This is GREAT news, i think it is just what we need.. a hands-on lab with guided exercises to give everyone a better understanding of VDI and especially XenDesktop and the Hyper-V platform integration.

Personally i spend a lot of time working with companies on Proof of Concepts to decide whether or not Virtual Desktops deliver the value-add their company needs. I think this is virtual lab is a great innovation in the quest to spread understanding of both the several hyper-visors available and the concepts needed to build a viable Virtual Desktop proof of Concept.

Deciding whether or not Hypervisors A or B is the best platform for your organization may not be easily decided over this virtual lab, but i think it clearly shows what Hyper-V can offer in the aspect of a virtual desktop host. And let there be no doubt, when you are talking about virtual desktops, the cost of the hypervisor is a parameter.

Citrix XenDesktop to me is the best positioned Virtual Desktop broker in the market. This is from my point of view because of the close integration with the older brother Citrix XenApp, this integration makes it possible to spread your virtual desktops over a dynamic virtual desktop platform, and the much cheaper “shared virtual desktop” platform which Citrix XenApp delivers.

What i do not understand is why VMware has not tried to incorporate terminal services(now RDS) support in a much better way to help accommodate the users which does not need to have their own OS, and by that lowering the total cost of the deployment… but that’s just me.. i do not buy the hype, i did the math.. And if you do VDI without doing the math.. “Oh boy..”

To get more information on this new lab cooperation between Citrix and Microsoft have a look here: http://community.citrix.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=116033898

Click here to try out the lab: https://cmg.vlabcenter.com/default.aspx?moduleid=281742e3-2613-42da-bd58-2c3578f039b4

or watch the video here:

I guess i could put in a guide to solve the challenges here but i chose not to. Citrix and MS did a good job on guiding through the challenges and delivering a good lab to work in.. good job!

I Really wish we could see this from more virtualization vendors! this is the way to show off your product!

For those of you who have not had the time to visit the site yet, it can be found here: http://community.citrix.com/

Now.. what i really wanted to tell you all about.. Citrix Ready Community Verified.

For a long time i was looking for a place to go for information on what applications, solutions are working with Citrix products in real-life. I have often come across requests about products that i would not have a lot of experience with, but the customer has a desire to do an integration into an infrastructure i was helping with. A while back i wrote a post about my first impressions on the community verified site.

Some of the issues i raised back then are still not completely solved but after talking to Vishal i am confident Citrix is working to make the site even more intuitive and easily accessible.

The issues addressed in the version of the site that has just recently been released are as follows:

• Integration between Citrix Ready Community Verified and the official Citrix Ready
  • There will be an automatic integration between
    registrations and the Citrix Ready Site
  • For the issues where naming for some reasons differs there will be an admin option to manually link the products.

• Comment integrations “Join the Conversation”
  • When the site was released the comment section referred to the Citrix support forums. It has now been integrated  so we don’t have to leave the site to add a comment to a product. This will hopefully make it even easier to add comments on compatibility and maybe even link to external sites like AppDeploy or similar.
  • There is also dynamically shown relevant knowledgebase articles.

• Product searching
  • Tag-Searching is now part of the product search giving the option to actually do a search for “IBM” through that getting a list of the verified IBM hardware and which products they are being used with.

I see a huge benefit in the improved comment integration, the fact that people stay inside the site when they add a comment will hopefully make it easier and hopefully allow even more people to submit comments on how they use the products.

I really like this initiative and have also spend some time trying to add my knowledge to the products and registering the products i work with, but the solution will never be better than the data which is put into the solution, so i hope all of you out there will consider pitching in with your knowledge   all you need is to register for a user account and then http://community.citrix.com/citrixready

Rene Vester

Requirements:

OS: Vista
Citrix XenApp SDK:  4.0,4.5,5.0
Server: Windows 200x
Citrix XenApp: 4.0, 4.5, 5.0

You can read more here: Farm Monitor Gadget for XenApp

And download the version for Windows 7 Beta here: Update- Farm Monitor Gadget – Windows 7

Nick promises a lot more cool tools, i will definitely be keeping an eye on the site

Rene Vester

Microsoft has released a new tool called ProcessMonitor and in basics it is the combination of Filemon, Regmon and Process Explorer this tool comes from Microsoft buying Sysinternals and Wininternals last year. As most of you know Microsoft has continued to release the Sysinternal tools freely to us all and now they have taken it one step further actually collecting a few of our favorite tools in one. The tool can be downloaded from here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/processmonitor.mspx

As I wrote the three great tools have been collected into one interface and the layout has been changed slightly but nothing that will make it hard for prior users to adopt this new tool. Basic functionality is the same as before however there has been added support for showing or hiding the collected data from registry, file access or process monitoring.

(The hiding or showing of captured data is done in the top bar by toggling the famous icons.)

Some of the very cool new features are:
File, Registry, process and stack summary giving an easy to view look at what has been accessed, run or read during a trace.

Process tree has been added to the same tool as we knew it pretty much from process Explorer.

And there has been added support for boottime logging, something I am very happy to see integrated.

NOTE: This feature combined with advanced output can easily absorb 20-30GB of diskspace, so be sure not to enable this unless you are specifically looking for something and after the boot procedure has finished be sure to open Process Monitor and save the data to a file.

And as everything else it is easily configured through the tools menus.

But the key to this new tool seems to be ‘The tools we love in a new wrapping’. No more launching filemon and regmon trying to piece together from timestamps what happens when, now we have a tool to show all the information in one tool, and it is even possible to launch the tool minimized from a commandline.

For me this tool is definitely going to replace file- and regmon from the list of tools of the trade.

Microsoft has changed the license slightly according to Tim Mangan mainly to limit distribution of the tools to Microsofts site.

I will update this post as I learn more about the tool from my work with it, until now it seems like a nice way of collecting the tools we all use with an even better chance of piecing the information together.

/René Vester

I decided to try to make a list of the tools of the trade, keep it updated as i remember more tools.

Regmon(Sysinternals)
A great tool to monitor registry actions with options to filter for known issues like Access Denied etc.

Filemon(Sysinternals)
A Great tool to monitor file access to a server, again this tool has good features to filter for Access Denied etc.

Regshot(download)
A simple tool to make comparisons between before and after snapshot, very useful for making custom registry settings for users at logon. 

Reshacker(Download)
A tool which allows you to open an edit ressources of win32 executables, very handy if you need to remove surden menu’s in Office Products, IE, Calculator or whatever you need. Written by Angus Johnson, there is alot more info on his page.

Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit(download from MS)
A set of tools to help you determine problems with LUA(Limited User Accout/Access) bugs and with these tools you can also check applications before installing them on Terminal Servers, simply getting a read-out describing the way the application interact. Thereby helping you in your planning.

Tools mentioned by experts and colleagues, which i have not had the time to fully test yet.

WireShark(Download)
A tool allowing us to monitor network traffic on a packet basis.

Reg2Adm(Download)
Reg2Adm is a great tool to move registry hacks to adm files. I have not yet fully explored this tool but it is high on the list. It can be downloaded as part of the NUTS-Package.

I will convert this post to a static page later and keep it updated.

/Rene

The best way to do this in my oppinion is to use the “The Active Directory Group Policy”-Approach:

What you need to do is to create seperate OU’s in your AD to contain servers in the different geographical locations, lets say TS-DK, TS-US for the sake of demonstration.

On both OU’s you link your standard Lockdown policies, logon-scripts and what have we and make an additional GPO call it, lets say ProfilePath.

Then we edit the GPO for TS-DK and go to Computer Administration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Terminal Services and edit the entry called ‘Set path for TS Roaming Profiles’

Enable the policy and set the path for \\DK-fileserver\profilepath do not specify a placeholder for username, Terminal Services adds the username itself.

Then we create and edit the GPO for TS-US make the same change but specify \\US-Fileserver\profilepath

this will make sure that when users log on to a server in DK they will fetch their profile from the DK-fileserver and when logging on to a server in the US OU they will fetch their profile from the US-fileserver.

Another solution to this problem would be to place profiles on a DFS-share being \\Domain\dfs\profileshare for example. This would allow to add several servers to the dfs-root and thereby getting both fault tolerance, shared workload and users accessing the most local copy.

/LamerSmurf

 Alan Yousef from Extentrix and Stephen Spector from Citrix has worked up a great whitepaper on Citrix USB Keydrive Toolkit. I was reading through it and saw how they used Thinstall for packaging an ICA client to a usb-pen and visited www.thinstall.com.

Thinstall.com in cooperation with Citrix provides an all in a box citrix client ready to place on an USB key. I have tested this with Webinterface and it works great.

If you want to read more about the whats and hows, Douglas Brown posted a great article on this: http://www.dabcc.com/dabcc/webapplication/aspx/dabcc.content.aspx?intPKText=1612&intPKChannel=33

The price of the virtualised Citrix Client is $30 per USB-installation for corporate users and free for personal use. 

Ressources:
The Citrix whitepaper: http://apps.citrix.com/cdn/toolkits/files/USB_Toolkit_Q42005.pdf

The ICA on a USB: http://www.thinstall.com/products/virtualized_citrix.php