Archive for March, 2010

I recently made the move over to using an Apple MBP, and was able to find the full Mac Client for my new laptop. The wheels came off when it came to licensing. Seems like I had temporary license on my MBP which when it expired wouldn’t be cleared. It took some google-wacking to find how to clear the cached temporary Microsoft CAL and Citrix CAL before I could connect again. So partly for my own future referrence, and partly to help others I thought I would document this process…

Firstly, started by clearing out the BUCKETS for non-windows clients which is held on the Citrix MetaFrame/Presentation Servers. This is located in the registry in \HKLM \Software \Citrix \MS Licensing followed by the Bucket ID

Next on the Mac, delete the CitrixID file held in Macintosh HD/Users/UserName/Library/Preferences/Citrix ICA Client/

Then finally, for good measure delete the contents of the Windows location for licensing (used if you RDP into the Citrix MetaFrame/Presentation server this located in /users /Shared /Microsoft /RDC Crucial Server Information

Here’s a round up of my favourite articles on the TechTarget site. VDI is a hot hot hot topic this week. At the top of my agenda this year is getting familiar with the XenDesktop product – and these need to know articles do help in that process.

SearchVirtualDesktop.com…
What you need to know about Citrix XenDesktop 4
A relatively complete product, XenDesktop 4 may be the VDI platform for you. Find out what it offers and if it’s a good fit for your enterprise.

VMware vies for virtual desktop dominance with View 4.5
VMware’s View 4.5 won’t be out until later this year. But sources said the VDI software has better management and tighter integration with ThinApp.

On the humorous side the co.uk arm of the TechTarget team has this fun post/round of “news’. I think they work for the Onion down in that London!

From SearchVirtualDataCentre.co.uk…
The Virtual Vidalia: EMC recruits top 25 bloggers; VMware fanboy upset Hyper-V doesn’t suck
In this edition: EMC has offered all top 25 VMware bloggers according to vSphere-land.com jobs; a VMware aficionado is deeply saddened that Microsoft Hyper-V R2 isn’t a ‘humungous flop’; a virtualization architect’s family still doesn’t understand what he does despite multiple explanation attempts; CBS contemplates “Survivor Island: The Virtualization Administrator”; and the mystery behind who @jtroyer follows on Twitter.

In this quick little tip I show you how you can use EMC Storage Viewer – to bridge the gap between the information you see in EMC NaviSphere application and the information you see in vSphere4. For years VMware Admins have struggled to map their datastores in ESX to the underlying LUN on the storage array. Not any longer they don’t. And like NetApps RCU and VSC – the EMC Plug-in is for free!

Click Here to read more:

Well, OK – I guess now that View4 has been released you could say this is a little old hat. But… much I what I write about in View3 is much the same in View4! Honestly! Someday I plan to revisit this series of articles probably when VMware 4.5 is released… By then VMware will have thier PCoIP protocol working with the Security Server, and much better integration with ThinApp.

This was originally wrote for the vSphere4 book that recently became available on Amazon. But it never made the book because of length of the whole book, and difficulty of finding a good home for a chapter VDI. Thanks to the folks of TechTarget for taking my work and making it available.

Part 1: What’s new with VDI?
Part 2: Installing VMware View
Part 3: Publishing individual virtual desktops
Part 4: Publishing virtual desktop pools
Part 5: Basics of VMware Composer and linked clones
Part 6: Managing linked cloned desktop pools
Part 7: Using a Virtual Desktop offline
Part 8: Desktop restrictions with group policy objects
Part 9: Installing Connection and Security servers
Part 10:Creating and applying certificates
Part 11: Application virtualization

Here’s all the articles I wrote about the NetApp Rapid Clone Utility 3.0 available on TechTarget.com. The three articles build as series to show you the full functionality of the NetApp RCU 3.0. At the time I wrote this – 3.0 was in beta but I imagine it has GA’d now.

Part one of the series describes what the RCU can do, and how its setup. Part 2 covers how you can provision new volumes from the NetApp Filer, and mount them to each and every ESX host as click of mouse. Finally, part 3 covers how you can quickly clone many VMs using the RCU – and then make those cloned desktops accessible by VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop

Part 1: Initial First-Time Configuration

Part 2: Deploying new datastores

Part 3: Cloning Virtual Machines