This is the first article in a multi-part series about building and maintaining an inexpensive scalable platform for VDI in enterprise environments. Requirements Before we can even start to think about a possible architecture, we need requirements. Only requirements enable us to make choices that benefit the customer. Without proper requirements we are not building for the real world but for some alternate reality. Please keep in mind when reading this article that the solution presented here only makes sense for you if your requirements are similar.

It sometimes happens when I reply to an e-mail from somebody who is asking about my products that the receiving mail server rejects my message with the code “554 rejected due to spam content”.

When you use XenDesktop the only way it makes sense you may find that Citrix has not really put much effort into making that a smooth experience. Persistent is a Second-Grade Citizen XenDesktop is really designed to be used with pooled desktops - machines that are reset to a pristine state when the user logs off. Of course, stateless desktops are much better (and, importantly, cheaper) served from XenApp. This has been the topic of many a debate which I will not repeat here. But I will state that if you give a so-called knowledge worker a personal desktop, you better make sure that desktop is persistent.

Processing several terabytes of data per day is not too uncommon and easily possible with Splunk - that is one of the many things I learned at .conf 2013 in Las Vegas.

This is a collection of answers to questions around Atlantis Ilio you are likely to have when using the appliance in production. How Can I Get Detailed Load Information? If you want to find out what an Ilio appliance really is doing and the information displayed in Ilio Center is not detailed enough, issue the following on the command line:

Whether user profiles are loading slowly or group policy processing is taking too long - uberAgent for Splunk tells you exactly what is causing slow logons. uberAgent always supported a broad range of platforms, from physical PCs through virtual desktops to Citrix XenApp. Today we add RES Workspace Manager to that list!

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Many errors related to user profiles result in the user getting a temporary profile instead of the regular local or roaming profile. I have written about possible causes for that here. In addition to that, there is an entirely different category of errors that occur when even a temporary profile cannot be created. This article describes likely causes.

Cleanly shutting down all virtual machines on a given set of hosts is not as trivial as it might seem - especially if you want to be able to restore the original state once the planned maintenance you are doing this for is completed.

I have been using Windows 8 Client Hyper-V for a while now and must say it works like a treat - except for one thing: it is practically impossible to give VMs at the same time NATted internet access and connect them to other VMs and to the host. Windows Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) just does not work reliably and I have found no other product to use instead.

I had to troubleshoot a case where it suddenly was not possible any more to connect via ICA/HDX to freshly installed Windows 7 VDI machines. As it turned out, the root cause was a combination of Microsoft disabling legacy technologies and Citrix relying on them.

Analyzing slow boots is a difficult task. You need to install software like XPerf and master its far-from-intuitive command-line options to generate a trace file that you can then analyze. Once you find a possible cause for the long startup duration you never know if it is specific to the machine you analyzed or if it affects other PCs, too. In other words: XPerf, although powerful, is difficult to master. And it does not scale. uberAgent does. And it is super-easy to use.

I just had a situation where I was facing an empty desktop with no way to logoff, start a program or do anything else. The only thing left to do was to log the session off from an admin session. This got me thinking: how many ways are there to create such a situation? I am writing down all the ways I know of and ask everybody to contribute. Can you come up with a way to end up with a completely empty desktop I and no one else thought of before?

There are situations when you have VMs on disk, but vCenter does not know about them - i.e. they are not in the inventory. While it is fairly easy to add a single machine to the inventory, doing so for dozens or hundreds or VMs is too tedious to do manually. This script automates the process.

Do you know the maximum number of users each of your terminal servers can host with acceptable performance? You may have found out the hard way how many are too many - but how many are just right? Farm sizing and server capacity planning are typical tasks for consultants who often have a hard time fighting the peculiarities of perfmon and logman trying to get the data they need for their calculations. It can be so much easier at no additional cost. The 60-day Enterprise Trial version of Splunk in conjunction with an evaluation license of uberAgent give all the information you need in much less time. Here is how.

When you move users from a physical PC to a VDI environment you may find that they are not too happy with their new machine’s performance - it happened to me. To quantify things I took a series of measurements comparing the old PCs we migrated away from with both VDI machines and the new PCs available to some.

Let use take a look at some graphs I created with Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA), showing a typical corporate laptop boot Windows 7. Detailed information on creating such a trace can be found in my earlier article Analyzing a Slow Boot with Windows Performance Recorder & Analyzer.

In the last five years Xperf has gained popularity as an administrator’s secret weapon for battling all kinds of performance issues. But just when it was on the brink of becoming as mainstream as such a tool can be, Microsoft superseded it by something else: Windows Performance Recorder.

Today it is still as common as it was in the 90s to go for a coffee after switching on the PC in the morning, only to find it still booting when coming back several minutes later. SSDs have not arrived in the average office yet, and even they can only cure some of the diseases that cause computers to start up agonizingly slowly.

When you buy a new HP server it comes with the BIOS setting HP Power Profile set to Balanced Power and Performance. That sounds good but is bad - at least for CPU performance in a VDI environment.

The days are long gone when a browser was just another application. Modern websites are applications of their own, and the browser is their operating system. That has consequences for monitoring. It is no longer sufficient to gather performance data for the browser as a whole. When, for example, Internet Explorer’s CPU usage is high, Administrators need to understand what caused that. Is it the business-critical ERP site or are people just watching fun videos on YouTube?

Windows Explorer is an end user, a consumer product. It creates a reality distortion field that hides part of what is really there and makes you see things that do not exist. That is OK for its intended customer base, but as an administrator you cannot afford to live in a dream world.

Considering the importance of fast logons for a good user experience there is surprisingly little information on the subject. Windows does not even record the total logon time, let alone where it is spent. Administrators wishing to analyze their users’ logons are left in the dark. But that can be changed.

Even if you only have a moderately sized VDI deployment chances are high you will face the problem of getting USB smart card readers to work on the virtual desktops. Given that this is such a basic requirement it is astonishingly hard to implement correctly. To save you the pain of having to start from scratch here is my description of how to do it.

This is a collection of bugs, errors and problems I encountered working with Offline Files, along with possible solutions or at least workarounds. For more information about Offline Files see also my other articles about this topic.