By Shawn Bass on Thursday, March 27, 2008 7:13:00 AM

It's no secret that Citrix is planning on moving large parts of the Citrix farm configuration into Group Policy.  One of the many reasons for doing this is that you could build a new server, drop it into an OU, and have it preconfigured for use.  While this group policy based farm configuration won't be coming for a year or two, there's some important things that Juliano has discussed in a blog entry with respect to how you get from IMA-based farm/server config to Group Policy based farm/server config.

Essentially what Citrix is planning on doing is creating a Migration Utility that would read the farm information from your current PS 4.5 environment, export the entire thing to an XML file (which you could then edit to make minor modifications and then import it into the new XenApp environment that is Group Policy based.  While I applaud Citrix's thoughts in this manner, I also feel like this type of utility is about 7 years overdue. If a farm migration ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 2:57:09 PM

I just noticed on Frameworkx.com that Gus and Rich have officially joined Citrix Systems as Technology Evangelists.  This isn't entirely surprising as both of them worked for Citrix in previous lives, but what is interesting is the timing.  Citrix has recently lost several of their Citrix Technology Professional (CTP) members.  One wonders if this isn't some tit for tat with Provision/Quest...  Of course with Gus gone, there goes another CTP.  Don't worry Gus, I'll hold down the fort for ya!

See this blog entry on Frameworkx for the details.

I know both Gus and Rich very well and I wish both of them the best of luck with Citrix.

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, March 04, 2008 3:43:38 PM

I'm at a client side right now working on a large SoftGrid implementation project. I'm going through the motions sequencing applications when I came across one application from Reuters named StockVal. While I initially figured that this would be a slam dunk sequencing process, I discovered that it was anything but that. You see it's become apparent to me that application virtualization doesn't actually save you from your own stupidity. What do I mean by this? I mean that one of the biggest challenges with traditional software packaging is that packagers do stupid things. What kind of stupid things?  Well here's some that I've personally solved over the last year:

1) Packager snapshots MDAC 2.5 RTM version registry key (the Data Access version key) and distributes said package to over 3,000 desktops. Those desktops that attempt to install anything that requires MDAC 2.7+ fail as they are stating that the machine needs MDAC 2.7. Well XP doesn't come with MDAC ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, February 26, 2008 9:48:11 AM

There's a lot of buzz in the security industry right now after a paper was published by some researchers from Princeton University that demonstrates how whole disk encryption systems can be completely thwarted by obtaining the encryption keys from a laptop's RAM.  How is this possible?  Well, when an Operating System is in sleep mode the decryption keys are stored in memory to allow the operating system to boot back up and continue accessing the encrypted disk.  In addition, different RAM chips decay their memory contents at different rates when power has been removed from the RAM chips.  Cooling the RAM chips can slow that decay rate upwards of 10 minutes by using a simply air duster can turned upside down.  Once the RAM chips are cooled, their contents can be dumped by booting to a USB disk with memory extraction tools, or if you're unable to change the boot order, the chips can be removed and transferred to another system where the contents of the RAM c ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, February 26, 2008 8:01:04 AM

Citrix has posted my second technical video this time covering an Introduction to Citrix Streaming and Virtualization (or Isolation as Citrix loves to call it)

As Brian Madden alluded to here and here, Citrix has begun to post more and more technical videos on the XenApp landing page. Within the last week they've posted up the video I created that describes what Citrix Streaming is all about and demonstrates a walk through of creating a streamed application for both a Presentation Server and an ICA Client.  The video is 33 minutes long and gives a good overview of how Streaming works as well as some best practices for streaming your applications.  If you like this video, please post a comment and let me know y ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, February 19, 2008 4:31:02 PM

At a customer site I recently ran into an issue in their PS 4.5 farm (PS 4.5 with HRP1 and AMC 4.6 updates).  The issue manifests itself as certain icons appears a black squares.  The strange part is the icon doesn't look like a black square while you're adding the published app, but the minute you click Finish to save the published application, you see the AMC display it in all of it's blackness like so:

If you then go to view one of these icons in Web Interface, you'll see it show up like this:

Obviously this will result in confusion for the admin as well as frustrated us ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, February 14, 2008 3:34:50 PM

Citrix finally put out a public hotfix to replace limited release hotfix PSE450R01W2K3021.  The new hotfix PSE450R01W2K3033 fixes several issues with Installation Manager including one that's existed since MetaFrame XP!

Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, February 14, 2008 9:06:51 AM

Citrix has recently announced a new product called Workflow Studio that is a tool for putting together a visual workflow for completing repetitive tasks.  This workflow would then leverage PowerShell scripts to complete the individual tasks.  What's interesting about this tool is that Citrix has mentioned that it came from an unmentioned technology acquistion/partnership.  From my perspective, it sounds an awful lot like FullArmor's Workflow Studio product that was announced in July 2007.  It's also got the PowerShell community wondering the same thing.  Folks like Karl Prosser of the amazing PowerShell Analyzer and PowerShe ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, February 14, 2008 8:23:15 AM

Trying to play catch up on the industry as I've been extremely busy lately.  I've come across several blog items from other community guys that I thought were important to share.  All of these items have something to do with Terminal Server scale / performance.

First Michel Roth of ThinComputing.net pointed me to a new free utility from Warren Simondson of Ctrl-Alt-Del Consultancy called TSLoadStat.  This is a command line utililty that measures a few server performance stats and reports them on the command line.  While I don't personally find static measurement tools a good indication of server performance (especially because often these tools induce their own load that artificially makes the server look terribly busy when it's not, it's still worth mentioning here).  You can find the information on TSLoadStat here.

Ne ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Wednesday, February 13, 2008 8:14:58 AM

PubForum is a conference that is put on by Server Based Computing experts as a community gathering / learning experience.  I presented at PubForum 2005 in Nice, France and it was a great experience.  If you plan to be in Dublin during May 9th through 11th, or if you've ever wanted to go to Dublin, I highly recommend this conference.  The conference costs a nominal €175 so it's not very expensive.  Although with the current weak dollar, that's about 1 billion USD LOL.  It's actually around $260-275 US.

More details about the conference including scheduled presenters and topics can be found at the following link.