From the RES Community Hero Dept. Today I’d like to introduce a new blog site, which one of my good colleagues, Musa Cakar from RES Support has launched. The blog is called My Virtual Environment, or MYVE.nl. His first article is very useful, as it deals with reducing the size of Mozilla Firefox profiles, using the RES Workspace Manager. Be sure to check out the article here!

From the Mayday-We’re-Syncing Dept. On the last day of 2011, the Service Release 3 for the RES Workspace Manager 2011 was released. Among a bunch of new cool enhancements, there is one that I especially would like to elaborate on. Workspace Manager supports Microsoft Sync Center, a part of Windows 7. Specifically the support consists of that network drive-mappings, created in Workspace Manager will continue to work nicely, when Sync Center is used to bring stuff offline. This means you don’t have to worry about scripts to map the network drive when you’re offline. A new technote RG044 has been added to the Technote Library describing how this works. A helpful buildingblock has been included.

<<< Click here to read the article

From the Technotes-R-Us Dept. With the Automation Manager 2012 currently available as RC2, a RESguru article describing the nuts, bolts and registry settings of the new Dispatcher+ has been overdue for a while. To the rescue comes Rob Aarts with a great article, which explains the ins and outs of the new dispatcher component. Also covered in the article is the Master Dispatcher/Cache feature. The most important registry settings to tweak the behavior of the Dispatcher are also covered. Finally the article also covers the new WebAPI for Automation Manager.

<<< Click here to read the article!

From the sideline comments dept. Just before xmas Brian shares his view on what’s important for vendors in relation to Desktop Virtualization. I’m not going to recap his article in total, you can read it here. What I wanted to comment on specifically, is that it’s really nice to have been working with a vendor for 11+ years now, who all along has been doing what the good Dr. Madden orders today! :-) While we originally back in the late ’90s started out being a product only for Terminal Services/Citrix environments, RES products were kept in tune with the times and trends to embrace all windows platforms: Workstations, Laptops and Server Based Computing – what I referred to as tri-platform support back in the day.

With the emergence of virtualization, first on hardware, then later on applications, it was  possible for RES to add 3 more innovative dimensions to that picture:

1. Early VDI Workspace support: RES Software actually didn’t have to change much, if anything in the Workspace Manager (back in the day known as PowerFuse) to support VDI. As the Workspace Composer runs inside the user’s session, seen from a technical perspective of the product, it’s running on a workstation OS, which just happens to be accessed as a terminal server through RDP, HDX or whatever. In other words, all the goodness which Workspace Manager offered already for Laptops, Physical workstations and Terminal servers, was available for VDI from day one.
2. First App-V integration: RES was TRUTHFULLY, THE VERY FIRST VENDOR who worked proactively with the Grand-Daddy of all application virtualization technologies, SoftGrid by Softricity – now known as App-V by Microsoft. Since then, we’ve adapted to support pretty much every major App Virtualization platform out there. Application virtualization is an important piece of VDI as it will allow you to have more apps to co-exist in the same image. Using the workspace manager to differentiate access to these apps, you can litterally cut down your VDI configuration to one golden image per operating system. Look out for an article on this topic later.
3. First Reverse Seamless provider: Back in the day, RES had this little – relatively un-noticed – sidecar utility to the Workspace Manager, known as the RES Subscriber aka Workspace Extender. These were the first implementations of Reverse Seamless Windows. Few people saw the potential early on, but I’d like to highlight a specific video, made by my former colleague Rick Eilenberger, that demonstrates what it was able to do already then in 2007. It was known as the RES Subscriber. The technology later licensed by Citrix, evolved to a stand-alone product, known as VDX. For more information on VDX, go read here.

The only thing we’ve left alone in regards to virtualization, is so called ‘User Virtualization’. This is some sort of horn which the Usual Suspects likes to blow (and do I mean blow… ;-) To my experience, the concept of virtualizing the user makes no sense at all. The user is the only real “object” in the entire getup anyway. Sure, hardware is quite real too, however unlike the behavior of users, it’s behavior is way more predictable, hence virtualizing it is relatively easy in comparison. This is one of the reasons why I believe the idea of redirecting the profile to a database is a flawed concept to begin with. You want as fast and reliable access to your settings to your settings as well as your documents to cater for the user’s sometimes erratic behavior. This is why the RES Workspace Manager was built with purpose to store User Settings in the same manner as User Data is stored; in a location which is unique and readily accessible to the user.

With the ever-growing adaptation of Cloud Computing into the Enterprise space, the profile game is a-changing. Boatloads of other pundits have been describing in vivid detail how users will demand access to their settings virtually anywhere. One way of dealing with this is to provide ACCESS from anywhere to a centralized solution. Citrix have been doing this for well over 20 years. Thing can however quickly become harrowing if changes the user makes should follow them between different infrastructures (different server farms, operating systems or even different laptops). This is where an intelligent and granular approach to handling user settings is required. If you are contemplating storing your settings only in a standard SQL database – or on a fileserver for that matter you are asking for trouble, or at the very least unnecessary complexity. I’ve discussed this previously in this article.

Anyway, while the usual suspects are duking it out on the commentary section over on BM, RES Software is ready to take on the new year. Stay tuned to this blog for even more tidbits and useful info in 2012! Happy new year everybody.

‘Twas a month before Xmas and through the hotel, nothing was stirring… well maybe, except for the 450+ geeks and guru’s who assembled at the Hilton Universal City, Los Angeles for the first major Citrix Technology Exchange event on Dec 2nd 2012. RES Software had been invited as a platinum sponsor of the event. Besides showing our products at the vendor’s tables, we also had a couple of presentation slots. I want to take a moment to specially thank my friend Rick Eilenberger at Citrix for putting this great event together. Be sure to check out his follow-up article here.

During one of the RES Software presentations, I had the pleasure of once again demonstrating the unparalleled awesomeness of the RES Automation Manager. This time I had the good Mr. Luca Lo Castro with me on stage, as he is indeed the evil mastermind behind this latest creation. What we have here is nothing less than one of the most awesome Run Books created for RES Automation Manager yet. The Runbook does the following:

• Unattended installation of Citrix Provisioning Server 6.0 (PVS)
• Unattended installation of Citrix XenApp 6.5 (XA)
• Unattended installation of Xen Desktop 5.5 (XD)
• Preparation of a Windows 7 image (application of best practices, per Citrix’s recommendations.

This is quite valuable for anyone who installs these products for a living, no matter if you are a consultant, a Citrix SE or perhaps a Citrix admin at a large installation. The cool part is that ALL of the above is done in less than 45 minutes! Add that to the approx. 15 minutes it takes to stand up the RES Automation Manager infrastructure, and ask yourself this: How long does it take you to stand up a XenDesktop + PVS + XA environment under normal circumstances? I trust you see my point. So what are the prerequisites for all this? You’ll need the following:

• Your 3 .ISO files, respectively for PVS, XA and XD. If you haven’t got them, download them from MyCitrix.com
• A server (200x, doesn’t really matter), which will hold your DBMS for Automation Manager and be a mount point for your ISO’s. Let’s call it Server1. If you can run a compatible datastore for Automation Manager, this could be your laptop!
• Mount the ISO’s on this server using Daemon Tools or similar. Alternatively, if you are using a VM, you can just mount the ISO’s directly on the virtual machine as DVD drives. Finally if you already have the ISO’s extracted somewhere, you can just share those folders. Either way, make sure you share the individual mount folders, so the contents of each ISO is available as a \\server1\share UNC path.
• You will also need 3 blank x64 Server 2008R2 servers. And I do mean blank. For example, not manually install the .Net 4 client profile ahead, as it will mess up the unattended installation of SQL Express. These servers will be the target servers for PVS, XA and XD. Lets call these machines Server A, B and C
• Finally you’ll need a blank Windows 7 machine. This is the machine which will be prepped for use with PVS (registry hacks applied, services configured etc) as the golden image.

To get things stood up, here are some guidelines to get you started:

1. Download and install the RES Automation Manager aka AM. Refer to the Getting Started guide.
2. Deploy the AM Dispatcher to Server1
3. Deploy the AM Agents to the 3 blanks Servers A..C
4. Import the buildingblock, which you will find at the end of this article.
5. In the AM console, go to Repository | Run Books
6. Rightclick on the Citrix POC-Sales runbook and select Schedule Job
7. Fill out the parameters for the runbook as described below
8. Hit OK, then hit the local Starbucks.. :)

The parameter screen needs a bit of explanation, because if you don’t fill things in right, then of course “interesting” things may happen. You know the drill: BS in, BS out. So let’s have a look at a screen I’ve already filled out below. Click to enlarge:

 The table below explains each field and what you need to enter. There’s a couple of blank spots, but as soon as I get them validated by Luca I’ll be sure to update the posting.

Those of you who are savy with Automation Manager may wonder why that AM resources aren’t utilized for this RunBook. The reason is twofold: First of all, you don’t wan’t to be waiting to upload the close to 8GB of the 3 ISO’s together to the datastore. Not that it can’t handle it, but think about that you would have to do that every time there is a new .ISO. it would make things really cumbersome. Second, by not using a linked resource we preserve the flexibility of the runbook, without having to modify it, i.e. we don’t need to edit any resource every time we go to a new place where we want to use the Run Book.

I guess at this point you want to have a go at the RunBook, so just click on the Christmas present on the right to download:

Enjoy!

Note: If you have problems with getting the runbook to work, again: Make sure the 2008 servers are blank. If still no luck, post your results in the forum, so we can get some eyes on it. The buildingblock is provided as-is. It’s not something that has been provided officially in the context of RES or RES Support.

While Hollywood probably aren’t adopting said title just yet, there’s definitely some Practical Magic to be shared here. A couple of months back, my old partner-in-crime, British RES Wizard Mr. Grant Tiller, created a pretty cool video. In one swift go, it shows all the goodness there’s to be had with the Citrix XenClient in combination with RES Workspace Manager, Automation Mananger, and the Service Orchestration Module. All in less than 11 minutes. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can still catch it here.

I’d recommend you to watch this one, as it will be well worth your time. The good folks over at Citrix did so already, and highlighted it in their announcement of the XenClient 2.1 release last week.

From the So-Ein-Ding-Muss-Ich-Auch-Haben Department. Here the other day I came across a nice article by Michel Stevelmans, where he’s taken the time to dig out some really useful explorer registry keys. These are the settings one needs to pick up from the users registry in order to serve up a consistent desktop experience, when moving across a computing estate. While the article was written with a competing vendor in mind, I have the luxury of really not having to care about that. This article will show you how to to put this knowledge into practice with RES Workspace Manager – and yes, you guessed it: BuildingBlock Included!

<<< Click here to read the full article

From the Gold-Brick-Through-Your-Window Dept. A while back you may have read about the work that was initiated at the Citrix Servtech event in Santa Clara, CA. As it turns out RES Software and Citrix Systems found a lot of common ground in leveraging the power of the RES Automation Manager to speed up Citrix XenApp 6.5 deployments.

IMPORTANT: The buildingblock has been updated Dec 5th. See below.

There is good reason to look into automating XA6.5 installations: You may not have noticed it, but the end-of-life date for XenApp 6.0 was recently updated. In other words, within the coming year you may need to start thinking about upgrading your XenApp farms. To ease this transition, it is my pleasure already now to be able to share with you the fruits of the collaboration between Citrix and RES. You can download the building block for Automation Manager at the end of this post.

A few words about the building block: It contains a Run Book which will schedule several Modules, necessary to install and configure XenApp 6.5 – including it’s prerequisites. To try it out, you need to download and install the RES Automation Manager. You can pull down a fully functional 45-day eval copy here. Getting-Started guide is available here. Out of the box there will be enough licenses to install a handful of XenApp servers. You will also need your XenApp 6.5 ISO image handy. You will either mount the image somewhere or extract the contents to a folder. Either way, the buildingblock requires the contents of the ISO to be accessible via a share. This is important. Once you schedule the Run Book, you will be prompted to enter some information such as paths, passwords, etc. See the screenshot on the right for an example.

Those of you who are savy AM hackers may wonder what’s up with the share. As it turns out, it’s really the most efficient way to access the Citrix distribution media, simply because of it’s size, it’s not feasible to upload as a AM Resource. Second, bear in mind that the ISO contents may be updated by Citrix in the future.

I wish to personally thank the following people for their contributions to this project: Rick Eilenberger, Josh Fleming, Alex Danilychev and Brian Mirrotto @ Citrix Systems. And last but not least my fearless Sicilian friend Luca Lo Castro here at RES, who put the pieces together into a working building block. Credit also goes to Musa Cakar and Arno Vos, who took the time to expand the datastore capabilities. See below:

As mentioned, the buildingblock was updated December 5th 2011. The update consists of support of MS SQL Datastores. While the original buildingblock only supported SQLserver 2008, it now supports creating the XenApp Datastore on MSSQL 2005 and 2012 (Release Candidate 0).

Click here to download the updated XenApp 6.5 block:

From the Technotes-R-Us Dept. Ever wondered how to create nice uniform HTML signatures for your entire company, then to discover there’s someone that needs a different one. Fast forward 6 months you’re faced with having 5 or 6 different email signature templates for Outlook to juggle. If you want a sleek method of dealing with all that, you want to check out this article from resident co-Guru, Sascha Maier. Here you’ll learn how to not only embed different bitmaps into the signature according to group membership, but also how to distribute those bitmaps using RES Workspace Manager’s Custom Resource feature.

<<< Click here to read the article.

PS: This is our 60th article, w00t!

From the Technotes-R-Us Dept. A new article has been published in the Technote library by resident co-author Mr. Patrik Kaak. This time he takes us through how you troubleshoot if you have large User Settings files in Workspace Manager. This article illustrates how to figure out what’s actually being stored inside of these files.

<<< Click here to read the article.