendors in this space include VMware (vSphere), Citrix (XenServer), Microsoft (Hyper-V) and a number of other players.

Application Virtualization. This is another form of virtualization, which has virtually nothing to do with server virtualization (pun intended). In this model, an application (think about your office productivity suite, or your electronic medical records client) is installed on a central server and executes there. The user connects from their endpoint (PC, laptop, thin client devices, etc.) via a remoting protocol and essentially controls the application remotely. This can be done on the simple level with Microsoft Terminal Services and the RDP protocol, and on the higher end via specialized solutions such as Citrix XenApp (formerly known as Presentation Server or MetaFrame). The benefits are obvious. Applications can be centrally managed and IT support personnel would no longer have to touch an end users system to install or patch an application. All updates are performed on a few centrally located servers. This approach also has the advantage of the application being physically close to the backend data of the app (on a low-latency, high bandwidth network), which leads to faster execution of the app and much increased security as the data never leaves the datacenter. The only information that is exchanged between the end-user’s device and the central server are screen updates and mouse and keyboard events. The protocols also include the capability of conveying information such as audio, printing, USB device support etc. The performance is actually astonishing in many cases and the most demanding customers in the area of engineering run their complex design applications via Citrix XenApp.

Desktop Virtualization. This is the latest and greatest. Instead of executing just a set of applications in the datacenter, the industry is moving towards executing desktop operating systems in the datacenter and allowing users to connect to the desktops . One could write a whole book about desktop virtualization, so I am trying to keep it brief. Some vendors tout a “VDI” or “Virtual Desktop Infrastructure” model, where each user basically has their own, assigned, virtual desktop in the datacenter. This model moves the headache of desktop maintenance to a central location, but still encounters some of the same challenges associated with traditional desktop management (such as the need to patch multiple desktop instances and troubleshoot/fix corrupted or infected desktops).
More advanced models go towards a shared desktop image model, where each user connects to a brand new, pristine desktop operating system, which folds the applications and user settings into the desktop as the user connects. This has the advantage of ensuring the highest performance (after all, a brand new desktop always performs best) and can also cut down on the number of desktops to maintain. Having just one or a handful of desktop master images to patch and maintain for thousands of users provides great efficiency gains and cost savings.

So, let’s recap. Server, Application, and Desktop Virtualization are three distinct disciplines in healthcare IT and are important to understand. Don’t fall for the siren’s song and believe that a particular vendor who is good at one discipline is automatically an expert at the other virtualization disciplines.
Check back on these pages in the near future for my rundown on virtualization techniques for your EMR implementation.

Florian Becker
Twitter: @florianbecker
Virtualization Pulse: Tech Target Blog
Ask the Architect – Everything Healthcare

100+ degree heat, searing sun, and free kool-aid! Who doesn’t love IT conferences in Vegas in June! Citrix will have a very deep and comprehensive presence at this year’s HP Technology Forum 2010 which is THE do not miss IT hardware event of the year! We have some great stuff planned for this year’s event including:  

• Demo Citrix XenClient LIVE and in person on HP laptops!
• Get the technical skinny on how Citrix XenClient – the industry’s FIRST type 1 hypervisor --- leverages Intel platforms in our joint breakout sessions with Intel. 
• Check out how Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V with HP StorageWorks P4000 SAN solutions are redefining business continuity to deliver high availability or all types of applications, not just “mission critical” ones. We’ll also show you how to set up a fully automated disaster recovery site using the Remote Copy feature of the HP P4000 in conjunction with the Citrix StorageLink Site Recovery.
• Get under the covers with joint Citrix, HP and Microsoft solutions for desktop virtualization including learning how to architect scalable desktop virtualization solutions to support thousands of Microsoft® Windows® 7 users.  
• Get hands on experience and proven best practices in deep dive lab sessionsfor configuring Citrix provisioning services, creating XenDesktop desktops, and configuring XenApp infrastructure all running on an HP ProLiant BladeSystem servers.

All in all, we have 8 joint break out and hands on lab sessions running at Tech forum 2010 and there might be a special surprise or two during the event!    I wish I could tell you more now – but I can’t – it’s  a secret!      To get the details you will have to join us at HP Tech Forum, June 21 -24 … See you there!  

Computerworld posted an article titled E-Health and Web 2.0: The Doctor will tweet you now. The title made me cringe, to be honest. If any medical provider would communicate with a patient via facebook or twitter on patient related topics, we’d have an avalange of lawsuits on our hands. Thankfully, it is not that bad as the article cited above describes electronic communications between doctors and patients accurately. However, the slightly misleading title still leads me to believe that some clarification on web and social media is in place.

• Ever heard of email? It’s this killer app that spread from scientists to the rest of the world in the mid-to-late nineties. It’s not inherently secure, but there are systems that allow for secure communication and it is slowly being discovered by the healthcare world to allow patients and providers communicate with one another. Instant messaging also falls into this category and so is text messaging (txt is really a special form of telephony and we have been using that killer app for at least 50 years to communicate with our doctor). Sophisticated EMR vendors have implemented such capabilities into their systems. There are many, but Epic’s MyChart module comes to mind – for an idea on how it works, check out the various Group Health Seattle Ads: I actually only found a recent one here. Group Health Seattle implemented MyChart and secure patient to doctor communication in 2002/2003 – long before YouTube became mainstream, so I can’t find the original ads, which also shows you that this is nothing new. The key here is that patients and providers don’t use the “traditional” email systems that are often available for free by various providers on the Internet, but implement a system directly into the Electronic Medical Records app, which has the added benefit that the communication becomes part of the patient’s record.

• Twitter and facebook are still relatively new, and are certainly not intended for any kind of point to point communication, but rather for dissemination to larger groups or “Communities of followers”. Businesses (Joe’s Pizza as much as a doctor’s office, larger group practice, or large hospital) leverage twitter, facebook, MySpace, etc. to update their customers about things they deem important. Announcing new products or services, sending links of interest, or providing patient education on general topics are all things that lend themselves greatly to twitter and facebook. By the way, the same information can be effectively distributed via email lists, but twitter and facebook allow for customer controlled opt-in and opt-out. Both sides win – customers don’t get annoying unsolicited emails and business don’t have to manage email lists. Again, evem the direct message feature in twitter does not lend itself to securely communicate with patients, hence my introductory cringing at the beginning of this blog.

• Speaking of blogs….Blogs are also labeled “social media”. The idea is really nothing new. In the old days (by that, I mean the very old days in the mid 90s), we had to teach ourselves HTML, stand up a web site, and voila – we could get our thoughts and comments out on the web. In my mind, blogs are the great equalizer as they are very easy to use and provide the technical means to publish articles and opinions to the web (some are rants – actually, this blog could be described as a mild rant) . Blogs often allow for others to comment on the original article and that way get a nice discussion going. In healthcare, blogs play an important role as patients can discuss their own conditions with others (often anonymously by using screen names instead of their real names). This also allows for the sharing of information and the establishment of a support network. It’s the 2009 version of Fight Club without the hugging. Twitter and blogs often go together as bloggers leverage twitter to announce a new post to their community of followers. Healthcare providers can provide pro-active patient education via blog sites and use twitter to let their patients know that something noteworthy has been published.

So – none of these concepts are new or revolutionary in my mind. These are old technologies that either make the administration easier (blogs) or allow more user control when it comes to information blasts (twitter, facebook), or facilitate point to point communication (email, IM,txt). It goes without saying that both patients and providers must carefully consider their privacy (and the associated regulations) when using either of these media forms.

Thoughts? Comments? Please post them here.
Follow me on twitter: @florianbecker