shawnbass.com - Server Based Computing blog

Need a good way to benchmark your TS/VDI environment? Login Consultants releases beta 0.5 of Virtual Session Indexer

shawn@shawnbass.com — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 01:32:59 GMT

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;
Simplified and centralized configuration of the Launcher(s) and setting-up multiple launchers (master-slaves) for large scale tests is now more straightforward;
The installation and configuration of the target platform is now 99% automated (only Office requires a manual default installation);
The scripted user workload is now a more realistic loop of 15 minutes (previous beta was 6 minutes). It is now also more dynamic and includes a printing to PDF.
Many bug fixes and more robust user workload scripting suited for extreme system loads and improved platform support.

I personally have not made the free time to do a thorough testing of Login VSI myself, but if it's anything like the other free Login tools, I'd expect nothing but the best. Login is really a great company that puts out some very good tools for all of us to use for free. You can download a copy of Login VSI by registering on their website at www.loginconsultants.com

Citrix Delivery Center Visio Stencils

shawn@shawnbass.com — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:43:55 GMT

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've been selected by Microsoft as a Terminal Server MVP

shawn@shawnbass.com — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:14:44 GMT

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.

Virtualize a Citrix server?

shawn@shawnbass.com — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:28:24 GMT

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 Servers on a VM platform. Now, which platform to choose? While VMware clearly has more experience (read: existence) in doing this, XenServer has an advantage which is that they have the developers of Citrix (and to some degree Microsoft) at their disposal. With some of the recent optimizations that Citrix has made in XenServer, they've been able to bring the overhead of virtualization down to 7% on 64-bit Citrix XenApp. The virtualized 64-bit XenApp was able to host up to 70% more users than the virtualized 32-bit instance. This isn't that big of a surprise though since the 64-bit instance isn't limited by kernel memory like the 32-bit instance is. I recommend checking out this blog entry over at Citrix for some more details on how they conducted their testing if you're interested in this.

Attending Synergy? Then borrow video camera, make cool video, and get free video camera...

shawn@shawnbass.com — Thu, 15 May 2008 04:09:41 GMT

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.

I'll be at Citrix Synergy, and this blog gave me a good idea to bring my FlipVideo camera. Only I won't have to adhere to all those crazy "rules". I'm such a rebel... Oh yes, I will be videotaping analysts...oooh..... And I might even upload videos to my site, or maybe even some other site.... Uh-oh now I've gone and said it...

The ultimate guide to Citrix MFCOM SDK

shawn@shawnbass.com — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:36:45 GMT

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.

Taking a long time to launch your Citrix apps? Maybe you need to try Citrix FastLaunch...

shawn@shawnbass.com — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:39:24 GMT

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. I'm certainly encouraging any/all corrections/clarifications to these assumptions.

First an overview of my understanding of the utility:

1) Windows boots up and the user logs in.

2) There's a Start Menu startup folder shortcut that links to this utility written by the Citrix IT guys.

3) The executable starts up and initializes a connection to a Citrix server. If the user had existing disconnected apps on that server, the apps would immediately show. If the user didn't have any apps running, they would just see their desktop.

4) Upon launching their next Citrix application, it would immediately appear via the magic of session sharing.

Ok, so what's the catch?

1) First of all, since this is a utility that runs in the startup menu of the client system, you've got to have some way to get it there. If you're using PN/Web client you're a bit SOL since you'd need some type of ESD or script solution for pushing the shortcut in their start menu. If you're using PNA, you could use the Citrix infrastructure and PNAgent to place the shortcut into the Start Menu, but you'd still need to stage the utility onto the machine. That means there needs to be some type of out of band management mechanism of getting it there. For most people with internal corporate desktops, this would be pretty easy through their existing ESD and/or Group Policy. For external users, you probably don't want sessions auto-launching in the background for security reasons.

2) What this utility is actually doing is automatically invoking an ICA session on a ~~Presentation Server~~ oops I mean XenApp server. This has implications in a few different areas:

a) Licensing. Unless Citrix has developed a way of not actually counting these "auto-launch sessions" you'll need to have enough licensing to accomodate every single user that has this utility deployed. At the client site I'm at right now, they have about 1500 ccus of PS4.5e, but a pool of about 6k total users. So if this is really an issue, then they would need to buy 4500 more licenses.

b) Server capacity. Everyone knows that one of the biggest hits to a Terminal Server environment is session initialization. All of the logon script processing, printer mapping, and process initialization is brutal on the Citrix server front. I see two issues here. One is major blackhole effect when shifts change. If you've suddenly got two to three thousand simulatanous Citrix logins vs normally seeing 500 max, that's a pretty significant rise that you might not be ready for. Secondly, does your Citrix farm have the capacity to accomodate the number of users that have FastLaunch deployed? Going back to my example of having 6k total users with 1500 max ccus. If the farm can handle 1500 total users, but you've just thrown 6k sessions at it are you going to stress it beyond it's capabilities?

c) Reliance on the magic of session sharing. Session sharing is a beautiful thing. It's a technology that in it's most basic form instructs the Citrix server to simply spawn a new user process for XYZ application within the existing TS/Citrix session instead of launching a whole new session. Now, there a many reasons why session sharing might fail. But the first (and most obvious) reason is that the application being requested isn't installed and published on the server that your session is running on. There are still many Citrix environments that are highly silo'd. The reason why an organization is in a silo situation may vary from company to company, but the bottom line here is that if your in a silo'd architecture, this FastLaunch may offer you no benefit on launch wait time if the application requested has to be fulfilled from an alternate server silo. Now, if your infrastructure is built such that you're using application virtualization (a.k.a. Citrix Streaming, Microsoft Softgrid, VMware Thinstall), then you might be able to get by with about 80% of your apps being serviced by the same server that you've initialized your startup session on.

Overall I think the concept behind FastLaunch is a good one. I think it could get even better if Citrix was to start tracking user experience patterns to know that XYZ user typically launches these applications initially and therefore we should spin up a session on XYZ silo, etc. But considering that this is an internally developed utility and is being provided for free, you can't exactly complain.

To wrap up I want to say the following things:

1) I'm not an expert on this particular utilty so I'm certain that at least 1-99% of this blog entry is completely wrong. :)

2) The type of thinking behind this utility is EXACTLY what Citrix needs to keep doing. There are tons of people out there with similar ideas/concepts. Citrix needs to find the ones that are game changing (or disruptive technology as they like to call it) and jump on them.

3) Offering this stuff for free is cool and all, but come on....this kind of stuff deserves real consideration for corporate backing. If the licensing, server performance, and session sharing issues are problematic then you just haven't thought hard enough about alternatives to make it better.

Barry Flanagan posted up a list of technical sessions that will be at Citrix Synergy

shawn@shawnbass.com — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:26:56 GMT

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.

Why I love GotoAssist Express Beta

shawn@shawnbass.com — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 18:31:51 GMT

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

Mark Templeton's advertisement to Citrix Synergy calls out reference to Brian Madden

shawn@shawnbass.com — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:26:23 GMT

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 they will be great.

Back to the Brian Madden reference. If you watch the video Mark mentions Brian's name at 1:19. Who would have thought?