Daniel Feller from the Citrix Worldwide Consulting Solutions group has posted a nice set of Visio Stencils for the new Citrix Delivery Center components.  This includes visio shapes for all the new XenApp branded components as well as XenDesktop, XenServer, Password Manager, Netscaler, WANscaler, Branch Repeater, etc.  I definitely recommend picking up a copy if you frequently do Visio diagrams of Citrix infrastructure components.  And thanks to Daniel for sharing this with the community.

I received an email yesterday that I was nominated and approved for a Microsoft MVP in Terminal Services.  What can I say other than I'm honored to be included in such a great group of people who contribute so much to the community at large.  Thanks to everyone for their support.  My MVP page can be found here.  One of these days (when I get free time) I'll actually update my profile to include all the relevant info.  Also, Congrats to the other new Terminal Server MVPs:  Seung Heun Noh: Terminal Server: Engineering, Greg Shields: Terminal Server: Author, and Joe Shonk: Terminal Server: Architecture.  

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The age old question of whether or not you should virtualize a Citrix server.  It use to be a diffcult question because the virtualization platforms were not very optimized for a Terminal Server workload.  Many things have changed in this regard, and now it's not such a crazy decision anymore.  There are certain use cases where it's a no brainer (license servers, web interface, secure gateway, etc).  However, for pure Presentation Servers it was always a bit of a toss up.  On one hand you have a situation where you know you're going to get less users than on physical hardware, versus the other side that says since 32-bit Windows is limited to 2 GB of kernel memory, then virtualizing some Citrix servers on a 16GB or 32GB server carved up into several Terminal Server VMs will scale more users than a single physical instance on th equivalent server hardware.  But that's comparing a physical install using 32-bit Windows, not 64-bit.  Still, it does make a lot of sense to at least consider virtualizing your Terminal...

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Vishal Ganeriwala from Citrix has recently posted a blog entry about a social networking contest that's being conducted at the Citrix Synergy event next week in Houston.  If you happen to be attending, here's how the process goes:

You comment on Vishal's blog entry stating that you'd like to borrow one of the FlipVideo cameras. You record some 5 minute video segment capturing your thoughts (or someone elses if you don't have any LOL) regarding the Citrix Synergy event. You turn the camera back into Vishal the following day. All the videos get uploaded to YouTube. The top 5 most viewed submissions will receive the FlipVideo camera for free....

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Vishal Ganeriwala from Citrix sent me a tip that Dr. SDK (head Citrix MFCOM jockey) has updating his SDK Guide "Scripting MetaFrame".  The new guide can be found here and is a must read for anyone attempting to use MFCOM from VBScript/PowerShell, etc.

Gus Pinto has blogged recently about a utility developed by the internal IT organization at Citrix that was used to assist in minimizing the amount of time required to get people into their Citrix apps.  You can see a "veedio" [ LOL @Gus ;) ] of this in action here.  Gus also did a follow up interview with the creators of the utility here.

One thing to know up front about this utility is that it will be released to the web as an unsupported utility on CDN.  It won't be an "official" Citrix product.

Now before I comment on this, let me first state that I have no inside knowledge of how this thing was developed, nor am I an expert at the inner workings of it.  That being said, let me state some assumptions about how I *think* this thing is working and some potential shortcomings of it. ...

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With only three weeks to go before the Citrix Synergy event in Houston, TX Barry Flanagan has posted up a list of technical sessions from the Citrix Synergy conference.  While anything could happen, I'm getting the general feeling like this might just be the most technical Citrix iForum ever.  Even if not, I'm just happy that Citrix is actually publically recognizing the Citrix Technology Professional program as opposed to treating it like the ugly red-headed stepchild (no offense to ugly red-headed stepchildren).

View the list of technical sessions in Barry's blog entry.

I have been a long time supporter of the Citrix Online GotoAssist product as an excellent way for organizations to provide remote support to their internal associates, but specifically for their remote office workers, work from home employees, and third party customers/partners.  Whenever I'm able

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Never in a million years did I ever expect to hear a reference to Brian Madden in a public video from Mark Templeton, but that day has come.  I was reading a blog item from Jeffrey Muir where he mentioned a video that Citrix was sending throughout the company as a commercial advertisement to re-enforce the reasons why people should attend Citrix Synergy.  Jeff posted a link to the video and I gave it a listen.  Surprisingly, Mark talks about the Geek Speak Live section of the conference that several of the Citrix Technology Professionals (including myself) will be speaking at.  This is a great thing as it's becoming clear that Citrix is really beginning to recognize the CTP program and evangelize it within the organization.  If you're going to Synergy, I recommend you stop in on the Geek Speak Live sessions.  I'm sure...

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I have a customer that is performing an upgrade to Presentation Server 4.5 right now.  The way I setup their deployment is that the server is built with 2003 SP2 and then an unattended build of PS 4.5.  Then after the server is joined to the farm, there's an Installation Manager package group of about 50 core components that are pushed to the server.  From a Citrix hotfix perspective, the following items are deployed:

PSE450W2K3R01.msp  - Hotfix Rollup Pack 1

PSE450R01W2K3003.msp PSE450R01W2K3004.msp PSE450R01W2K3007.msp PSE450R01W2K3008.msp PSE450R01W2K3009.msp PSE450R01W2K3010.msp PSE450R01W2K3029.msp PSE450R01W2K3033.msp PSE450R01W2K3036.msp PSE450R01W2K3042.msp

PSE450R01W2K3032.msp -  Limited Release hotfix

These hotfixes were generally deploying well to all servers, but I've noticed an odd situation that's sometimes occurring when I push the entire package group to a brand new server.  It seems that during the deployment of PSE450R01W2K3008.msp it sometimes stalls the installation of the IM Package Group (i.e. it does ever seem to finish).  Upon further investigation of the MSI log, I'm seeing where the problem is occurring.  Here's a snippet of the MSI log with the relevant MSI action that's hanging the install:

...

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