Kiera Doheny posted a blog-invitation to all Citrix XenApp Engineers who wants to visit florida in december and help make the next generation certifications for the CCEE exams.

Criteria for participation:

• Must act as Engineer for a XenApp 5.0 for Windows Server 2008 environment
• Must have integrated XenApp with at least one Platinum component such as:
  • EdgeSight 4.5 or higher
  • WANScaler 4.5 or higher
  • Access Gateway 8.0 Enterprise Edition or higher
• Experience with the following is ideal:
  • Using XenApp SDKs for customizations
  • Scripting (MFCOM or Powershell)
• Experience with or plans for the following are a plus but not required:
  • Virtualizing XenApp on XenServer, VMware, or Hyper-V
  • Provisioning XenApp loads
  • Monitoring Loads of XenApp farms

No need to prepare! Simply attend all four days and provide information about your Citrix implementation as well as the specific tasks you perform.

Compensation: If you are selected to attend the workshop, Citrix Education will pick up the tab for your travel, meals during the workshop, and entertainment in beautiful sunny South Florida!

It sounds like a pretty sweet deal .. check out the blog post here:
http://community.citrix.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=50365272

Rene Vester

So.. the Brian Madden Company has been acquired by TechTarget an IT Media company with several large websites.

I think this news is going to make alot of noise in the community, hopefully people will support the new situation. The situation will for sure give Brian and Gabe more time to work on what they really believe in.

I for one support people who are able to be succesful and take a good long look and then decide for whatever reason to back to the roots, what made this fun in the first place and i think for Gabe and Brian that is blogging, writing analyzing. Not so much the hassle of administration in a small company.

My hopes for the new situation is that BrianMadden.com will keep its standard, the forums will grow even more active and the articles and blogs are going to continue to deliver Community content

All i all.. TechTarget acquired The Brian Madden Company. I am assuming not much will change other than more visibility when it comes to Gabe and Brian.

Good luck with the new jobs Gabe and Brian!

You can read Brians explanation here: http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2008/11/20/brianmadden-com-is-now-part-of-techtarget.aspx

Rene Vester

So i think we have all seen the major takes on virtualization. We have the Server virtualization, Desktop virtualization and Application virtualization. Most vendors can agree on this, some name these areas a bit differently but over all that seems to be the cases i hear people talking about.

So i got to thinking, for a long time you have been able to download virtual appliances from VMware and use these in your infrastructure, there is a wide variety you can easily take a look here: Virtual Appliances, VMware

But how many of us will base our infrastructure on "some appliance" freely made available,  i am guessing not too many. Support on the products are needed, and we need to have High-Availability, replacement units and estabilished support channels.

So wouldn’t it be wicked cool if we could have official products, from the real vendors we use today. Established support channels, agreements already in place and what about all our management servers monitoring the appliances, what if the virtual appliances fit the same products?

Cisco Nexus 1000v Virtual Switch

Cisco took the lead in this area as they announced their Nexus 1000v Virtual Switch a while back. I was really excited to see how this would go off, but the idea seems to have been well recieved. But what is it?

The Cisco Nexus 1000V switch takes advantage of VMware’s vNetwork Distributed switch framework to offer tightly integrated network services as part of a server virtualization strategy. At the same time, the switch offers operations and management consistency with existing Cisco Nexus and Cisco Catalyst switches.

Cisco VN-Link and the Cisco Nexus 1000V switch provide server virtualization technology to ensure consistent, policy-based network capabilities to all physical or virtual servers in a customer’s data center.

In short this gives you the opportunity to replace your builtin VMware vSwitches with a Cisco Virtual Switches. This allows the network administrators to manage all the switches in the environment, not only the physical switches. Give it a read here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9902/index.html

I am not sure on the pricing models available, but i think this is a cool step in simplifying the infrastructure, allowing the network people to work their magic in their areas and at the same time not holding back the simplification of managing the server infrastructure.

What could the future bring in this area?

Well i think i already stated that i think this a cool initiative from Cisco, but what other areas would benefit from the same way of thinking? Now seeing as i do not work much in the area of advanced networking, i got to thinking where this would be worthwhile for the vendors i do work with. Funny enough i got to think of Citrix.. I have often been annoyed with all the new hardware products and the trouble they seem to have getting the products to the customers. Setting up replacement procedures and the likes. I always excused them with the fact that "they are new in the hardware business", but now that i see Cisco going virtual on their physical technologies, I cant help but wonder if this would save vendors like Citrix a lot of troubles. I run through a couple of examples with Citrix technologies, but it could just as well be other vendor-products.

Lets take a couple of examples:

• Secure Gateway
  The product who gave us secure access to Citrix applications from the web. Often placed in a DMZ on a Windows Server with only a webinterface to keep it company.. the feature is already ported to the linux based Access Gateways, and the Freebsd based Netscalers in form of the Access Gateway Enterprise. Virtual Appliance potential?
  
• Access Gateways standard and Advanced edition
  2 Nics, 1 linux based OS.. Virtual Appliance potential?
  
• Low-end Netscaler product line
  I often see these boxes in place to only add Access Gateway Enterprise features, maybe combined with a bit of load balancing. In these use cases we are not nearly utilizing the massive performance of the Netscaler hardware. Why not deliver this product, maybe even a bit cheaper with no hardware needs. Virtual Appliance potential?
  
• EasyCall Appliance
  Not being and IPT expert there could be challenges to virtualizing this in contact with the company PBX, but still if at all possible. Citrix wants this product to be widely used together with the XenApp Platinum license. Why not make it easier for companies to adopt the technology. Virtual Appliance potential, maybe?
  
• Citrix Branch Repeater
  Windows 2003 R2 based server, already supported on almost any hypervisor. Virtual Appliance potential?
  
• Unnamed new appliance from Citrix
  I am going out on a limb here, but i am guessing there will be more appliances from Citrix, simply because it is an easy way to deliver a product without having the dependency on other vendors, like Microsoft or similar. Please Citrix consider it as a virtual appliance
  

I am not saying the products should be made freely available, just that it would be great with a virtualized product where you paid for the ’software’ instead of the hardware. Giving customers the option to choose and support their strategic platform.

I for one hope to see the virtualization vendors taking up the appliance area as a new area of focus.. it could even easily be integrated into the powerpoint slidedeck..

Server Virtualization - Desktop Virtualization - Applications Virtualization - Appliance Virtualization

I think it would be awesome

Rene Vester

Rene Alfonso at Citrix did a blog post on the tools delivered by citrix to help us all become a little stronger when it comes to troubleshooting.

There are alot of best practice and design documents, but the list Rene provided is great for troubleshooting. In his post Rene listed:

Examples

Print Detective CTX116474

Medevac 2.5  CTX107935

CtxHideEx32  CTX110341

Citrix ICA File Creator CTX113472

ScreenHistory 1.0 CTX113046

JetTest CTX116532

DSInfo 1.2 CTX114916

And as these tools are great there is still a need for more. And Rene’s post was also an appeal for all of us to pitch our suggestions to what tools do we need.

Have a look at the article and respond here:http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/renea/2008/11/12/How+to+Become+a+Citrix+Super+Hero

Rene Vester

Just heard from "The Cloud"(The wine is so old fashion), Citrix might be lowering the prices by 10% for the rest of the year.. Yihaa! i hope this will make people a bit more eager to work with the different tools available to make the business more efficient.

I think it is a good signal from Citrix, now that we have a bit of a financial crisis that alot of companies are worrying about. Not to say that i would not like for Citrix to lower their prices permanently ;-), but i think it is a good way to give businesses an option to move on with their projects towards the delivery center idea, and in some case save money in a productive way rather than cutting back on labor or the likes. I have not heard about Subscription advantage and the upcoming price adjustment.

This is still unconfirmed on my hand, but i will update when i have confirmation from official sources

Rene Vester

So after a vote for next venue the place and date for now has been decided. In the Pubforum spirit some details are up for review and change.

The possible and considered options for the next Pubforum was:

So the venue was decided at the scheduled vote on saturday afternoon, sadly not everyone participated in the vore, but i am assuming everyone who had an oppinion attended at the arranged time

The date for this is for now set to first week of June 2009.

Hope we will see alot af cool people there

Rene Vester

So.. day two.. Wilco Van bragt kicked off with a presentation on "Freeware tools", as always Wilco showed a deep technical knowledge, and alot of great tools. Wilco has been testing alot of freely available tools, and i was considering blogging the tools now, but i saw that Wilco actually did alot of articles in the area as well, so have a look here: http://sbc.vanbragt.net/mambo/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=5&id=27&Itemid=49

Wilco is also blogging from Pubforum, his blog can be found at: http://sbc.vanbragt.net/mambo/

I had the pleasure of stepping out in the Sun for some early lunch with Jacob Berg, so missed a few sessions, but they will be available on the pubforum site http://www.pubforum.info/welcome. Pretty sure Wilco also did an outline on his blog which i mentioned earlier.

Alex Danilichev did a presentation on VDM, i also did a blog post on it, you can view it here: Citrix XenApp, TS, VDI high res and large screens, a pain- Virtual Display Man

Citrix EMEA did a run through of the differences between "XenDesktop 2.0 and the new 2.1" and it seems to be a few new features and alot of fixes and improvements. Definately a recommendation also from Karen in tech support, upgrading is recommended. Great run through.

Max Ranzau a danish long time Powerfuse dedicated guy, now working with RES. Max did a presentation of the products Powerfuse and Wisdom, with the main focus on RES Wisdom. The outline for the products in a simple way is that the Wisdom product manages the Machine, Powerfuse supplies the User with ressources.

After Max, Karen from Citrix Support Escalation team in Dublin went on and did a technical run through of the architecture of XenDesktop, i think it gave good insights into troubleshooting a XenDesktop environment.

After that, Thomas Did deep technical dive into the troubleshooting of XenApp, doing a demonstration of a troubleshooting scenario with a Citrix IMA service that would not start. Thomas took it through CDFtracing and showed how everyone can do cdf tracing using traceview and the TMF files from Citrix. To obtain the TMF files and a link to traceview have a look at http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX106233.

On that not it was time to participate in Sascha’s demonstration of "How to make White Russians in france.. and Why.." .. let me just tell you, it tasted great!

Rene Vester

So at Citrix Summit Orlando, it truly seemed Citrix is doing a major push to support their community. I made a blogpost earlier about the new application verification program, found easily at http://community.citrix.com/citrixready.

I do not know if Citrix could tell the future and wanted to support the upcoming President Obama, or whatever their reason was, but as many of you might already .. the webinterface is now black! its been given a great new and updated look and feel, but very few customers actually use blue and black as the corporate colours. So, as part of the new strategy to help the community share what they learn Citrix did a new website called www.pimpmyxenapp.com.

So what is PimpMyXenApp?

PimpMyXenApp.com is really community platform when you can get a glimpse of what others have done with Webinterface, you are able to download the Paint By Numbers Kit so that you yourself can work with your webinterface, or even better have a professional Webdeveloper do magic for your corporate webinterface.

At the site there is also a link to the Webinterface SDK support forum so you share and discuss with other members of the community who are looking to change the webinterface.

And i must say.. Webinterface can be tweak in alot of ways, and one of the most crazy i have seen is from Jason Conger, have a look at this video.

I just wanted to show that the Webinterface can be a lot more than just the black elegant look which is the standard, but it takes a bit of time and effort. Hopefully we will see alot of templates for Webinterface. It would be cool if we could have a template frenzy like it has been seen on opensource blogs like wordpress and what not.

Maybe Citrix will make it even easier to distribute the templates, we will see..

Rene Vester

Pubforum kicked off, and against all odds, Wireless was running at kickoff, so i think we have shown that there is hope that we will be online throughout the event.

The day kicked off with Alex Yuschenko welcoming everyone to the 11th Pubforum, and passed the word to Raimonds Martinovs.

Raimonds Martinovs kicked off Pubforum with a good presentation on "VMware latest developments" giving us all a run through of how Raimonds and Novosco work with VMware and surrounding technologies. Raimonds ended his presentation with a great demonstration of the Site recovery manager functionlality live.

After a quick bit of lunch we moved on to the Citrix side of things.

Oliver Lomberg from Citrix EMEA started out with a great session on "XenApp 5.0 - first impressions". Oliver gave us the whole truth and nothing but the truth, he actually used the term Crap… i wont say what it was in regards to, but it was a feature that helps in automating application installation.. or should help..

my key take-aways

• OS Platform on the applicances Citrix is working with seems to be changing to CentOS which will help in the quest towards full virtualization, so we may soon be able to virtualize CAG, EasyCall etc.. Yehaa! i am gonna watch this closely
• Installation Manager is being revamped and relaunched by the end of november 2008 with better functionality, but it does seem that Citrix is moving focus even more away from the installation manager product.
• The new ressource manager is based on Edgesight technology and gives us an even better overview of the Server ressources and similar.
• The new version of Edgesight inlcudes robot-procedures so you can monitor SLA using scheduled robot operations.
• ICA optimization using WANScaler technology, Oliver had graphs showing a 12x better compression using the new feature with only session, so way cool for branch offices on low bandwith/high latency connections.

Oliver did a good live Demo of the new streaming features, package relations and so on.

Helmut Hauser from VisionApp did a great presentation of "Citrix Edgesight 5.0 whats new, and better", very honest presentation on good reasons to upgrade, whats new and whats great. A live demo would have been cool, but Helmut did great on the presentation, and with lots of good screenshots which explained the views way  better than a live demo with limited information in the database.

Kowing alot more on what to keep in mind with edgesight installation. The day went on with Rick Dehlinger and an inspiring presentation of the VisionApp products vWM - VisionApp Workspace Management, vSM - VisionApp Server Management. Check out www.visionapp.com.
Rick tried to place the product in the world of Delivery Centers, sharing the vision that Citrix and it made alot of sense, Rick did a great demonstration of the products and it surely touched my interest and i will be sure to pick his brain sometime tonight or during the weekend. Especially the "Factory" tool which could be a good way for companies and consultants to reuse and secure that implementations are done in the right way with the right experiences being kept in play.

Rich Crusco did a presentation on "Whats new in Provisioning Server 5.0". I have been looking quite a bit into that so there wasnt much new, but overall the product is now much more enterprise ready, SQL Server, Farm design etc, so its looking good for Provisioning Server. But there is no doubt in my mind, Provisioning server is going to be a key component in the future implementations.

Thomas Monahan did a great runthrough of the Hotfix rollup pack 3 for XenApp 4.5 and 5.0 on windows 2003.. go figure. Some of the optimized areas are:

• Zone Data Collector election
• resilience to election storms
• black hole effect
• optimized election performance
• ZDC Election Perfmon Counters
• Load balancing performance
• Static Data Broadcast Optimization
• Data Store improvements

Best practice for deploying HRP3: CTX118659 do read!

• Having XenApp 5.0 on 2008 and XenApp 5.0 on 2003 with HRP is considered a mixed farm.
• CTX118658 - IMA Performance and Resiliency Enhancements in HR3
• CTX118771 - Installation Guide for Hotfix Rollup Pack 3 for XenApp 5.0 and Presentation Server 4.5

As always a very technical and well presented presentation from Thomas.

And that made the first day at pubforum, time for dinner and a beer.. maybe two..

Rene Vester

Well i arrived at Pubforum Nice around dinnertime, and it was great to see so many familiar faces, i really do believe that part of the success of Pubforum is the stable balance of new comers and veterans, the veterans being open to bring in the first timers, and hopefully everyone expand their network, or atleast their horizon by talking to people who see things in a different light.

Pubforum Nice 2008 is held at the Novotel City Centre in Nice, its my first time in Nice and i must say i am impressed, it seems to be a perfect location, i cant wait for kick off tomorrow.

Everything seems to be business as usual, the people attending pubforum are introducing themselves and getting aquainted so i think its gonna be great

The sessions seems packed with Specialists and vendors in what appears to be a good mix, its great to see all the companies helping to sponsor this event and make it happen and stay affordable .. Thanx!!

A new thing this time around is the Master Classes i will try to update on how that goes.. big hopes there

The real threat to the blogging from pubforum is always the quality of the Wireless.. i will try to do updates if something comes up or do a summary at the end of Pubforum.

More to come as we kick off the 11th Pubforum tomorrow.

Rene Vester