XenApp

A recent article on Microsoft’s Ask the Directory Services Team blog piqued my interest. It talks about how leaked access tokens prevent logon sessions to be freed when the user logs off. This wastes system resources that can only be reclaimed by rebooting. A symptom of this happening is that RDS session IDs are not reused.

This article is based on my Citrix Synergy 2015 session and is the fourth in a mini-series on Group Policy performance. All measurements by uberAgent on Windows Server 2012 R2 with Citrix XenApp 7.6 in a steady state. Please start reading with the first article.

What is API Hooking? API hooking is all about making others do things they never even knew they could do. More precisely: tricking other processes into doing things differently from what their developers programmed.

This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. In the previous articles in this series we saw how to calculate a farm’s capacity and then how to determine its load. With that information and knowledge of our methodology we can go about calculating the capacity of the new farm, in other words doing the actual sizing. Which is dead simple, by the way.

This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. In the previous part of this series we saw how to determine the capacity of a server farm. This time we will look at how that capacity is utilized, in other words at farm load. As before we will do that for the four main components of a XenApp server separately: CPU, memory, storage and network.

This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. As we have seen in part 1 of this series, when sizing a new farm the first thing we need to know is the capacity of the existing farm. Armed with data on capacity and additionally load, we can easily calculate the capacity of a new farm. In this article I describe how to determine capacity of the four relevant hardware components of a XenApp server: CPU, memory, storage and network.

This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. One of the first things you need to do after starting a XenApp farm upgrade project is to answer the obvious question from management: how much will it cost? In order to be able to answer, you need to have a good understanding of the resources required. In other words, you need to size the farm.

This is a very personal recommendation of what to read to become and stay an expert in Citrix XenApp. Learning the Basics Terminal Services for Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Advanced Technical Design GuideTerminal Services for Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Advanced Technical Design Guide Brian Madden and Ron Oglesby Available online free of charge

Managing Internet Explorer via group policy is a daunting task. Hundreds of policies are available to control the browser’s user interface, security settings and much more. This article lists strategies and scripts I have found helpful.

As before this is mainly a condensed and beautified version of my twitter postings. You can get them unfiltered and without delay by following me. Office 2010 Here is a nice overview of the new Office suite by Mark Wilson. By the way: Although available as 32-bit and 64-bit versions, the 32-bit version is the default and recommended by Microsoft for the time being.

Not sure where user profile management might be useful? Here is an example that should apply to almost everyone. The obvious new user interface feature of Microsoft Office 2007 is the ribbon. But there are numerous other UI enhancements over Office 2003. One of these are the Quick Access Toolbars. If you are not sure what I am talking about: the following screen shot should give you an idea (from a German version of Office, sorry):

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)

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.