CirtixLive! – FREE Online Virtual Event – Secrets, Lies & VDI

VDI is one of the hottest buzzwords in the technology industry and IT executives are looking for a clear understanding of what it means. CitrixLive! is a not-to-miss event that will decode the myths and uncover the truth about VDI to give you a clear, strategic view of desktop virtualization and make all its benefits available to you today.

Desktop virtualization is more than just VDI. It is about desktops, applications, personalization, the best user experience and much, much more. At CitrixLive!, you’ll get a complete understanding of what desktop virtualization really means.

CitrixLive! will include a keynote and sessions from leading Citrix and industry experts along with booths from a wide range of partners and sponsors. As an attendee you will have access to downloadable resources to help drive toward next steps on executing your desktop virtualization strategy.

Attend CitrixLive! to get a 360 degree view on desktop virtualization that will shed new light on the technology, change your perceptions and turn the industry on its head.
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AppSense are proud to be chosen as a sponsor for the CitrixLive! online virtual event. By attending this event you as an end user or Citrix Channel Partner will be provided with the ablity to virtually navigate around an iForum/Synergy style exhibition floor, interact with the Sponsors & Vendors at their booth via a chat interface, read product datasheets and learn tips and tricks from Citrix vendors and VAR Channel.

Citrix will also be hosting speaker and demo sessions too… so if you were unable to make Synergy this year or cant wait to go again next year, get along to this free event!

You can register your place here

Look forward to seeing you there!

VDI – The Need For User Personalization

Martin Ingram, VP of Strategy at AppSense has been inundated with Press and Analysts wanting to interview him to learn more about the strategic requirement for user personalization within VDI environments. 

Personalization is key to reducing risk and increasing user satisfaction and enabling the adoption of lowest cost, non-persistent VDI environments.

You can read more about this topic along with the views of industry leading Commentators and Analysts at:

IT Business Edge – Putting a Personal Touch on VDI, by Michael Vizard

Virtualization Review – All about the User Personality, by Beth Schultz

These posts come further to Citrix recognizing the need for user environment management solutions in VDI environments, as posted by Sumit Dhawan here

Process “Hibernation” Utility

Guy Leech, a contributor on this AppSense Blog has developed a utility to pause processes, minimize the process/application window, free up the Memory while paused, and provide the option to resume process at later date.

Here is the article intro along with link to the original post (containing the download):

“Ever have the need to pause a process so that you can come back to it later – maybe something that is resource hungry, difficult to get back to the same point in if you quit it or possibly doesn’t work when away from the corporate network? Then this is the utility for you – via a simple user interface it allows you to pause and resume any of your running applications/processes.”

Read more about this cool utility with option to download it here

What’s the risk in your Desktop Strategy?

As we progress with our desktop strategies it is becoming clear that there are common themes that are competing with each other for priority. This depends on what is most important to your strategy will ultimately decide on what type of desktop delivery stack you will ultimately choose. There is no wrong or right answer, regardless of what the one-hit wonder desktop virtualization vendors may say. Their opinion will always lead you to their vision of desktop virtualization regardless of what is truly important for your organization. The answers that will lead you on your right path will be a trade-off and prioritization of;

• Lower TCO: Lower hardware & management costs and a standardized desktop
• Higher Productivity: High availability, high performance, low maintenance
• Security: Greater control of data, configuration and malware
• User Acceptance: Use case driven for flexibility, productivity and unique desktop experience
• Risk: Trade off the risk of an unproven delivery mechanism against perceived benefits

When organizations are considering user acceptance they will ultimately consider it as the trade-off against lower TCO and security. Because the new desktop virtualization vendors are also marketing their products with the user in mind, they are offering some degree of user personalization with the promise of lower TCO and a more secure computing environment. However, following this seemingly alluring path is also frought with risk. The term “one-hit wonder” refers to the fact that these vendors are providing technology whereby they provide the whole desktop virtualization delivery mechanism. They may only do one thing well but you have to take the whole stack with little option to swap components out. This makes these vendors a single point of failure in your whole desktop virtualization stack. Also, new and unproven technology usually requires significantly more support. Enterprises with thousands of users require a lot of support regardless of the maturity of technology. Start-up vendors are unlikely to have a support organization that won’t strain under this type of pressure. This risk will surely restrict the roll out to only where that benefit is seen as being absolutely essential.  This will not lower TCO, as this will only really be realized with a homogoneous desktop delivery mechanism, not a heterogenous one where each use case has a completely different desktop delivery stack.

The key is to create a desktop delivery mechanism that suits all of your use cases and achieves the Lower TCO, gains the higher productivity and ensures security. Risk can be handled by creating a desktop delivery mechanism based on mature technology, proven enterprise level vendors and best of breed solutions that have been designed to work with multiple desktop delivery technologies. But to achieve this and satisfy all of the use cases will require a way to ensure user acceptance by task worker, knowledge worker and mobile worker alike.

The answer is strickingly simple, thankfully.

Choose the desktop delivery mechanism that suits your priorities and avoid trade-off for user acceptance by using a best of breed User Environment Management solution that can work with both your existing desktop delivery mechanism and your planned desktop strategy regardless of whether it is homogenous or heterogenous, physical or virtual.

AppSense User Environment Management products that provide the ability for users to create their own unique and productive desktop experience with personalizations, user data and user-installed applications are a perfect example of how user acceptance can be achieved over any desktop delivery mechanism. More to the point, they key to avoiding the trade-off is by providing a solution that helps IT manage the user personality. This is why granular policy management is so important. With AppSense, IT make the decisions as to the users entitlement to personalize and roam without fear of loss of data, applications and personalizations. AppSense also seamlessly automates the usually painstaking aspects of migrating a users unique desktop experience through a windows upgrade. A single best of breed User Environment Managemet solution, a single user personality, any desktop delivery mechanism. IT in control of it all. It couldn’t be simpler.

Some Citrix XenDesktop Troubleshooting Tips

I have recently had to build a new Citrix XenDesktop environment for some testing which included Citrix Provisioning Server and Citrix XenServer. Along the way, I had various issues and struggled to find a single, comprehensive, troubleshooting article so I am going to have a stab at it here since I had to go through various tests in order to sort my issues. Having said this, there are some very good technotes on the Citrix web site here – http://support.citrix.com/product/xd/v3.0/technote/

1. Enable logging for the Workstation Agent and ensure that access to the C$ share of the master XenDesktop image is enabled, including a firewall exception for file sharing. This is so that you can get at the log file without having to log on interactively to the image. See this article for how to enable the logging by a simple edit to the WorkstationAgent.exe.config file:  http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX117452 

   Obviously ensure that the Workstation Agent (Citrix Desktop Service) is successfully starting, as are other Citrix services, and the log shows it registering with the DDC.

2. The event logs are also obviously another place to look when things fail although this can be tricky if your VM has been connected enough to want to reboot when the connection attempt has failed.
3. You can also enable logging for the Desktop Delivery Controller service which is detailed in the link above. Ensure that the DDC service and other Citrix ones start successfully.
4. PortICA logging can be enabled – http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX118837 – which could show potential ICA problems. It didn’t for me but will stay enabled in my base image whilst I am still testing.
5. Citrix tracing tool (CDF – Citrix Diagnostic Facility) – this didn’t help me as it only currently supports a small number of client side features such as USB. It can also be run on the machine running the Workstation Agent but I didn’t do this.  http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX120269
6. I did have some errors when using the XenDesktop Setup Wizard so I followed the steps to get a log file for this. I couldn’t get the log produced via the command line so ended up modifying the .config file as described here: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX118278 

   My issues actually turned out, I think, to do with the fact that the template I was specifying in the wizard had an 8GB disk attached (it was my Gold Build VM that was booting off the PvS disk but still had the original hard drive in case I needed to rebuild the PvS disk) so each new VM created by the wizard was creating a new 8GB disk and I simply didn’t have the storage for it (not that I got an error suggesting this). I therefore created a new VM in XenServer that had the memory, NIC and CPUs I wanted but had no hard disk so actually didn’t have an OS installed (it never even got booted). This doesn’t matter since the OS comes from the vdisk/vhd you specify, separately, in the wizard.

7. Check that you can logon with the required accounts to the VMs in your XenCenter/XenServer console. This should show any domain joining or account issues, e.g. expiry or permissions. Also check network connectivity to/from them.
8. Fire up your gold image VM, since it should be on a standard image disk so the changes will be lost when it shuts down, add it to a new desktop group without a hosting infrastructure so that you just use the name of the VM in the group. This should tell you if the problem was something funny about the desktop group or the VMs that comprised it.
9. My issue was that I was launching the connection from Web Interface but I wasn’t getting a session, just a failure popup – “Unable to connect to the desktop. This may be a temporary problem. Click OK and then try starting the desktop again. If the problem persists, contact your system administrator”. Before acknowledging the failure popup, look in your %temp% folder for the ICA file that it dynamically created. It won’t be a .ica file but instead will most likely be a .tmp file although will probably start “ica*”– easily spotted by modification time, particularly if you sort on modification time. It is actually the argument to cdsbar.exe if you look in Task Manger on Vista or with SysInternals/Microsoft Process Explorer. Open the ica file in notepad and check that it makes sense – e.g. is connecting to the right thing (“Address=”) and that the entity can be resolved/contacted. Note that the ica file, in best Mission Impossible style, will self destruct, i.e. be deleted, when you ok the failure popup thanks to the “RemoveICAFile=On” line. Note also that there is little point in saving the ica file for later use since it has a logon ticket in there which most likely will have expired.
10. This leads on to checking that port 1494 is accessible in the virtual desktop by telnetting to it. However, port 1494 is only alive for a brief while after the connection is initiated so wait a few seconds after you have clicked on the icon to launch the session in Web Interface, or Program Neighborhood, before trying the telnet. When accessing a pool, look at the temporary ICA file to figure out which machine to check or reduce the pool to a single machine. We are not really looking for anything here other than the connection succeeds although you will probably see the characters “ICA” displayed.
11. As by this stage all logs were looking fine and port 1494 was working, I put on a network monitor, in this case SysInternals/Microsoft Process Monitor, on my client machine (the one accessing Web Interface) and filtered on wfica32.exe. This is when I found that some traffic was going through my proxy that I hadn’t allowed for – bingo, problem solved when the proxy was disabled. In my defence, I had tried accessing from a different client (this should probably be a separate line item in this troubleshooting “guide”) but that had also failed, albeit probably for different reasons as it wasn’t using a proxy.
12. Watch for proxies! Obviously configure them as necessary or disable them.
13. I did have some “funnies” with my XP VMs created by the XenDesktop Setup Wizard and running off PvS. I think they were because after creation I had switched the master disk away from Standard Image mode. My excuse is that you have to manually hit F5 to do a refresh after changing vDisk properties and I didn’t! I was actually getting the error described here: http://forums.citrix.com/message.jspa?messageID=1393521 

    Sometimes the streaming console (StreamConsole.exe) on the PvS box can help diagnose these kinds of issue. Unfortunately it didn’t in this case.

14. I also got caught by my base image having miniscule event log sizes (64KB) so even though they weren’t up for long, it was enough for them to fill up and not to overwrite so it was back to the base image to set larger sizes and set them to overwrite as needed.

How to find what has changed in HKCU

There are times when you need to find out what has changed in a user’s registry hive, either during their session or, more often, when they have logged out. This may be to try and understand why an application isn’t behaving the way it should, or because you are trying to find specific settings to extract and put into a mandatory profile or an environment provisioning mechanism such as that provided by AppSense Environment Manager. Here we reveal how to do you this even if you weren’t actively monitoring the registry in the session.

The SysInternals, now Microsoft, Process Monitor tool is very, very good at this sort of analysis but not if the changes to the registry have already occurred. Check it out here anyway:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx

With traditional local and roaming profiles, you can load the ntuser.dat hive file containing the changes into regedit, but unfortunately regedit does not show the timestamps that are present on every registry key. This is where the free regrecent tool comes in as it allows you to search a registry key for changes made in a given time (and date) range. Note though that only registry keys have timestamps, not values, so a registry analysis performed this way won’t tell you what values have been modified, added or deleted unfortunately but the information can still be incredibly useful. Of course, if you have a copy of the hive file before the user logged in, either from a backup, the base mandatory profile or from the roaming profile location if the user is still logged on (HINT: take a copy of the original ntuser.dat at this point and work with this file) , then you can compare the changed registry key’s values in the two hives. It also does not require administrator privileges so can be used by the (test) user before they log off.

Download it here:

http://www.appsense.com/mstools

As an aside, when doing on-site troubleshooting in my consultancy days, I used to use regrecent to tell me what had changed 5 minutes after I left site to 5 minutes before arriving to see what had actually changed even though the customer would usually swear blind that they had not changed anything at all!

NEW FEATURE No. 11 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Registry Hive Exclusions

This is the eleventh installment in a series of posts about the new features and options in AppSense Version 8 Service Pack 2.  (If you have not yet downloaded this latest release, you can read more info and download it from here )

AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 introduces new functionality to the Registry Hive action – Registry Hive Exclusions.

This feature allows the administrator to specify registry settings to hive out at a specific level and then exclude certain keys or values beneath that level in order to reduce the registry file size on disk. For example, you could hive out the whole Microsoft Office key, but exclude settings for Microsoft Access.

Note: You can use wildcards for the key name and you can explicitly exclude a key name with an embedded wildcard character by enclosing the key name with quotes “”. However, it is not possible to specify a key path with a leading wildcard such as *\Software”wildcardkey*”.

Note: It is not advised to use keys that start with HKEY_CURRENT_USER since the software does not use this key internally

Note: Registry Hive Exclusions currently only work when hiving out settings rather than hiving them in. This is the preferred method since it reduces the amount of required storage space on the network.

P:S
As this is an ever growing blog topic, the previous posts on the other new features we have detailed can be found below:

NEW FEATURE No. 1 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Run As

NEW FEATURE No. 2 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Connect As

NEW FEATURE No. 3 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Improved compression and data handling protocol

NEW FEATURE No. 4 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Manipulation of files in Personalization Analysis

NEW FEATURE No. 5 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Run Once

NEW FEATURE No. 6 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Group SID Refresh

NEW FEATURE No. 7 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Trigger Action Time Audit Event

NEW FEATURE No. 8 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Stop If Fails

NEW FEATURE No. 9 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – New Application Categories in the User Interface

NEW FEATURE No. 10 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Refresh

NEW FEATURE No. 11 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Registry Hive Exclusions

KISS and make-up

I’ve always been a massive advocate of ‘KISS’ – Not the grease-paint laden 1970s glam rock band (although I do own a few dozen of their albums and sport their band logo on my arm!) – the concept of ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’.

In my opinion, one of the most important factors in designing and building software is to ensure that the user interface, and the concepts behind the software itself, are kept as simple and intuitive as possible.

There’s no point in implementing a killer feature if that feature is too complex and too difficult to actually configure and maintain as it may result in confused end-users and, inevitably, a redundant piece of functionality.

On the other hand, by reducing the complexity of a particular piece of functionality too much, software vendors run the risk of making that particular feature totally inflexible and to some extent of little to no use to the end-user at all!

Therefore, there has to be a balance between simplicity and flexibility.

A good product needs to be designed well, proven to work and simple to understand. Take the rock group KISS as an example. They started way back in the early 70′s with a lead guitarist, a bass player, lead vocalist and a drummer. Add some make-up and a track list of great songs and a global brand was instantly created. The concept was simple.

Start tampering with a working formula and things start to go wrong.  Change the appearance (i.e. remove the make-up) and the ‘product’ becomes misunderstood. Start making things more complex and consumers become disillusioned.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

AppSense Environment Manager can be seen as a complex product. It can be used in a variety of ways to solve a variety of different environment problems.

So, have AppSense delivered on the concept of ‘KISS’ with Environment Manager? Have we provided a killer product that is simple to understand, yet flexible and compelling? Maybe, maybe not. There is always room for improvement. However, improvement must not come at a cost to the consumer.

Our next product release, currently scheduled for Q1 2010, aims to introduce improvements to the way the software is currently configured and maintained, without adding unecessary complexity or introducing the risk of ‘breaking something that used to work’.

So,  ‘Keeping It Simple, Stupid’ is, ironically, not a simple task. However, by adopting the concept, it may save you many ‘Crazy, Crazy Nights’ trying to put things right in the future.

Powerco used VMware and AppSense on their Citrix farm, introduced SQL, and saved $390k per annum.

Powerco, New Zealand’s second largest power company used virtualization technology to consolidate their server (Citrix and Oracle/SQL) and save $390,000 per year.

As part of their ICT refresh, they included VMware to virtualize the Blade servers running Citrix, along with AppSense Performance Manager which when combined, increased server capacity and enabled a greater consolidation ratio.

Mark Flowers, Powerco Server Team Leader said,
“AppSense helped us reduce our 47 Citrix servers down to 25.  Not only do we have more users than ever on our existing hardware, but we have not had to compromised or restrict any of the Citrix applications.”

The full article on ComputerWorld can be found here

The official Powerco & AppSense case study can be found on the AppSense customer pages here

Further information on how AppSense can reduce your Operational Costs & TCO can be found here

NEW FEATURE No. 10 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Refresh

This is the tenth installment in a series of posts about the new features and options in AppSense Version 8 Service Pack 2.  (If you have not yet downloaded this latest release, you can read more info and download it from here )

AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 SP2 includes an automatic refresh of items which use the following registry keys, or subkeys:

control panel\accessibility\stickykeys
control panel\appearance
control panel\colors
control panel\cursors
control panel\desktop
control panel\international
control panel\keyboard
control panel\mouse
keyboard layout
software\microsoft\plus!
software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\policies\explorer
software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\policies\system\wallpaper
software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\themes

These registry keys are all refreshed by using the SystemParametersInfo win32 function to individually set known items.

In addition, any change to the desktop folders causes an icon refresh to be sent and AppSense Environment Manager also broadcasts a system wide policy update message.

Refreshes are sent after all other actions have taken place.

A broadcast message for environment variables is sent whenever Environment Manager updates any variables. Environment Manager listens for broadcasts from other programs, such as VBScripts, to pick up any environment variable changes from within them.

Tip: If the key you are setting requires a refresh but is not in the list above, try setting a dummy value that matches one of the above registry keys. This forces a refresh.

P:S
As this is an ever growing blog topic, the previous posts on the other new features we have detailed can be found below:

NEW FEATURE No. 1 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Run As

NEW FEATURE No. 2 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Connect As

NEW FEATURE No. 3 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Improved compression and data handling protocol

NEW FEATURE No. 4 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Manipulation of files in Personalization Analysis

NEW FEATURE No. 5 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Run Once

NEW FEATURE No. 6 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Group SID Refresh

NEW FEATURE No. 7 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Trigger Action Time Audit Event

NEW FEATURE No. 8 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Stop If Fails

NEW FEATURE No. 9 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – New Application Categories in the User Interface

NEW FEATURE No. 10 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Refresh

NEW FEATURE No. 11 – AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2 – Registry Hive Exclusions