Al has a very nice overview of Citrix XenServer 4.01 and areas that it compares/differs to VMWare ESX.  It's a great read.

Aaron has a great snippet about Adobe Flash 9e breaking Citrix's SpeedFlash acceleration as the ActiveX OCX that Citrix is looking for isn't present in this version.  You probably want to give this blog entry a read before upgrading your Flash components on your servers.

A few weeks ago I set out to get a test rig running for lab VMs running under Citrix Xen and Server 2008's Hyper-V.  However, my lab (READ: basement) already has 4 rack servers, a Citrix Access Gateway, several routers, a 1.5TB NAS, and a 3000kva UPS.  I was a bit concerned that bringing another rack server that sounds like a jet turbine into the basement might be a bit too much for the boss (READ: wife)

Since I wanted this rig to be used only for lab VM (my prod VMs run on the redundant rack servers), I decided that a simple white box system with a good proc and sufficient RAM should do the trick perfectly.  The biggest concern that I had was I knew that both Citrix Xen and Server 2008 Hyper-V require that you use 64-bit CPUs (not a big deal today) and a BIOS that supports setting Intel-VT or AMD Pacifica to enabled (this is the setting that will often leave you with a whitebox system that won't...

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Citrix is beginning a series of webinars to talk about the various SDK components.  I personally think this is very valuable as there's always a need to script some component leveraging the Citrix SDKs.  What a great way to learn about it from the Citrix developers themselves.

The first webinar in the series will on the Virtual Channel SDK and will be held on Friday January 25th 2008.  The webinar will cover the following topics:

• Brief Introduction to ICA protocol
• What is ICA virtual channel?
• Possible uses of custom virtual channels
• Virtual channel components
• Client-Server data exchange
• Introduction to Virtual Channel SDK
• Sample virtual channel demo

Click here to view the information on the webinar and to find the registration link.

Problems installing Office XP on Terminal Server while trying to suppress the installation of Outlook.  This is a confirmed bug in the Office installation routine.

What is Project S-Bend?  In it's simplest form, it's a mechanism of notifying a Citrix admin of audit related events that are occuring on your Presentation Server 4.5 farm.  Ok, so what is it really?  It's a Windows Service that Jason wrote that identifies changes to your Configuration Logging database (new in PS4.5) via a SQL Trigger.  When new events are written to the Config Logging database, Jason's windows service will dispatch an email to you letting you know what changed.  Here's a link to where you can read about S-Bend and download it.  And here's a link for basic setup instructions.  Awesome stuff.

I'm not sure how I missed this KB article in December, but Citrix released the tool to recreate the Citrix Print Service user account.  The tool can be downloaded from CTX113554.

Thanks to Thomas Koetzing for the link.

From the SoftGrid Team Blog I learned that Microsoft recently published a guide that provides information on how to setup Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 (formerly SoftGrid) and how to implement the different modes of Streaming/Virtualization that are available in 4.5.  The guide can be found here.

Al has a nice tip on improving the performance of RDP and ICA connections on Windows Vista.  Read the full details here.

One of the Microsoft folks in Indonesia put a new spin on the otherwise boring TS Web Access in Server 2008 by putting a Siverlight front end to it.  While it may not be practical for business people to launch their apps this way, it does look pretty!

Check out the demo here.

Download and explanation of how you can set it up here.

And thanks to Thincomputing.net for the link.