I previously blogged about a memory leak in Secure Gateway 3.1.1 and that you should avoid it.  Citrix has released Secure Gateway 3.1.2 that fixes the memory leak in 3.1.1.  Get it at CTX122212.

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be presenting three sessions at the Fall Citrix User Group Norway event in Geilo, Norway from October 7th to October 9th.  There will be plenty of great speakers coming including Simon Crosby, Rich Crusco, Rick Dehlinger, Benny Tritsch, Rene Vester and Alex Yushchenko.  The event is going to be held at the Dr. Holms Hotel in Geilo.  Very much looking forward to attending and thanks to the cug.no group for inviting me to speak there.  Details on the agenda of the event are not public yet, but I'm sure they'll be...

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I've just posted up details on the November 2009 5-day Advanced Citrix training class that will be held in Las Vegas, NV.  This class is a great opportunity for people who administer Citrix environments to get deep understanding of how Terminal Services and Citrix XenApp environments really work.  We'll also discuss server virtualization, Provisioning Server, XenDesktop, etc but the class is primarily focused on XenApp.  This class is not made for people who are new to Citrix and we don't spend time on pointless lab exercises that you can do without an instructor there.  This is 5 days full of in depth technical lecture and best practices sharing.  You don't want to miss this.

The 5-day master class is $2895 USD and there's a maximum class size of 16.  Full details of what is covered in the class as well as details on how to secure a seat is located on the training page.  Hope to see you there!

At a client of mine we're steadily rolling out 3k instances of XenDesktop.  One issue that surfaced early on is that Weblogic Workspace v10.2 crashed on launch after the deployment of the Citrix XenDesktop Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA).  The client had packaged/certified the 3.03.059 release of the VDA.  After deploying the VDA and rebooting, user's of Weblogic Workspace 10.2 were unable to launch the application.  The crash that would appear is this:



It turns out that this particular issue is caused by applications that attempt to acquire a large allocation of memory during startup.  Something about the XenDesktop VDA breaks this ability.  The good news is that Citrix has found this issue and corrected it in the new XenDesktop 3.0 Feature Pack 1 VDA (3.1.3236) which can be downloaded at CTX121590

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A client of mine experienced some slowness/freezing of XenDesktop 3.0 sessions when used from India.  The slowness is experienced during logon, but also during a minimize/maximize of the XenDesktop session or during an unlock of the local PC.  Here is the background of this issue and what was done to mitigate the issue.

Background: Client uses folder redirection of Application Data folder. That AppData folder is currently redirected across the WAN because of lack of infrastructure in India. Yes, I realize this is an extremely bad practice, but it's what they decided to do and it's what I currently have to deal with. Client PCs are in India. XenDesktop VMs are in Chicago. Circuit is 9MB bandwidth and approximately 270 ms of round trip latency.

Issue: Desktop Receiver takes approximately 90 seconds to complete the logon to a hosted desktop. However, this delay is a one time daily expense so was workable, however the bigger problem is that any time the hosted desktop was minimized and maximized...

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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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