Citrix Products 2010: A Wish List

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)
Citrix/Terminal Services/Remote Desktop Services

What is a CTP Meeting all about?

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?”
Citrix/Terminal Services/Remote Desktop Services

New XenDesktop 4 Licensing Model: Flexibility? Yes, but at what Cost?

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.
Citrix/Terminal Services/Remote Desktop Services

Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM) and the Broken Rootdrive

Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM) and the Broken Rootdrive
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.
User Profiles

Four Ways to Increase the Capacity of Your Citrix XenApp Farm

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.
Performance/Sizing

Folder De-Localization with Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM)

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?
User Profiles

Citrix User Profile Manager: How Registry Exclusion Lists Can Mess Up Group Policy Processing

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.
User Profiles

ParseCitrixLicense Now Supports XenDesktop Licenses, Too

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.
Helge's Tools

Free Tool to Help You Better Understand What is Inside a Citrix License File

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.
Helge's Tools

The Most Interesting New Feature of Server 2008 Terminal Services / XenApp 5.0? Why, Font Smoothing!

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.
Citrix/Terminal Services/Remote Desktop Services

Undocumented Program Neighborhood Command Line Switches

Undocumented Program Neighborhood Command Line Switches
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.
Citrix/Terminal Services/Remote Desktop Services

Taming Black Holes: Parallel Session Creation

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?
Citrix/Terminal Services/Remote Desktop Services