Citrix

What would Joe, a Citrix admin, put on his Christmas wish list? Here are some guesses in no special order. XenApp A version of XenApp that runs on Windows Server 2008 R2 One console only, at least for XenApp PowerShell SDK for managing XenApp Realtime audio/video so that, for example, Microsoft Office Communication Server can be used well Migration tool that exports an old farm’s settings and imports them after optional transformation into a new farm Support for XenApp in SCCM (Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager)

I just returned from my first CTP (Citrix Technology Professional) meeting and thought I might share a few experiences. The meeting took place in one of Citrix’s headquarter buildings in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The meeting itself ran over two days, which means that most attendees were away from home and work for four. While that is certainly nice to know, the question you probably have is: “What does actually happen during such a meeting?”

It seems the Citrix community had only had one topic recently, albeit one discussed hotly: licensing. Now that Citrix has given in and practically allowed all conceivable license types, everybody is happy?! It seems so, although CCU licenses have doubled in price, as Shawn Bass points out. But is this really the happy ending of a short but wild story? Maybe, maybe not. Let me explain.

Terminal server application compatibility scripts have been around for a long time - so long in fact, that I considered them a legacy and stowed away any knowledge of them in a very remote area of my brain. When a Citrix customer brought up a problem with the mapping of ROOTDRIVE in the User Profile Manager forum, at first I had no clue what he was talking about. Luckily, the customer was able to pin the problem down to a specific command that failed when, and only when, User Profile Manager was processing the logon. This is the story of UsrLogon.cmd, ACRegL.exe and UPM.

Even with the most meticulous design, the day will come when your farm’s capacity is not sufficient any more. User numbers increase, applications become more resource-hungry and the amount of data to be handled increases steadily. So what do you do? Simply more of the same, i.e. buy more servers and add them to the farm? That is one way of increasing capacity, but it is not the only one and therefore may not be the best.

Jim Moyle recently started a blog on desktop and application delivery. While reading his first two posts I thought “yes, that’s so right”. Regretfully, people like him, who disregard the current hype and cut through the marketing BS, are scarce. More of the same, please!

Do you like what you read in this blog but have questions I did not answer (yet)? Or do you prefer listening and talking to live human beings instead of sitting alone in front of your screen? Well, come hear me speak and tell me what you think! This summer I will be speaking at the following conferences (all in Germany and in German, I am afraid):

This is a collection of new knowledge base articles related to Windows user profiles. As you can see, the last two months were pretty quiet. So quiet, that you may have missed the release of the first update to Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM). The new version comes as an MSI file that either installs or upgrades to UPM 2.0.1. You can get it from here.

Windows user profiles prior to Vista / Server 2008 contain localized folder names. End users expect that, of course, but admins tend to hate it because automated management becomes much more difficult. How can this dilemma be resolved? End users only see the local copy of the profile, while admins mostly have to deal with the central copy on a file server. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a “translator” component that makes sure local folders are localized while central folders are in one language only?

I will be attending the combined Citrix events iForum, Synergy and Summit 2009 in Las Vegas, which start in just a few days. As always, I hope to meet great people and have interesting conversations there. In case you want to talk to me, you need to locate me first. That should not be too difficult, though, given that I will be wearing these shirts most of the time:

The documentation of Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM, for short) recommends excluding the following registry keys from processing: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies The net effect of this is that the Citrix profiles managed by UPM do not contain any policy settings. The reasoning behind this being: Policies are reapplied anyway during the next logon, so there is no reason to waste CPU cycles on synchronizing such “redundant” information.

Citrix User Profile Manager, co-developed by sepago and Citrix, has been released. This is the first in a loose series of articles about UPM I intend to write. I will start by giving recommendations on how to set up the central profile storage called “user store”.

A few weeks ago I published the tool ParseCitrixLicense which displays the contents of Citrix license files in a human-readable form. The original version 1.0 did not support XenDesktop licenses, for the simple reason that I had none to test my program with. Recently my colleague Nicholas Dille provided me with a XenDesktop eval license which I used to implement the missing tags in ParseCitrixLicense. Please see for yourself what ParseCitrixLicense extracts from a XenDesktop license file.

With the release of the hotfixes KB946633 and PSE450R02W2K3037 ClearType font smoothing is finally available on both the current and the upcoming Citrix flagship products Presentation Server 4.5 and XenApp 5.0. Remains the question of how to configure it.

It took five years and probably lots of customer complaints, but finally one of the most important technologies introduced with XP/Server 2003 is available over the remoting protocols RDP and ICA: font smoothing aka ClearType.

Update: Version 1.1 supports XenDesktop Licenses in Addition to XenApp Licenses Most Citrix products rely heavily on license files. While the basic format of a license file is somewhat documented, most fields used in license files are not. This makes understanding their contents difficult. It does not help that the license files can hardly be called readable with most of the relevant data in one long line.

Much has been written about the many new features of Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services. Now, with the upcoming release of Citrix XenApp 5.0 (Project Delaware), Citrix updates its best-selling product and ports it to the new platform. Brian Madden analyzes whether it is still worth buying Citrix XenApp / Presentation Server on top of pure Windows Terminal Services.

Nearly every professional working with Citrix Presentation Server knows about Program Neighborhood (PN), and some may even use it frequently. It was first introduced in MetaFrame 1.8 and is used to start published applications from one or more server farms. In PN you can either configure individual applications or define application groups. The latter are simply lists of published applications which PN pulls from a designated Presentation Server and displays in its UI.

Have you ever tried to log on to a terminal server and, after entering your credentials, been forced to stare at a grey screen for a lengthy period of time wondering what the machine might actually be doing? Of course you have, along with a few million other terminal server users. Being a technical guy (you would not be reading this otherwise) you have checked CPU / memory / hard disk utilization and the current session count when users complain that logons are slow. You will probably have noticed that all relevant metrics are in the green and logons are the slower, the more users try to log on to a server concurrently. It turns out that parallel logons are the root cause of the problem. Why?

This post covers a technology developed by Microsoft Research in the late 90s that finally made it into terminal services: ClearType. ClearType As is sometimes the case with technology, it is difficult to explain how it works, yet easy to see the benefits. Let us start with the easy part.