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.

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.

Al Solorzano recently posted a nice article on Group Policy Preferences over here.  If you're not familiar with Group Policy Preferences, it's the technology that Microsoft acquired from Desktop Standard.  GPP is a nice way of extending management reach to registry settings that were previously not able to be managed by Group Policy (at least not without those PITA Administrative Templates anyway).  There's also some powerful capabilities for filtering that are largely lacking from Group Policy.  While out at Citrix Synergy a little over a week ago, I had the pleasure of some great conversation with Al at a group dinner outing.  Al is extremely knowledgable about a variety of technologies and I highly recommend following his blog (if you don't already).  Al's blog can be found here.

Justin Zarb recently blogged about a video he found from a TechEd session where John Sheehan gave an overview of the new features in SoftGrid / MAV 4.5.  I'd love to give all sort of nice comments about the video, but I'm plagued by the Silverlight Download Error 4001 so I can't even watch the video.  Anyway, I'm passing it along in case you haven't seen Justin's blog entry about it.

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.