NetScaler VPX: Tech Preview Available for ESX 4.0

So as promised in my previous post on NetScaler VPX, the virtual edition of the Citrix network appliance solution has been released for ESX 4.0.  Actually, I found the official release to be kind of low key so therefore I have provided all the relevant links below in case you missed it.  While this is currently a tech preview it will at least allow for VMware environments to begin leveraging this technology in preparation for the production release.

https://secureportal.citrix.com/MyCitrix/login/EvalLand.aspx?downloadid=1857216&LandingFrom=1002 - NetScaler VPX Download Site

http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx123096 - NetScaler VPX for ESX Installation Guide

http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx121291 - NetScaler VPX 9.1 FAQ

http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx122426 - NetScaler VPX Licensing Guide

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX121819 - NetScaler VPX 9.1 Getting Started Guide

http://support.citrix.com/product/nsad/vpx9.1/ - NetScaler VPX 9.1 Knowledge Center

VMware View: How to Un-associate a User from a Desktop

During a View implementation this week a customer asked the question of how to un-associate a user from a desktop if they were using an automated pool of persistent workstations.  This would be required if you had a pool of assigned workstations, meaning that once a user logged into a session the VM they were connected to is always mapped to them after that point.  Then, for example, say a user left the company and you want to remove their workstation from the pool so it can either be re-allocated or destroyed, this is how to accomplish that task.

Using the vdmadmin tool execute the following command from the View Manager server while logged in as an admin:

vdmadmin.exe -L -d poolName -m machineName -u UserName

Alternatively, if you want to assign a desktop to a user, meaning that the first time they go to log into View they receive a specific, pre-created VM, then use the following command:

vdmadmin.exe -L -d <pool_name> -m <vm_name> -u <full_user_name>

Where <pool_name> is the View Manager pool name, <vm_name> is the virtual machine name as seen in VirtualCenter (vCenter), and <full_user_name> is the user name formatted as DOMAIN\username .

Below is a usage sample for this command:

vdmadmin.exe -L -d MyPool -m WinXP-VM -u MYDOMAIN\administrator

 The vdmadmin.exe tool is located in the “%ProgramFiles%\VMware\VMware VDM\Server\bin” directory and is accessible from the command prompt.

SRM 4.0 and EMC Celerra: How to Guide

As I’m sure you have all read by now, version 4.0 of Site Recovery Manager is hot off the assembly line from VMware with some exciting new features.  Probably the most interesting new functionality to me is support for NFS.

When poking around for some technical tidbits I happened upon the following guide courtesy of the VIOPS site.  Authored by Cormac Hogan from VMware, the guide is a step by step whitepaper which outlines how to configure SRM 4.0 in conjunction with EMC Celerra, with a specific focus on NFS based storage.  Even cooler is the fact that you can leverage the Celerra Simulator, available free of charge from Powerlink, along with ESX to get your feet wet with testing this new functionality without touching your production environment.  Ain’t virtualization grand!

 http://viops.vmware.com/home/servlet/JiveServlet/download/1602-1-8390/EMC%20Celerra%20NFS%20CLI%20&%20SRM%204.0%20Setup%20Guide.pdf

Oracle: VMware and EMC vs. RAC

Over the past couple of months I have been working on a very interesting project focused on helping a customer move away from an outsourced model and bring their IT infrastructure in-house.  Their business revolves around Oracle on the backend, so it is very important that, as they move to hosting it internal, the environment is configured with cost, performance, and availability in mind.

Their initial plans included a migration to Oracle RAC.  While there is nothing wrong with this direction, it can tend to be very costly and complex.  RAC provides for the utmost in database availability but can be very difficult to migrate to in heterogeneous Oracle environments.  Upon searching around for some options I found a whitepaper from VMware concerning the benefits of leveraging ESX with Celerra to host Oracle as an alternative to RAC.

Since the customer is moving away from a Solaris specific hardware deployment to an x86 platform for cost saving reasons, it’s kind of a no brainer to continue in the direction of server virtualization.  That combined with the fact that they will be implementing replicated NS-480 arrays gives them a lot of options and flexibility as compared to RAC.  Beyond having a more flexible infrastructure, I was surprised by some of the performance and cost savings outlined in the whitepaper.  According to the document, for comparable deployments using Oracle 10g RAC EE and Oracle 10g SE virtualized, TPS was around 950 vs. 550 and Users were around 19.000 vs. 10,000 both in favor of Oracle on VMware.  On top of the better performance, Software Licensing Cost per TPS was around $2100 for RAC and $250 for the VMware base configuration.

Beyond virtualization the focus on Celerra in the document was mainly around demonstrating the advantages of leveraging multiple protocols for storage connectivity through the different approaches for deployment.  The Celerra platform is key for this reason as it supports NFS, iSCSI, CIFS, and FC in a single, fully redundant, and easy to manage platform.

So if your considering the deployment of RAC in your environment, take a hard look at the following whitepaper.  While the comparison isn’t completely apples to apples, for most environments the virtualization approach can meet the availability and performance requirements at a lower price point.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/partners/oracle/vmw-oracle-virtualizing-oracle-db10g11g-vmware-on-infrastructure.pdf

NetScaler VPX: Ready for Prime Time

Well NetScaler VPX is now GA, actually I’m a little late as it was announced last week.  If you recall, I touched on this subject a few weeks ago when harping on the importance of a true load balancing solution for high availability in a XenApp environment.  As a brief recap, the VPX line of NetScaler is a virtual appliance solution that gives you all of the functionality of the hardware based version but runs on top of a hypervisor, mainly XenServer at this point. 

But take heart VMware lovers, word on the street is NetScaler VPX will be released for vSphere by November of this year.  According to the NetScaler VPX site  a free Express Edition is available for download.  Upon further inspection of the license guide, link below, the Express edition allows unlimited use of the Standard Edition functionality at 1Mbps full-duplex throughput.

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX122426 

While that isn’t exactly practical for full production use, it does allow you to adopt and gain experience with this technology in your environment without being confined to an evaluation period.  The Express Edition binaries can be downloaded from the following link:

https://www.citrix.com/English/ss/downloads/details.asp?downloadId=1857216

Once your ready to move it to production you have a few choices regarding full purchased versions.  The following is a breakdown of the different VPX appliance flavors along with retail pricing:

	VPX 1000	VPX 200	VPX 10
HTTP Throughput	1 Gbps	200 Mbps	10 Mbps
New SSL requests/second	500	500	500
SSL Encrypted Throughput	1 Gbps	200 Mbps	10 Mbps
HTTP Compression Throughput	750 Mbps	200 Mbps	10 Mbps

VPX 1000 Standard = $15K

VPX 200 Standard = $5K

VPX 10 Standard = $1,200

The Standard edition gets you all the critical functionality around load balancing, short of GSLB which I’m not happy about, and Access Gateway Enterprise edition.  There are also Enterprise and Platinum editions of the appliances, an outline of the features can be accessed here:

http://www.citrix.com/%2Fsite%2Fresources%2Fdynamic%2Fsalesdocs%2FDataSheet_NetScaler_Sept09.pdf

Once you’ve decided which version you will be implementing you can use the following guide to get started:

http://support.citrix.com/servlet/KbServlet/download/20331-102-577426/NS-VPXGettingStarted-Guide.pdf

XenApp 5.0 FR2: Automated Management

A classic stereotype for Citrix XenApp as a technology, in about any IT organization, is that it requires a lot of effort to manage.  This especially holds true in larger environments with a lot of concurrent users, therefore usually translating to a number of servers to maintain. 

While there are a lot of creative ways to add efficiencies into the management of XenApp environments, Citrix as taken the next step in building these technologies right into the product.  With the release of XenApp 5.0 FR2, several features have been integrated to add automation with provisioning, power and capacity utilization, as well as general management tasks such as allowing business units to add users to published resources.  The post listed  below by Vinny Sosa from Citrix outlines all of these critical new features as well as other interesting benefits of 5.0 FR2:

http://community.citrix.com/display/ocb/2009/09/16/What%27s+new+in+XenApp+5+Feature+Pack+2+in+plain+English

Provisioning Server and XenServer Interoperability

While working on a XenDesktop POC this past week I encountered an issue with communication between Provisioning Server 5.1 and the target device client which promptly caused a wave of deja vue.  Could it be the old retry issue that has been around since PVS 4.5 and XenServer 4.1?

As insinuated above by the old product versions referenced, this has been a problem with virtualizing Provisioning Server target devices on XenServer since Citrix first comingled the 2 products.  Apparently depending on the configuration of the network card in the XenServer host a problem can occur with excessive retries on the target device side.  This translates to slow boot times when streaming a VM from Provisioning Server as well as long image capture times when trying to build a vDisk.  It appears to be caused by TCP Offload parameters being enabled on the physical adapter of the XenServer host.

A workaround for the issue is outlined in the following Citrix Knowledge Center article but basically you can set a registry key on the target device side which disables Offloading.

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX117491

UPDATE: Greg Bulla, a friend of mine and tenured engineer at Old Dominion, shot me an email after reading this post to share some of his personal experiences on this subject.  Upon building a XenServer based guest and executing a capture for a vDisk, Greg encountered the timeout issue noted in my blog.  However, the fix I posted did not address his particular issue. 

After implementing the fix outlined in Citrix article CTX115658, he was able to correct the timeout problem with his VM.  This appears to be another method of disabling Large Send Offload.  The link for this particular article is listed below.  Thanks Greg!

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX115658 

XenDesktop Design Resources

This one is going to be a short post as I just got home from the race track and I am wore out to say the least.  Tomorrow I will be starting a POC for a large educational institution in NC so I thought that I would share some of the resource which I find very in designing XenDesktop environments.  No matter if you are engaging with a consulting company, preferably us, or if you are going about it on your own, it is incredibly important to gain an understanding of the technology as well as best practice around configuration prior to starting an implementation.

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX120760 - XenDesktop Design Handbook

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX122044 - Migrating Users from Physical Workstations to XenDesktop

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX121478 - Designing an Enterprise XenDesktop Solution

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX120516 - Simplifying Application Delivery to the Virtual Desktop

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX119775 - XenDesktop Scalability Analysis

http://jeremywaldrop.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/how-to-build-and-optimize-a-windows-xp-image-for-xendesktop/ - How to Build and Optimize a Windows XP Image for XenDesktop (Created by our very own Jeremy Waldrop)

Citrix XenApp Training, No Excuses!

It seems like all too many times I have witnessed people in the IT industry use training as an excuse not to learn something new…sounds backwards right?  Well basically, I think that people tend to get upset when their employers cut training or travel budgets  and use that as an excuse not to help themselves.  I think that a lot of us rely too much on structured training and do not leverage the resources readily available from an unlimited number of free sources.

A perfect example is located at the link below.  While browsing the Citrix Communities site I happened upon these great video tutorials which cover several technical topics around XenApp including profiles, Application Isolation and Streaming, CPU and Memory optimizations, XenApp policy, and the list goes on.  These are aspects which are often misunderstood, not properly utilized, and/or configured incorrectly in XenApp environments.  With just a little bit of time and initiative, leveraging resources such as this can make the aforementioned challenges simple to overcome.

http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/subfeature.asp?contentID=164122

So take a few minutes out of your day to help yourself.  There is ultimately no excuse when it comes to bettering your skillset and your career.

Upgrading Provisioning Server vDisks: You’ve Got Options

I have been a huge fan of Provisioning Server ever since I started working with it when Citrix acquired Ardence a few years ago.  It is arguably indispensible in medium to large XenApp environments and provides the mechanism around efficient management of images for XenDesktop.  That being said I think a lot of organizations are turned off to using this technology based on the perception that it is overly complex.

Probably the 2 main reasons for this perceived complexity is the need for hardware commonality and the image upgrade process for specific items such as the PVS client, NIC driver, and certain other specific scenarios.  It is true that when streaming an image to bare metal the hardware needs to be relatively common, i.e. the same, across all systems consuming said image.  However, there are ways to layer in flexibility via a common image build process.  The second challenge around upgrading vDisk images has also recently been addressed with the release of Provisioning Server 5.1.

Prior to PVS 5.1 upgrading items in the image such as the PVS client or NIC drivers meant you had to lay your image back down to the  physical or virtual machine from which it was captured via  a reverse image process, upgrade the software or drivers, and then capture your image to a vDisk once again.  This process is time consuming especially if your a large environment and have many different vDisks.   Trevor Mansell, an engineer at Citrix, recently posted 2 great articles on how to leverage the new functionality called Direct VHD Boot in PVS 5.1 to enable the boot of even hardware based vDisk images on Hyper-V or XenServer eliminating the need for the reverse image process and recapture.

http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/trevorm/2009/07/28/New+Way+to+Upgrade+with+PVS+5.1+and+HyperV

http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/trevorm/2009/08/15/PVS+5.1+Direct+VHD+Boot+using+XenServer

This functionality adds a tremendous amount of efficiency to the vDisk upgrade process as well as many other benefits to XenDesktop environments, and physical and virtual environments where PVS is leveraged to centrally manage the delivery of operating systems.  Thanks to Trevor for this great information!