After having just migrated a customer from Web Interface 3.0 + Secure Gateway 2.0 to Web Interface 5.1 / Secure Gateway 3.1.1 I had the unfortunate pleasure of finding a memory leak in Secure Gateway 3.1.1.  After some period of time (hours/days depending on how busy your SG environment is) the private bytes in use by the Secure Gateway service climbs to a point where it stops functioning.  When this happens you're down.  What's worse is that if you're using traditional port monitoring on a hardware load balancer, the SG Service still listens on 443 so your load balancer won't direct users away from the non-functional Secure Gateway host.  About three days ago Citrix pulled the Secure Gateway 3.1.1 download as visible on CTX121012  However that doesn't help me much since my customer was turned up a few days prior to it being pulled UGH!.  Anyway, I'm now in the process of uninstalling SG 3.1.1 and installing 3.1 in it's place (which sucks because 3.1 has a security vulnerability).  Hopefully Citrix will put out a fixed 3.1.1 release and more importantly hopefully they start communicating these types of things through their blog, etc.

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Over the course of the last few years, I taught an Advanced Citrix training class that was originally developed by Brian Madden.  Over those few years, I took the material and updated it, rewrote large parts of it and made it my own.  At the same time, Dr. Benny Tritsch began contributing to the material and was teaching the class in Europe.  After BrianMadden.com was acquired by TechTarget, Brian (and myself and Benny Tritsch) effectively halted those training classes.  This is why the Training URL on Brian's site says "We're working on our 2009 schedule".  Anyway, I've arranged a relationship with a training facility and I intend on giving the training class anywhere from 2-4 times per year (no need to become a career trainer - there's plenty of those out there now).  If you're looking for a training class to really learn how Citrix works, then this is the class for you.  We don't do any of those pointless labs that are in most training cirriculum....

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So I've got a client that I've been rolling out HRP04 for XenApp 4.5 in order to resolve a nasty conflict between Microsoft App-V and Citrix's Client Drive provider cdm.sys that results in BSODs in certain circumstances when users of App-V applications try to perform I/O to their client drives.  The system BSODs with a Stop 8E.  I've been cautious about rolling out HRP04 because we've found re-introduction of some multimonitor glitches that were quite stable with HRP02 (as long as Post-HRP02 3040/3044 wasn't deployed - can't remember which of those two the seamless problem came from).  Anyway, I've got HRP04 rolled out to about 80% of the farm, but we have one app that was bombing in Seamless mode because the application didn't think that the session had an 800x600 sized display.  What's strange about this issue is that I ran...

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I'll be giving a session a Pubforum 2009 in Dublin, Ireland on June 5-7 (yes Friday through Sunday, this is a geek conference after all).  I'll be presenting on VDI and where the industry in general is at now that XenDesktop 3.0 has been released.  Stop by and say hello!

My good friend Jeroen van de Kamp of Login Consultants mentioned that they've recently released the 0.5 Beta of their platform independent performance benchmarking tool for TS/Citrix and VDI environments.  What would a tool like VSI be used for?  Let's say you want to compare how many VDI sessions you can get on VMware ESX vs Citrix XenServer, or how many Terminal Server sessions you can squeeze out by tweaking your LanMan Parameters or Virus Scanner settings, etc.  This is the type of benchmarking that this tool was created for.  The best part, Login gives it to us for free!  That's free as in beer.

Some of the new features of the 0.5 release are:

True platform independence (both VDI & SBC) through a powerful custom command line option within the launcher, this includes the possibility to use a CSV file with advanced connection details for each individual session; Randomization of user data within each user load loop, this is the most important new feature of this beta as now optimizers (either at a memory or network level) cannot optimize/cache/compress/de-duplicate in an unrealistic fashion;...

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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.