Published on 29 Jun 2009
As EdgeSight is a component that is offered by Citrix in several Platinum Editions for strategic products as well as a substitute for Resource Manager in XenApp, customers like to profit from the value-add compared to traditional system management products. EdgeSight is often used to augment the data collected by those tools. But when using EdgeSight with Provisioning Server, things get a little more complex because an agent is assigned a unique ID to match data uploads to the correct database entries.
Published on 17 Jun 2009
I have been involved in the rollout of EdgeSight with several customers. Sounds great so far, doesn’t it? But more than once I needed to tackle with very rigorous security standards causing the setup to take much longer than usual. These standards require installations to be executed with the minimal set of permissions. Unfortunately, most installers are not designed to work that way and vendors do not properly document the permissions expected for their setup wizard.
Published on 16 Jun 2009
After publishing the XmlServiceReader and writing about the shortcomings of the health check for the XML service provided by Citrix, I like to expand on the process of creating a custom health check using the XmlServiceReader.
Published on 05 Jun 2009
You may well ask why I created a tool to send arbitrary requests to the XML service and parse the reply in scripts – which is, by the way, called XmlServiceReader. First of all, I did not like the tool included with the Health Monitoring and Recovery of Presentation Server and XenApp – called RequestTicket.exe – due to its limitation to being executed on the same host as the XML service is located. Furthermore, this tools has a hard-coded request and does not allow customization of the request sent to the XML service.
Published on 19 May 2009
Since I have released the XmlServiceExplorer and XmlServiceDigger,I have received several requests for another tool allowing for custom health checks against the XML service, e.g. see this comment. The XmlServiceReader is a command line tool sending arbitrary requests to the XML service and printing the reply to the same window. This output can be checked in a script to determine whether the reply is valid and the service fully operational.
Published on 15 May 2009
I held a presentation about Citrix XenDesktop - the VDI product. Please download the slides here.
Published on 30 Apr 2009
… because I will be wearing a shirt with the same design on it at Summit/Synergy in Las Vegas starting next Sunday. One way or another I recommend you remember our faces (see below) to catch up with us ;-) I am really looking forward to technical discussions about almost anything.
Helge
Nicholas
Published on 23 Apr 2009
In a previous article, I described how Windows XP and Server 2003 handle folder views, why those configured for network drives are lost upon logoff and how to correct this behaviour. The last article explained the new design for storing folder views introduced by Windows Vista and Server 2008. But it only hints at a solution using a profile management product and lacks a proper description how to achieve this. Fortunately, Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM) can be configured to resolve this issue which I will expand on in this article.
Published on 21 Apr 2009
In one of my previous articles I explained how Windows handles folder views and how to preserve these settings for network shares when using roaming profiles across multiple machine. A reader has pointed me to the fact that the described behaviour seems to have changed beginning with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.
Published on 25 Mar 2009
Lately, I have been working in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) space a lot. I have noticed everybody talking about offline capabilities and how badly needed this feature is in VDI. In my eyes, offline VDI is a mix up of two topics: offline provisioning and VDI. In this article, I’d like to expand on this to explain my scepticism as to the applicability of VDI to mobile devices.