Recently I build a XenApp environment on Azure for demo purposes. I used –> this <– website helping me calculating the costs.
This website (running on Azure :-)) makes it easy to calculate the costs of your XenApp/XenDesktop environment on Azure.
You can provide the locations, working Hours, Workloads and number of users (and their profiles). It automatically loads the costs of Azure (so no outdated data!) for Comput, Storage and Network.
In complex environments, where distributed applications are deployed across the network utilizing numerous physical servers and workstations, connectivity can be reduced in general and/or per session basis. Connection Quality Indicator is a tool which provides feedback to the user when the network has been impacted to the point that the user’s experience is degraded. Displaying this information to the end user will improve overall user experience and reduce the number of helpdesk calls for network related user experience issues.
CQI is launched on session startup and continues to run for the life of the session notifying the user of changes to network performance. Notifications are used by CQI to alert the user about network state. There are several types of notifications that a user can see while the tool is running, they are as follows:
The way the end user interacts with CQI when using a Published Desktop or Application is for the most part the same, however, there are some subtle differences. When using a Published Desktop, CQI notifications are displayed in two different areas, system tray and standard notifications.
For Published Applications, since there’s no desktop, only standard notifications are shown. If more than one Published Application is in use within the same session, only the foreground application will display the notification.
More information here
CtxPatcher is a tool for downloading (and installing) updates for Citrix products.
Just install the tool using next-next-next and enter your MyCitrix account details :
Select the products, hit search and all available patches are ready to download. When you download the patches a install script is also created for easy installation:
Download the tool here
Citrix Education has a great offer. At a cost of $600 dollar you get 12 months of education to learn Citrix products. New courses are added at no extra costs. Current courses included in the eLearning Subscription include:
For more information go to: http://training.citrix.com/mod/ctxcatalog/course.php?id=187
The following registry key must be set for the Outlook Plugin to be enabled :
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\Malone.AddinModule]
“LoadBehavior”=dword:00000002
If “LoadBehavior” is set to 2, then it is disabled. If it is set to 3, then it is enabled.
After creating the Sharefile accounts and installing the Plugin into the vDisk a customer didn’t saw the Outlook plugin features. This is how to enable them.
First open outlook and go to Opties (Dutch languagepack)
Select “invoegtoepassingen”
Select the sharefile plugin and choose start:
After that configure the Plug-in options:
Enter your credentials and you’re ready to go :
When creating a new email you notice the Sharefile options :
Sometimes you run into a hung VM on XenServer. This is how to kill the VM running on XenServer :
First look up the UUID (in my case 50fa073a- etc)
Using the command list_domains you can find the id’s (0, 6, 7, 9 etc)
Now use the grep command to find the domain ID you need and use the following command to kill the VM : /opt/xensource/debug/xenops destroy_domain –domid <domainid>
Today a customer requested to upgrade the amount of memory on their XenServers. This is how you easily can determine which memory modules are being used.
Ofcourse you can use ILO, but then you only see the size and location but not the specific type of (memory) module :
This is how you can identify the specific type :
In the above screendump you can see it’s a dual rank module.
After my review of Xackup XenServer backup software I received serveral emails and tweets with people asking me if I had ever done a restore test. The answer is : ….. YES! Ofcourse. 🙂
I did several migrations and restores for testing purposes and they all succeedeed. I advise to install the software on a separate server because it has some impact on the CPU.
Anymore questions? Please leave a comment. 🙂
The last couple of days I ran into some problems with restoring VM’s on Xenserver. I started looking for Hypervisor backup software for Xenserver. I took a deep dive into the wonderful world called the Internet and found Xackup from Fungusware. Alright, strange name but let’s take a look at the product itself.
I downloaded the software, requested a trial key and after 5 minutes I was ready to go! Installing the software was as easy as hitting next a couple of times and entering the license (trial key). No uploading appliances, no proxy IP addresses or something like that. Let’s take a look at the main interface :
I created a new backup job, look at the pictures below :
Select the VM you wish to backup:
Use a snapshot to create a backup or use NFS/CIFS volume directly :
Specify location, compression, differential etc :
Pre- and post jobs :
Schedule the backup job :
Send email on completion :
And here we go : 🙂
You can also use this program to migrate VM’s hot or cold to a new XenServer. Using the steps (source and destination XenServer).
The cost of this al :
85 AUD is approx 55 EUR. You can select as many Xenserver servers as you would like. No per Xenserver limit. 🙂
Try it yourself at www.fungusware.com
