Archive for the ‘Citrix’ Category

Yes, I know “floating anonymous users” brings forth this image of total strangers hovering over cubes in the offices trying to login to your system. It’s actually a turn of phrase I picked up on when I was last at Citrix offices in Dublin last year – getting my head around how XenApp, XenServer and XenDesktop worked. I guess in essence another way of looking at “concurrency” licensing models which you see in more “session” based virtual desktop/server-based systems…

Read on…

Citrix recently announced their work is almost done on the client hypervisor (can you call it a hypervisor if their is a DOM0 or parent partition?). That apparently ruffled some feathers and caused a bit of kerfuffle. [Yes, that really is an Andy & Lou reference] Personally, I wondering what the big deal is all about. Learn more about my skepticism here…

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

Following on from my recent “Chinwag” with Gabrie Van Zanten, this blogpost compares the relative merits of VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop. It raises the issue that a VDI project does offer the tempting possibility of considering other virtualization vendors other than VMware. It also posits the idea that by diversifying your virtual portfolio to be more multi-vendor you might reduce your dependency on a single virtualization vendor, build the virtualization team out of the striaght-jacket of being a VMware-One-Trick-Pony – and although your organization to really play one virtualization vendor of against another from a licensing perspective.

Read more at:

In this article, we eschew the normal blue-sky 2010 technology predictions for something a bit more everyday that will affect your daily virtual life.

Scale up, up, up and away
Firstly, it’s no surprise that by mid-year there is likely to be a major rerelease of vSphere4 with a strong emphasis on increased scalability. Building on top of vSphere4′s current scalability I wouldn’t be surprised to see the number of vCPUs a single ESX host can support go beyond the 128 core range. I think it’s likely that by the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2011 we will be looking at more than 8 vCPUs to a VM – with VMware pushing the amount of RAM per-VM into the 512 GB to 1 TB range and the ESX host supporting 1 TB or 2 TB of physical RAM.

Read on…

A pal of mine has put me on to a new utility called XenServer Documenter. To quoth the blurb “provides a time saving solution for making detailed documents of Citrix Xenserver infrastructures. It highlights a plethora of configuration parameters in neatly formated tables and constructs a professional looking Microsoft Word 2003 or Word 2007 Document”

http://www.halfmode.com/products.html

The blogs are a buzzing with talk about the “Thrilla in California”. Billed as a boxing match about hypervisor performance between VMware’s Scott Drummonds and Citrix’s Simon Crosby. It’s about 40mins long this video and you can watch the whole thing here:

http://www.catalyst.burtongroup.com/Na09/PlayerVideo011.html

I was quite put off by Crosby’s approach. Billed as discussion about the scaleability of the companies competing hypervisors – he seemed more keen to make an issue of VMware EULA and costs – than to actually talk technical about the capabilities of ESX vs Xen. To be honest I was surprised to hear the first issue being raised, as I thought/assumed that the restriction on people publishing performance data about ESX had been lifted long ago. Back in June 2006, Richard Garsthagen  (now VMware’s EMEA Senior Evangelist) made it plain that this restriction had been limited within Vi3:

http://www.run-virtual.com/?p=123

“You may use the Software to conduct internal performance testing and benchmarking studies, the results of which you (and not unauthorized third parties) may publish or publicly disseminate; provided that VMware has reviewed and approved of the methodology, assumptions and other parameters of the study. Please contact VMware at benchmark@vmware.com to request such review.”

Is that restrictive? Or is just there to stop any old tom, dick and harry putting together bogus performance reviews?

Anyway, only this week I had student who had formerly been a Virtual Iron customer – who because of the untimely murder of the product by Oracle – is now looking for alternatives. He’d checked out Citrix Xen but abandoned it because of the bottleneck that Partition0 introduced…

After sometime Citrix has released its version of Xen. I think what’s very interesting is Citrix licensing model. They have gone for a per-server approach, rather than a per-socket as favoured by VMware and Microsoft. XenServer starts at $600 per server for an annual license, and $900 per server for a perpetual license. Of course “the other virtualization vendors” (read not VMware) have all aggressive pricing strategies which kind of reflect the quality of the product they are offering. In other words -you get what you pay for. But perhaps this is a sign of changes or pressure to come on VMware… If you want to read more about Citrix’s offering, the Register has a round up.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/31/citrix_xensource_4point1_release/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/12/citrix_xensource_fourdotone/  

Well, not so much confused as middle irratated by the recent spate of product renaming by Citrix. I’ve been around in Citrix for sometime – and have seen this happen from WinFrame=MetaFrame=Presentation Server=XenApp process. OK, well, marketing knobs like product rebranding it gives them a new story to tell (Mike, stiffles a huge yawn). But for the average punter (customer) in the street its just window dressing. What’s odd about Citrix is there Stalin-like attempt to retrospective go back and erase history – literally renaming old products to match new ones. It’s like Stalin going back an having his goons erase people from pictures who fell out of favour with the old order. An extreme analogy, I know but one that is designed for humour value. You see what has to happen now is a process of mind-reprogramming and brain washing so we completely forget the old names – those who fail to pass the reprogramming test are likely to spend sometime in a gulag in Siberia!

To read Brian’s post and readers comments:

http://www.brianmadden.com/blog/BrianMadden/What-is-XenApp-45

Gus Pinto has written a blog entry about the approach technical preview of Citrix “VDI” solution currently referred to as XenDesktop. Citrix is really positioning itself as being the real company to deliver the “dynamic desktop” by offering customers a range/array of different technologies that deliver the application or operating system down-the-wire to the end-user. This includes VDI (XenDesktop), Server-based Computing (Presentation/MetaFrame Server) and steaming-delivery operating systems (Ardence)

You can read more about XenDesktop on Gus’s blog

Link:

http://www.frameworkx.com/contentblogdetail.aspx?blog=56&id=709

and sign up for a technical preview at citrix:

http://www.citrix.com/XenDesktop