Virtualization, EUC, and Computing in General
Jacob Rutski Ok so the title is a little bit misleading…because the StoreFront logon won’t even render on anything less than IE8. And sure, you’re thinking “Who still has IE7?” Or IE6 for that matter?? There are some really old XPe thin clients out there that have 7Mb of free space on them…ask me how I know. Now to the misleading part: We’re actually going to cheat a bit and use a WI site – since WI … Read more…
Setting up LDAP-based authentication the the NetScaler GUI is usually one of the first things I do on a NetScaler build…except on NetScaler 10.5 – it looks like this feature is broken NS 10.5 build 50.10 nc. The procedure is simple – configure an LDAP server and policy (or use an existing server\policy configured for CAG, etc). Then create a local group that matches the name of an Active Directory group – ‘Domain Admins’ for … Read more…
In the old days of XenApp, the XenApp servers were TS\RDS servers as well – this has not changed. What has changed is the mechanism for controlling connections to sessions on the server – they are now brokered by the Delivery Controller. Previously, if you wanted to allow users to connect you needed to grant the ‘Citrix Users’ group (or Domain Users if everyone used Citrix) the ‘Allow logon locally’ and ‘Allow logon via terminal … Read more…
Here’s a quick list of Powershell commands I find myself using frequently. I’ll keep this updated. Get a list of all brokered connections [code language=”powershell”] Get-BrokerConnectionLog | Sort BrokeringTime [/code] I always sort by BrokeringTime because the order appears to be odd otherwise because the log is updated with the initial brokering time as well as the EndTime. Add an application to multiple delivery groups [code language=”powershell”] Add-BrokerApplication -Name "AppNameHere" -DesktopGroup "NewDesktopGroupHere" [/code] Adding an … Read more…
There are a lot of timeouts in any XenApp environment – active session timeout, idle timeout, disconnected session timeout…the list goes on. Recently, I ran into an environment that was having a problem with disconnected sessions staying on the server – it was a newly deployed XenApp 7.5 site with infrastructure and VDAs on 2012R2. There were some issues with applications pegging resources when users connected to disconnected sessions – turns out the disconnected sessions … Read more…
In the old days, IT departments would usually just expose Microsoft ActiveSync externally and allow anyone that could authenticate to connect and sync corporate mail. Sure Exchange brought some control over these devices, including the ability to enforce a security PIN number lock and wipe them (full wipe) if they ever tried to connect after the wipe request was issued. But this still presents a problem: all of your corporate email data, including the top … Read more…
For the last few years wireless in our house was provided by a Cisco AIR-AP1252 dual band A-G-N access point – as seen here: Let’s just say that it’s not the most attractive thing in the world. I was given two choices by “the board”: either find a different solution, or put it somewhere out of sight. I first chose the out of site option and moved the AP to the basement. This worked for … Read more…
Let me preface this post with 2 things: It’s going to be short and sweet It assumes you’re using NFS for your datastores (which you should be – since writes are SYNC, the snapshot should be clean) First, you need somewhere to move the backing files – in my case, I take a tiered storage approach. VMs run on several spindles of 10K SAS; CIFS storage is on a few 2TB SATA drives; offsite is … Read more…
I see a lot of posts on the FreeNAS forums asking about performance for VMware\Hyper-V or any other hypervisor using FreeNAS as the backing storage for virtual machines. Then I see the specs of the systems those people are looking to build or already have built and I frown a bit. First, let me say that FreeNAS is more than capable of handling the task of storage for your home virtual lab – if you … Read more…
The Proliant G6 line of servers are quiet – and that’s big for anyone using server grade hardware at home (me). I had started with G5 servers, but those were pretty loud – especially the DL380 – per the HP quickspecs document, 44dB. Then I upgraded everything to G6 servers and it made a HUGE difference – sort of. The ESX host is a DL360 – nothing special here, just an extra NIC. The G6 … Read more…