Citrix Synergy – Day4

Today I attended the session called “Image Management and Replication with Provisioning Services”. Project Merrimack from Citrix supports vDisk versioning while in use by using a new VHD file with the extension of .avhd which holds all of the changes. This supports VHD chains which allow for multiple streams to several revisions of one vDisk. The vDisk lifecycle management consists of maintenance, test, and production; these are the new device types. Lifecycle operations are New, Promote, and Revert & VHD chain operations consist of Merge (2 ways), Delete, and Replication (Import / Export). These can all easily be seen within the NEW vDisk Versioning User Interface. You can have 10 different versions of the same vDisk and in this interface tell it to boot production devices from any of those specific versions. So in the new PS every update and every merge performed creates a new version of the vDisk. You can have Provisioning Server perform an automatic merge after a pre-specified number of versions have occurred. From a performance perspective, the longer the VHD chain becomes the more IOPS and memory it will consume.

So as I got into the lab, I started wondering “What version were we actually doing this on?” As it turned out, this was Provisioning Server version 6.0 that we were doing the lab with as you can tell from the screenshot to the left. The screenshot to the right you can see the new type category which now states ‘Production’. This is called ‘Project Merrimack’ which is in Alpha code currently and there is not a current ETA on this version.

One of the surprises for me was not that we were working with deployment of XenApp through PVS, but we were working with “Project IronCode” which is XenApp version 6.5 which does not use DSC anymore, but it has gone back to a similar interface feel and look as XenApp 5 originally had and it is called Citrix AppCenter. It makes me wonder if they did not abandon the XenApp 6 interface because there were so many complaints about it being slow to open and administrate from.

The interface for XenApp 6.5 was extremely quick and responsive and took hardly any time to start up and get going. It appears as if Citrix is going for a singular look and feel across their product line which is a breath of fresh air if you ask me.

The Provisioning Service Console in 6.0 shows the Versions selection now when you right click on a particular vDisk. In this exercise we were requested to make a new maintenance version and make sure that we boot one of the devices in the collection off of the maintenance disk or .avhd file. As you can tell below, the VHD revisioning console shows the Base disk version 0 and the maintenance version which happens to be version 1.

We then placed the specific device into the type called maintenance.

Then we made sure that the boot selection showed the maintenance revision and forced the boot to that version.

At this point you would update the disk by installing applications, security updates, service packs, or whatever you wanted to revise. Then go back to the PVS Server image and right click choosing Versions. Select the maintenance version and then click on Promote setting the version access to Test and clicking OK.

One thing that I really liked about this is that you can select the version and click on properties thereby writing a description of what was done on the disk. This gets away from our best practice of having to keep up with a .txt file with all of the revisions and description of what was done.

Below shows a device in Maintenance mode (Win7.2.avhd) and one in Test mode (Win7.1.avhd). Notice that Test is in Private Image mode and Maintenance is in Standard Image mode.

Below is a glimpse as to what the file structure now looks like.

When you try to promote an image from Test to Production that is in use you will receive an error. You can obviously perform this function after shutting down the VM which is attached to that vDisk version. By right clicking on the vDisk in question and selecting Show Usage you can easily see every VM using any revision of this vDisk.

By right clicking on the vDisk and selecting Replication Status you can quickly tell if replication to/from the other PVS servers is finished or not. As of now in ‘Project Merrimack’ (currently in Alpha code) this feature is not complete, but it will be very cool when this is LIVE and production ready.

By selecting an image and clicking revert you can demote an image from Production to Maintenance or Test.

The final Citrix event of the night was hosted by Train. The concert was excellent and the food was pretty good too.

Citrix Synergy – Day3

Although technically this is really Day 1 of Synergy, my Day 3 started with a Partner Appreciation breakfast hosted by Citrix, Cisco, and NetApp. The event consisted of a panel with a representative from each company talking about their alliances and complete architected solutions concerning VDI. We met Dan Kuchem from Citrix again there and we talked about validated designs using Citrix, Cisco and EMC. Steve Bigler was with me and we started talking with Dan about making some headway in this area with the help of Jason Heinrich from Cisco.

Heading over to the keynote address we entered to the sounds of DJ Solomon and his club like atmosphere that he has created. The beats and electronic mixes were a far cry from the Doobie Brothers / Moody Blues music being the focal at Citrix Summit. The lighting was pale blue and pinks roaming everywhere over the floor like the “bat signal”. There were WAY more people in attendance for the Synergy keynote than at the partner focused event of Summit. The crowded packed room actually did remind me of a club as the song “Like a G6″ started playing; all I could think of was Jeremiah Cook’s version, “Like a V6″, which is a much better worded song in my opinion. After which CeeLo Green’s song “Forget You” played and I started trying to create some Varrow related lyrics in my head to that song. The buzz of excitement being generated from the crowd now that all of the end users have arrived is kind of narcotic. Everyone is looking forward to this big kick-off event known as Citrix Synergy 2011! What! Rolling Stones…ugggh!!

After many electronic remixes, the event started and the first speaker to address the crowd was again Mark Templeton who started off speaking about the acquisition of Kaviza. It appears that the VDI-in-a-box will be a strategic SMB marketed solution going forward and will be Citrix branded in the near future. He then started to talk about their strategic alliance with Microsoft and spoke further in depth about Microsoft System Center. The v-alliance was mentioned and emphasized to end-users to get with partners who are in the v-alliance. Joint investment in best-of-breed solutions, technology, alignment, and ecosystems was one of the key overtones.

Mark stated that the gap between consumer capabilities and Enterprise IT is growing; dubbed consumerization. Consumerization will force more IT change over the next 10 years than any other trend, according to Templeton. Mark continued to state that Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Personal Cloud (dubbed Three-PC or BYO-3 or BYO-compute) is where everything is trending towards. “Don’t fight it, feature it” was the theme of this section. With the advent of all kinds of technological capabilities in the marketplace, building in the capabilities to use those both at home and in the business world seems like a logical step.

Templeton went on to state the TCO is being supplanted by leveraging TVO. TVO, being True Value of Ownership, includes the following tasks.

• Open and Optimize brand locations
• On-boarding of employees and contractors
• Re-organization and M+A adds/moves/deletes
• Flexible designs
• Eco-efficiency – on and off premise

“Finding better ways for business to do business; whatever, whenever, wherever” is Citrix mantra, claiming it is all about innovation. He stated that it was time for the reinvention of work, compute, and business. “When people use things because they have to, and not because they want to, you have then made things too complicated.” For example, why do people love Apple products? It is partially because they are easy and get the job done quickly and efficiently. Easier and simpler wins every time and it brings with it a higher TVO.

Several NEW products were introduced and demonstrated the keynote.

• GoToMeeting HD Faces
• GoToManage
• NetScaler Cloud Gateway
• NetScaler Cloud Bridge
• Citrix Receiver for Web
• XenClient 2
• XenClient XT

Anit Singh, Global VP for Enterprise, from Google was a guest speaker at the event and spoke about Google Chrome OS and their tablets. He then asked everyone to look under their seats for a card which would allow them to get a free Chrome device. Several hundred devices were given away at the event. The excitement level went through the roof at this time. He stated that traditional OS will eventually be superseded by devices in which you can access all of your apps from the cloud. Nothing but a browser is needed and it keeps your devices safe from viruses. At this point the newest Citrix Receiver was introduced and it looked especially sharp! Introducing “follow me apps” followed by “follow me data” was then introduced and demonstrated.

After the keynote we caught up with the CEO of UniDesk, Don Bulens and CSA of UniDesk, Ron Oglesby to talk about our newly formed partnership and how we can best position their product. We asked for the 30 second elevator speech that we would give to our customers. We took this time to better understand the product, the company philosophy, positioning, and level of commitment to the product. Both of these gentlemen were very impressive and truly cared about the partnership and its direction and success.

This evening I passed the XenDesktop 5 exam as the free exam that we could take for coming to Synergy!! We attended partner events for TriCerat and Cisco. Thanks for putting on these events guys and making everyone feel welcome! We talked with several of our customers today and made plans with them while here at Synergy.

Citrix Summit – Day2

Day 1 ended with the Partner Appreciation Party which was very cool. The buffet was excellent and it was nice to get to know each other at Varrow a bit better and also to see some of the vendor reps that we work with daily (as partner relationships are extremely important to us). I got to talk with Phil Eden from TriCerat a bit yesterday and he is a very excitable guy with a lot of enthusiasm about TriCerat first and the products second. I like people who love their company as I do Varrow. Then the guys and I bumped into Andy Whiteside and Dan Kuchem from Citrix and I got to catch up with them and begin to understand what it is that we can do better as a company to make progress towards becoming Citrix Platinum. These are just great guys to hang out with and they truly understand what it is like being a partner like us. Apparently we had the most representation out of any other partner in the Carolinas, and it was really appreciated. Woot! Go Varrow!!

Day 2 started off with a kick, as after breakfast Jim Kennedy and I launched ourselves into the “XenDesktop5: Under the Covers” hands on lab. Again the room was setup to where everyone had their own lab environment, Internet access, and was able to follow along through a lab guide for about 2 hours after a 1 hour session with the instructor. The facilitators of this class were Carisa Stringer (Senior Manager), Roger LaMarca (Consultant), Jeff Laughter (Technical Relationship Manager), and Michael Bogobowicz (Principal Consultant) all with Citrix.

This was the first lab of its kind at Citrix Synergy and as with any LIVE lab you can run into issues…and we did. Maybe 1/3 of the class had issues creating a desktop pool. Having been a part of conducting LIVE labs before, I understand that these are difficult and when users run into issues how bad it can look. The lab was extremely slow for the most part and we had to end up skipping most of the exercises for the sake of time. I digress on this one, because LIVE labs are just plain difficult to pull off; especially one of this magnitude.

I have to say that we have already worked a lot this week (2 days) with XenServer and it has started to grow on me. I am not as comfortable with it as I am vSphere at all, but I have a greater respect for it. I still am not a fan of the way it conducts storage (and for those of you in the know about that story…HAHA!).

We skipped lunch and went directly to the vendor expo and met with Andy again from Citrix who showed some amazing things using HDX 3D for CAD solutions. This technology would fit wonderfully for those companies who use CAD applications and would like to use the GPU of the computer launching the XenDesktop instead of the GPU of the server. In fact this was the limitation of using HDX (or ICA) to begin with when referring to CAD apps. It seems that they have found an optimal way to deliver these apps now with Citrix.

We also met with Liquidware Labs and talked with Katie Larson and Tyler Rohrer about what is coming down from their company in the way of new and exciting. I let them know that we would be interested in doing some BETA tests with the new product and left it at that. There are some really neat things coming from LL in our opinion in the near future. Talked with AppDNA and although their product seems like it would be a good fit when referring to VDI assessments (specifically the application portion and its ability to be virtualized), it seems that their pricing model and licensing structure is not where we would need it to be for repeatable and sustainable process.

“Taking user experience to another level: understanding HDX technologies” was the 2:00 session which I thought might be very exciting since the true measure of a successful VDI product is the user experience in the eyes of Varrow. When you have successfully made the end-user happy, you have then created a viable solution which will help our clients truly be successful. Making sure to keep the solution redundant and simple at the same time would be a close second and third on my list having been in the position of administration prior to consultation with Varrow.

This session was presented by Derek Thorslund (Director of Product Management) with Citrix. HDX is a set of technologies broken down into 8 categories: HDX Broadcast, HDX MediaStream, HDX RealTime, HDX SmartAccess, HDX Plug-n-Play, HDX RichGraphics with RemoteFX, HDX WAN Optimization, and HDX Adaptive Orchestration. This appears to be a great topic for a future BLOG in which I will breakdown the 8 categories more thoroughly into what they really do.

The philosophy of adaptive orchestration is to dynamically understand what is on the network so that the connection can best delivering the full extent of its capabilities. In Desktop Director there is HDX monitoring available which gives a quick view of all HDX features with problem areas highlighted. Server-side rendering and client-side rendering is the responsibility of HDX Media Stream and Adaptive Orchestration which helps achieve a higher frame rate and image quality. 30 Frames per Second is the maximum allowed in the case of Server-rendered video frame rate. Many thin clients can only handle 12-15 FPS. XenDesktop 4 handled 25 FPS itself. HDX MediaStream supports all of our favorite players: Adobe Flash, Windows Media Player, DIVX, and more.

A new Tech Preview of HDX MediaStream is out which will help with Flash Redirection (WAN users & LINUX devices), improved Windows Media Redirection (WAN), smoother audio, and a dynamic frame rate & image quality. I am looking forward to getting this into the lab and putting it through its paces!

HDX RichGraphics: Adaptive Display which is fully self-tuning is an evolution of progressive display and has some exciting features. Like Windows 7 Aero? Citrix is now able to do Windows 7 Aero Redirection which leverages the client side GPU for the ability to use DirectX 9, and Pixel Shader v2 to either a single or dual monitor.

HDX Realtime (VoIP) looks like an attempt to perform peer-to-peer VoIP redirects traffic from the data center when using the Softphone UI back to the client. The ability to separate these dynamically using HDX makes the protocol extremely versatile. I can see “HDX softphones” coming in the near future. VoIP-over-ICA is another method by which a complete softphone could be run in the datacenter using codec technology to bring voice to the endpoint. Reduced latency and smoother audio will need to be conquered before I see this becoming too popular. This could possibly be overcome with multi-stream ICA. I look forward to trying out HDX Realtime in the Tech Preview and see what it can and cannot do.

HDX 3D was talked about; expounding on what I had learned earlier from Andy Whiteside. XenDesktop HDX 3D Pro looks very promising when clients are using 3D professional graphics applications: CAD/CAM, GIS, PACS, OpenGL, and DirectX. Making sure that this is tested with the appropriate graphics card is extremely important as the HCL presented only had NVidia cards listed.

HDX Ready thin & zero clients were briefly talked about which are coming to the market which can give up to 1080p video!! The features available vary between the Windows, Linux, and Xenith type clients.

All-in-all this was a really good session with a lot of information presented and a great speaker. He was very understandable and articulate, and really knew his stuff. I was surprised when I heard that this can cut up to 30% of the current bandwidth used by HDX. http://www.citrix.com/techpreview is where you can find the downloadable to check this out for yourself.

My next session was all about a very unsexy feature but, a topic which is super critical to success which is printing. In the “Printer Driver Management in XenApp and XenDesktop” session presented by Jamie Baker who is the escalation services manager at Citrix along with Mark Callahan, an escalation engineer on his team, they talked about Native driver installation within the DSC and the policies surrounding them. Citrix Universal Drivers eliminates the need to administrate & replicate different drivers providing printing improvements and supporting advanced features. XenApp 6 and XD5 printer replication is achieved through PowerShell Cmdlets (such as XAPrinterDriverReplication, XAAutoReplicatedPrinterDriver). Prior to these version Print Migrator tool could be used. The PrintBrm command line tool was talked about and examples were given, then Mark started in by asking “Why do printer driver cause problems?” and gave many reasons as to why they actually do; also giving some troubleshooting tips to resolve those issues. The Stress Printers Utility was presented and explained in detail along with how to interpret the log generated.

XenApp 6 Printing Optimization Pack is available and is built in to XenDesktop 5 resulting in (95%) bandwidth savings and (96%) lowered print times over previous methods. CTX126125, CTX125160, CTX113879, CTX126093, CTX124817, CTX118622 were only some of the articles referenced in this session. In conclusion, Jamie had his good moments but he probably needed to rehearse the presentation enough to not have to read the entire session from his laptop. J This was already a dry topic so having a bit of improve presentation skills would have been great. Mark really looked at the crowd and wasn’t reading off of the script. You could tell that he had some real world experience resolving these matters, probably daily. The Q&A afterwards was really good as well.

My last session of the day was “Managing and Troubleshooting NetScaler Environments with Citrix Command Center presented by Mario Remirez (Sr. Technical Lead Engineer) from Citrix. The NetScaler is quickly becoming one of my favorite products from Citrix right next to Provisioning Server. Having a large background in Cisco, I love anything surrounding routing, load balancing, and other high-level networking tasks. Citrix Command Center however, is not a product that I was privy to prior to the session. It is a centralized administration tools which discovers your network inventory allowing for fault management, performance monitoring, configuration management, reporting, and secure administration using a SSL certificate. The session covered the following:

• Installation and Configuring
• Adv. Administration
• Monitoring
• Reports
• Events
• Troubleshoot

This product does not require a license and it comes with Enterprise or Platinum agreements and requires no additional support agreements (costs). This is a value add product which brings simplification to your array of Citrix products. The Home page delivers a plethora of information when you first log into the Command Center. The discovery process is achieved via SNMP and ping processes or through an import file. It will show you your build versions of everything Citrix and allow you to manage each from one central console! Add the Command Center into NetScalers by logging into them and adding the server as a SNMP manager, also adding the command center as your syslog server. This product supports local, Active Directory, RADIUS, and TACACS authentication methods. I could see the alarms page getting a bit out of control, but you really start to know what is going on in your environment by digging down into the alarms and alerts within Command Center. The details for these alarms are very specific and should provide a great way to get real time reporting and increase efficiency within IT groups by quickly pinpointing issues. Reporting from Command Center gives very granular reports, but have to be turned on manually because not all reports are ON. The default poll is every 300 seconds and for everything you want to add using the + sign impacts performance, so be careful not to just turn on everything. When working with AppFirewall (a feature built into the NetScaler), Command Center can be very informative when used to troubleshoot it. The dashboard for AppFirewall is found under the Reporting Tab at the top and the AppFirewall -> Dashboard on the left hand pane. Even the presenter said that he had to look that one up! J This was a great session and should be very useful for me going forward. The delivery of the information was done by a real expert and good speaker in Mario. Great job!

Citrix Summit – Day1

Citrix Synergy has gotten kicked off today in the form of Citrix Summit. This event is a two day event prior to Citrix Synergy strictly for Citrix Partners. The city has definitely started filling up fast; as if there weren’t enough people in San Francisco! I checked into the Hilton off of O’Farrell which is only blocks from the Moscone Conference Center where a majority of the events programs are located. This morning I realized that the hands on labs that I sign up for are located right on the Hilton Hotel premise.

I started off my day in one of the Citrix Hands on labs called, “Migrating your XenDesktop 4 Deployment to XenDesktop 5″. The first thing that I noticed was that there were several professionals here from all over the globe. The two people in my row were from Mexico and Utah respectively. We started talking Citrix products and tech talk and before you know it, it was 9AM and class was starting.

Every seat in each row had a connection for a laptop. This was a “bring your own” laptop event and luckily I had brought my entire arsenal (iPad, Mac AirBook, and my Lenovo ThinkPad T510). I was really hoping for real hands-on events while here at Summit/Synergy 2011. I was pleasantly surprised and 2/3 of the class time was entirely hands-on. We each got to migrate a XD4 environment to a XD5 one.

This class was facilitated by Allen Furmanski, Readiness Specialist and Al Mata, Technical Relationship Manager both from Citrix. We started off the class with a slide deck and going through the 5 types of XD desktop pools, then went into the XD 5 Migration Tools and the process by which you would export and import the settings. By the time the class was over I had learned a lot and feel comfortable doing a migration using these new tools.

At 1:00 I met up with Tim West, Jim Kennedy, and Steve Bigler from Varrow. We all ate and talked until 2:00 when the keynote address started. Summit 2011 is officially “krunk”!

Mark Templeton came out and stated that this is the most in attendance at a Citrix Summit ever. He talked briefly about starting with “Why” and showed a TEDtalk video featuring Simon Sinek concerning his philosophy of the golden circle. Often comparisons to Apple were made as an industry example of a company who really knows why they are in business. Then he went into the history of the ICA protocol and its name and where it is today. Looking back into where Citrix has come from Mark starts to roll into the “Why” of Citrix and where they are going. Flex cast is considered by Citrix to be the platform by which companies can flexibly deliver that vision. The idea around vision + culture differentiates Citrix. Play hard and work hard, get results, and have fun.

The keynote featured a variety of members from Citrix, as usual, as the tone and message of the event was to how and why to sell more Citrix and equipping your employees to do just that. I think that at Varrow we have done an excellent job of equipping ourselves with great talent at the engineer positions, and a sales force who can really sell Citrix (include two former employees). Our next level needs to be achieved by understanding how to leverage the variety of Citrix products within corporation by understanding the “why” of their business and then using the Flex-cast story to create business agility within that company.

I don’t really understand why Varrow isn’t a Platinum Partner yet, as I believe that we have everything that it takes to be one. I don’t believe that having an agnostic approach to virtualization should ever be a showstopper for any partner, especially one as accomplished as Varrow. Why be great at only one thing, when we could be completely awesome at many!?  I think that I will write, “Help us become a Platinum Partner!” on the back of my business cards and hand a couple of them out to Mark Templeton and the other CxOs and VPs of the company. Maybe then we could get some traction.