JasonSamuel.com

If you have a Citrix XenApp environment and change your SQL server, you will need to edit your mf20.dsn with the new server name. Located at:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\Independent Management Architecture\mf20.dsn

If you changed your SQL credentials, you will need to specify the new user name as well here. If you just change the password only and nothing else, you don’t need to edit your mf20.dsn file. But you will still need to set the new password or the IMA Service won’t start.

Once you make whatever changes you need to the mf20.dsn or not if it’s just a password change, do the following:

1. Go to Services and stop the IMA service (Citrix Independent Management Architecture) if it is still running.

2. Open command line and Navigate to:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\Independent Management Architecture

3. Type:

dsmaint config /user:yourdomain\youraccount /pwd:yourpassword /dsn:"C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\Independent Management Architecture\mf20.dsn"

4. Restart the IMA Service

5. You can also recreate the local host cache database (LHC database) if you have issues starting the IMA service after this. Type:

dsmaint recreatelhc

then restart the IMA Service. It will populate the cache immediately with info from the datastore.

When you try to start a VM in XenServer that talks to a StorageLink Gateway server, you get:

1/19/2012 x:xx:xx PM Error: Starting VM 'xxxxxx' - Storage assignment failed
(SSL_ERROR_SSL error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate
verify failed)

in the XenCenter log. You can verify the SSL cert by opening up the following in a browser window and replacing the x’s below with your StorageLink server’s IP address:

https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:21605

You will get a cert error message in your browser. Notice the Citrix CVSM SSL certificate issued on 1/19/2009 has expired today 1/19/2012 at 20:25:53 PM (GMT) which is 2:25 PM Central Standard Time. So basically any VM you try to turn on, reboot, or migrate after the cert expired will not work and return the SSL error above in the XenCenter log. Yeah, big problem.

I was the first to call in about this issue soon after the cert expired apparently. As I was on the phone troubleshooting this with the support engineer, others began calling in with the same problem. We have escalated it to the highest level at Citrix support and have been assured a workaround and a new cert are both being worked on and something should be available tomorrow morning. This is going to impact pretty much all StorageLink customers globally so trust me, they are working on it. Over the past several hours, I have tried numerous workarounds myself but been unable to get a full fix yet. I’ve tried self signed certs using OpenSSL, IIS & SelfSSL, etc. but to no avail so far. The StorageLink Gateway does not use a web server such as lighttpd, Apache, Tomcat, etc. either so I can’t force it to use another set of certs on that end. Apparently it uses API calls. When you restart the services, you will notice it copies the following SSL certs which are the culprits (into memory I’m guessing). I used Process Monitor to verify:

D:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\StorageLink\Server\cacert.pem

D:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\StorageLink\Server\server.pem

I actually did manage to get a little further than I thought on the handful of workarounds I tried, but nothing completely successful yet to regain functionality while we wait for a hotfix. If you want to try playing with the certs yourself, just remember to restart the StorageLink services after you swap out the certs each time so it pulls them in. XenCenter should see the SSL cert change and prompt you almost immediately with a warning message.

I will keep this post updated with the latest developments. Please post if you are having the same issue or come up with a temporary fix. In the meantime, call Citrix and open a case so you are in the loop when the fix is released.

UPDATE January, 24th, 2012 – Citrix has published the fix:

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX131994

Apply the certs using the instructions in the KB. Shouldn’t take long at all.

When you login to your web interface and launch a new desktop, it might not launch and you might get this error in the application event log on the server:

Source: Citrix Web Interface
Event ID: 30105  
The Citrix servers do not trust the server. This message was reported from
the XML Service at address http://localhost/scripts/wpnbr.dll
[com.citrix.xml.NFuseProtocol.RequestAddress].
  [Unique Log ID: xxxxxxxx]

In previous versions of Presentation Server, the way to set the XML Trust was to go to your Access Management Console and edit the Properties of the each server. There would be an “XML Service” property near the bottom in the left navigation you could click on. Check the “Trust XML requests sent to the XML Service” box and hit OK. For the whole farm, open up the farm Properties and go to Farm-wide > XenApp > General and check the “XML Service DNS address resolution” check box and hit OK.

In previous versions of XenDesktop, you could go to your DDC and open up the Delivery Services console, right click on the farm properties go to Farm-wide > Desktop Delivery Controller > General and check the “XML Service DNS address resolution” and hit OK.

In XenApp 6.0, 6.5, etc. you need to open Delivery Services Console or AppCenter and go to Policies and hit the Computer tab. Edit the Unfiltered policy and find the XML Service near the bottom in the left hand navigation. When you click it, you will see “Trust XML requests”. Hit Add and set it to “Enabled” so the Citrix XML Service will trust requests sent to it and hit OK.

All this is from memory so if I missed something, let me know. I don’t have any consoles in front of me for the different environments at the moment except Desktop Studio or I would post screenshots for you. Let me know if you need them and I’ll take some screenshots this evening when I have a bit more time.

And now for the whole reason for this blog post. In XenDesktop 5.0, 5.5, etc., the Desktop Studio console does not have this option if you look in the Unfiltered policy under HDX Policy. That’s a totally different policy. You have to set the XML Trust via PowerShell now. So to set an XML Trusts policy, open up PowerShell and if you haven’t already, add the Citrix snapin which will give you the ability to use the Citrix cmdlets:

asnp citrix.*

Now enable the XML Trust:

Set-BrokerSite -TrustRequestsSentToTheXmlServicePort $true

Done, if everything goes well, you should see no confirmation or error messages like this:

Now if you logout of your web interface, log back in, then attempt to launch the desktop, it should come right up and there are no more errors in your application event log.

When you launch Internet Explorer and open your Citrix web interface page, you want it to pass through the user’s credentials and see all the available apps. When the user clicks on an app, it should launch immediately with no further prompts. Plain and simple.

But this is not always the case unfortunately. Sometimes pass-through authentication breaks. Symptoms I have seen are:

1. You get prompted for credentials at the Web Interface logon (an authentication error occurred error message) like this:

2. Passthrough at the web interface works fine but when launching an app, you get a Windows 2008 R2 logon screen from the XenApp server like this:

3. You get a combination of both issues above.

Don’t worry, there are a number of things you need to check that can resolve these issues for you. One or more of these factors may be the cause of errors in your environment. Just run through the bullet points below and verify everything:

1. You need to be using Citrix Receiver Enterprise if possible and not just the plain Citrix Receiver. The latest Citrix Receiver is 3.1 but 3.0 behaves the same way. It comes with Online Plugin 13.1.0.89 enabled out of the box. You can go to the “Receiver for Windows 3.1 – Admins” download page here:

https://www.citrix.com/English/ss/downloads/details.asp?downloadId=2319945&productId=1689163

You will need to download the 55.1 MB zip file. Inside you will see both “CitrixReceiver.exe” and “CitrixReceiverEnterprise.exe”. The one you want to install is the Enterprise version. This version will install with pass-through authentication support automatically for you as well as Single Sign On (SSO). You can always install and enable SSO with the standard Receiver using the “/includeSSON” and “ENABLE_SSON=Yes” command line switches and this actually will give you pass-through authentication features (more on this in bullet point 7 below). Receiver Enteprise will require administrator access to install on PCs unlike the standard/regular Citrix Receiver. The difference between the two versions is described here:

http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/receiver-31-windows/ica-clients-deciding-v2.html

Note how Enterprise has “Single sign-on/pass-through authentication” but standard only has “Single sign-on”?

Now here’s a big problem. When an end user tries to download the Receiver off the Citrix website, it will not show Enterprise:

http://www.citrix.com/receiver

Go ahead and choose Windows in the drop down. The next page will show the download for Receiver. It does not specify if it is Standard or Enterprise. If you download the executable, it is just CitrixReceiver.exe which is the Standard version you had downloaded above.

So if you are troubleshooting pass-through authentication, the first thing you want to make sure of is go to Add/Remove programs on the user’s PC and verify it says “Citrix Receiver (Enterprise)” like below and not just “Citrix Receiver”:

I’m guessing Citrix only offers the standard version to end users so they are not confused on which one to download. The problem is if you are in an environment where Receiver Enterprise is not deployed centrally or if users take it upon themselves to install the latest Receiver from Citrix’s website (which does not require admin rights btw), they can cause a big mess and you are stuck troubleshooting it.

Another tip, you need to restart your PC for the pass-through authentication to work after you finish installing Receiver Enterprise 3.1. It will sometimes not start the Single Sign On process until you restart your PC. Or it will start it but it still not correctly passthrough credentials for whatever reason. So your best bet is to restart your PC to make sure everything is working correctly. Once you restart your PC, open Task Manager and verify “ssonsvr.exe” is running like below:

Here is another screenshot from Process Explorer which shows the dependency a bit better:

You can also go to the registry and under “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\ICA Client\SSON” it should have a string value called “Enable” with a value data of “True” like this. This means SSO was installed. This key will be there if you installed Enterprise or forced the SSO install using Standard. Here is a Windows XP example:

Another thing you can do, and I’m on an XP 32 bit box right now, is navigate to “C:\Program Files\Citrix\ICA Client” and open up appsrv.ini in Notepad. You should see “SSOnUserSetting=On” at the very bottom which means that single signon is enabled.

Another check to verify for Enterprise installation, go to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\PNAgent” in the registry and look for the DWORD value “EnablePassThrough”. It should have a value of “1″ meaning it is enabled. Standard Receiver doesn’t include the PNA plugin so you won’t even have this key if you were using it.

2. You need to verify the Citrix Receiver group policy allowing pass-through authentication has been applied to the PC you are working on. If you are just working on a test machine, you can apply this policy to just that PC for testing purposes instead of through AD. Just open up gpedit.msc on the PC, right click on “Administrative Templates” and then click “Add/Remove Templates…”. Click Add and choose the following file:

C:\Program Files\Citrix\ICA Client\Configuration\icaclient.adm

Once you have added it, navigate down to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Citrix Components > Citrix Receiver > Authentication and you will see an option called “Local user name and password”. Double click on it and set it to Enabled. You need to have “Enable pass-through authentication” and “Allow pass-through authentication for all ICA connections” enabled. So it will look like this:

If you expand the User Configuration section, you will see the same settings under there as well. I usually have it set there as well but it is not necessary. In my testing, you can leave it enabled at the computer level and it will work. The changes should be instant from my testing but if they don’t take, try doing a “gpupdate /force”, restarting your browser, and/or rebooting your machine.

3. There is a known issue with XenApp 6.5 where pass-through authentication will not work. You need to apply Hotfix XA650W2K8R2X64001 to all your XenApp servers. You can get it here:

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX130794

This will update your ccticket.dlls among other files that will fix the issue.

4. Verify on your XenApp servers that the RDP connection is set to not prompt for passwords. Under the Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration console, doubleclick on RDP-Tcp, then click the Log on Settings tab. Verify “Use client-provided log on information” is selected and “Always prompt for password” is NOT checked:

5. Verify in the Web Interface console that you have specified pass-through authentication for the XenApp site. Just open the Web Interface Management console, right click on your site, and click Authentication Methods. Pass-through should be checked here:

It should also be done on the XenApp Services site if you need it.

6. Pass-through authentication will not work in Firefox. I’ve added my web interface to the Trusted URIs config in FireFox but it won’t work. NTLM Passthrough authentication works fine on the web interface, but it won’t carry to the XenApp server when launching an app. You can add your WI to the list by typing this in the address bar in FireFox:

about:config

Then just type “NTLM” in the filter box. Add the URL (without the http:\\) in the “network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris” box. If you do manage to somehow getting pass-through authentication to work in Firefox, please leave a comment below. I’m not a huge IE fan.

Quick note in IE, you do not need to add your WI URL to the Trusted Sites security zone for passthrough to work. Local Intranet is all you need from my experience. Sometimes you may get prompted at the web interface for credentials. Just make sure the site appears in Local Intranet and not Internet. I’ve seen issues where NTLM passthrough may not work in this scenario.

7. One final note, I did some additional testing using the Standard Receiver and command line installation. If you install Standard Receiver using command line with the following:

CitrixReceiver.exe /includeSSON ENABLE_SSON=Yes

You will see in Process Explorer or Task Manager that “ssonsvr.exe” is indeed running after the install. In my testing I was able to get it to actually pass-through but on certain XenApp 6.5 servers only. They had the pass-through hotfix I talk about below in bullet point 3 above applied. This was the only exception. And it only worked immediately after the Citrix Receiver install without rebooting the system. After rebooting the PC, it behaved like all other regular unpatched XenApp 6.5 and below farms. I would get the Server 2008 logon.

I then added the .adm template and configured it as described in bullet point 2 above and pass-through authentication worked fine with both patched and unpatched XenApp 6.5 servers. It even worked on XenApp 5 Feature Pack 3 farms with Web Interface 5.3 just fine.

If you check Process Explorer as you launch an app, the whole chain is there from the single sign on service to the connection manager down to the ICA client/Online Plugin:

So bottom line, you can get standard Receiver to work with passthrough but only if using these command line switches during install. I would just deploy Receiver Enterprise to begin with to avoid having issues down the road. It just seems to make more sense to me.

Let’s say a host in your pool won’t restart a VM and freezes half way (that wonderful yellow icon). If you hit the console tab, it might be blank. If you hit the console tab of the host, it might also be blank. If you SSH in it may connect, but you can’t pass any xe commands. It just sits. If you attempt to migrate or stop a VM, it hangs. The host is essentially frozen but VMs are still running on it just fine.

This is all a pretty good sign the XAPI service on the host is hung up. XAPI is the XenServer management toolstack which pretty much controls everything on the XenServer host. If the “XenAPI” toolstack is hosed, XenCenter can’t talk to the host and you probably won’t be able to pass any xe commands. The Xen API is what controls everything at the host layer. Quick way to troubleshoot this:

1. SSH into the host with the issue.

2. Type:

df -h

which will show the disk space usage on the file system. The “-h” switch will display it in gigabytes. Much easier to read. We need to check the root partition and see if it is full. This is typically 4 GB and can be filled up by logs which may cause the XAPI service to stop. If the XenServer root disk is full, you will probably see it drop out of XenCenter because XAPI is stopped. You won’t be able to restart the XAPI service until you free up some space. Here is an example of the root being 100% full:

Extra tip, once you log in to one XenServer host, you can check other hosts remotely without having to SSH into each one in a different terminal. Just type:

ssh <RemoteXenServerIPorName> df -h

3. If the root is full like above, type:

cd /var/log

then

ls

to list the logs. Type:

du –ksh *.*

to list the logs with the sizes. If you find one that is too big, delete it:

rm <logname>.log

From here you can skip ahead below to step 6 and try restarting XAPI.

Also, you might want to consider moving your logs off to a different volume. If you fill your dom0 root, you’re basically hosing the XenServer. Citrix has a good article on how to move the /var/log directory to a different volume here:

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX130245

or retain fewer logs by editing logrotate.conf here:

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX131619

4. If your root is not full, the next thing you probably want to do is disable HA. You can do this in the XenCenter console or you can just type:

xe pool-ha-disable

or if you want to disable HA on a host (you’ll have to run this on each host though):

host-emergency-ha-disable force=true

5. After disabling HA, restart the toolstack:

xe-toolstack-restart

This will disconnect all the hosts in the pool in XenCenter but don’t panic. Give it 10-20 seconds, once the toolstack is restarted the hosts will all reconnect to XenCenter. All pending actions like reboots, migrations, etc. will all stop when restarting the tool stack so you have a clean slate.

6. You should be able to console into your host with the issues now. Type:

service xapi status

and see if it is running. If you want to see how taxed XAPI is, type:

top

to see all the running processing. If XAPI is taking up 40% CPU or more, that is a good indication something is hung up on it.

If XAPI is not running or is very taxed, type:

service xapi restart

if it hangs at “Stopping xapi” or “Starting xapi”, you may need to kill the process.

Type:

kill <pid>

using the process ID from when you ran “service xapi status” or “top”. Then service xapi status to verify all xapi processes have stopped. Then you can type:

service xapi restart

again if it didn’t automatically try and start already. Eventually it will say:

Starting xapi: ....start-of-day complete.                  [  OK  ]

and you should see the host pop back in your XenCenter console. If you go back and run top, xapi should be taking up around 1% or less CPU.

You can type:

xe task-list

to see all the running tasks which shouldn’t be much at this point. Don’t forget to re-enable HA after you’re done. Hope this helps someone.

You might get a request to to publish an Internet Explorer URL/link in XenApp for whatever reason. Web applications that use Java Runtime Environment (JRE)/Java applets do not play nicely with Citrix XenApp. The main problem is the Java cache. It wants to write its cache to:

C:\Program Files\Java\Cache\username\Sun\Java\Deployment\cache

by default during a XenApp session but nothing ever gets populated past the “username” part. The directory underneath will be blank and your web application will never load the Java applet.

I’m not a Java expert and I’m not even going to claim the following is any kind of best practice. But this is what I have done in my environments to make the web apps work using XenApp. If you have a better way of doing it, please do comment in this post.

So a little background, I am using Windows Server 2008 R2 with IE9 with Java (JRE) 6 Update 26 installed because my web app requires that specific version of Java.

1. Go to “C:\WINDOWS\Sun\Java\Deployment” and create a file called “deployment.config” with the following:

deployment.system.config=file\:C\:/WINDOWS/Sun/Java/Deployment/deployment.properties

2. Now create a file called “deployment.properties” in the same folder with your custom properties. What I do is generate a deployment file and then copy it over to this directory. To do this, open up Internet Explorer and go to your web app. Once Java is invoked, you will notice the Java icon in the notification bar in the bottom right.

Right click on it > Open Control Panel > Settings and you will see a path where temporary files are kept.

This is the default Java cache and will look like:

C:\Users\username\AppData\LocalLow\Sun\Java\Deployment\cache

Navigate to:

C:\Users\username\AppData\LocalLow\Sun\Java\Deployment\

and there will be a file called “deployment.properties” that was just generated for you. Just copy it over to the “C:\WINDOWS\Sun\Java\Deployment” folder as is.

Now you need to edit this file and specify the Java cache to be somewhere else. In my case, I want it to go to a folder on my D: drive called JavaCache. So all I add is this line (make sure the slashes are just like this, I know it’s a little odd):

deployment.user.cachedir=D\:\\JavaCache

So now my “deployment.properties” file will look like this:

#deployment.properties
#Mon Nov 28 13:17:40 CST 2011
deployment.javaws.cache.update=true
deployment.version=6.0
deployment.user.cachedir=D\:\\JavaCache
deployment.capture.mime.types=true
deployment.javapi.cache.update=true
deployment.browser.path=C\:\\Program Files (x86)\\Internet Explorer\\iexplore.exe
#Java Web Start jre's
#Mon Nov 28 13:17:40 CST 2011
deployment.javaws.jre.0.registered=true
deployment.javaws.jre.0.platform=1.6
deployment.javaws.jre.0.osname=Windows
deployment.javaws.jre.0.path=C\:\\Program Files (x86)\\Java\\jre6\\bin\\javaw.exe
deployment.javaws.jre.0.product=1.6.0_26
deployment.javaws.jre.0.osarch=x86
deployment.javaws.jre.0.location=http\://java.sun.com/products/autodl/j2se
deployment.javaws.jre.0.enabled=true
deployment.javaws.jre.0.args=

Yours will probably look different than mine depending on which version of JRE you have installed.

3. Make sure to create the location you specified above. It can be a blank folder and will be populated the first time someone invokes Java. So in my case, I created:

D:\JavaCache

4. Now publish IE and the URL like you normally would in the XenApp console. IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are using 32 bit IE and installed 32 bit Java, DO NOT publish 64 bit IE by accident. It will not be able to use the 32 bit Java. You will need to install 64 bit Java if you intend to use 64 bit IE.

Here is an example of how 32 bit IE should be published on Server 2008 R2 in XenApp 6.5:

Command line:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" "http://www.google.com"

Working directory:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer

5. That’s it, now launch your published IE web app from your desktop via the WI and it should load just fine. Once Java is invoked, verify your Java cache is pointed at the new location. Just look in your notification area for the Java icon, right click on it > Open Control Panel > Settings and you should see “D:\JavaCache”.

One interesting thing to note, older versions of Java pull their deployment configuration from a different location. So if putting everything in:

C:\WINDOWS\Sun\Java\Deployment

does not work for you, try copying them to:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\lib

and everything should work. Just make sure to edit your “deployment.config” accordingly with the new path to “deployment.properties”. An example, I have a web app that requires JRE 6 Update 11 and it pulls the deployment info from the lib folder and completely ignores the one in the Windows folder:

I also want to note that Oracle has pretty good documentation on configuring the deployment configuration file to your liking here:

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/guide/deployment/deployment-guide/properties.html

You can do quite a bit of customization to it. Some of my web apps require certain things to be configured in Java such as suppressing certain warning messages and I have used this article to set those switches. Again, I’m not a Java expert so there may be an easier way of doing this but this is how I have been able to get my Java web apps to work with XenApp. Let me know of your experiences.

Citrix provides and awesome tool called Citrix QuickLaunch that can do many things including creating ICA files for your newer XenApp 6.5, XenApp 6, XenApp 5 farms, etc. It works great as an ICA file creator for XenApp 6.5 or any versions below it through PS 4.0. You can download it here:

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX122536

I like the fact it talks about the TABCTL32.OCX not being registered error in the documentation:

“Run-time error ‘339’:
Component ‘tabctl32.ocx’ or one of its dependencies not
correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid”

Unfortunately it doesn’t tell you exactly where you can acquire the missing file. Instead of running around trying to fix it, I’ve hosted the TABCTL32.OCX here in zip format so you can download it and register it easily:

http://www.jasonsamuel.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/TABCTL32.zip

On an XP box, just unzip into c:\windows\system32 and then open command prompt. Type:

regsvr32 system32\TABCTL32.OCX

and it should pop up with a box saying “DllRegisterServer in system32\TABCTL32.OCX succeeded”.

Now you can launch CitrixQuickLaunch.exe and it will load right up. Weird thing I noticed today, the tool says “Citrix QuickLaunch Tool” but the CTX documentation says “Citrix Quick Launch”. So which is correct?

The screenshots in the article are very good. If you are using it just to create an ICA icon, make sure to click the “Options” button to expands the options and select “to a Published App”. Don’t forget to change the XML service port to 8080 instead of the default 80 or it will fail to connect to the XML Broker (granted you are using port 8080). Then just click “Write ICA File” and choose a location to save your ICA file.

Done! Double click your brand new ICA file and it should work fine. If you need to make any changes, use the tool to generate a new ICA icon or you can just open it in Notepad and edit by hand. You can remove the user name, password, and domain if you want. I typically just leave the domain only. I would NOT recommend storing passwords in plain text. Hope this helps.

I was able to attend a Desktop Virtualization seminar by Brian Madden several weeks ago. It was a small group of attendees so it was great to interact at a personal level with him and some of the other speakers and get some questions answered. What I loved the most about this seminar was that a lot of the discussion was vendor agnostic, so I didn’t have a ton of marketing pushed at me. That’s a welcome change because I don’t want to hear sales talk, I want to hear the raw facts from other engineers on what works, what doesn’t, and why.

A lot of what was covered is stuff most everyone working with VDI may already know. I’m not going to transcribe all my notes from the seminar. But some key takeaways that I felt were important were the following:

1. VDI projects and hardware refreshes are driven by different factors than last year this time. April 8, 2014 (End of Support, patches, hotfixes, etc. for Windows XP) is looming and many IT departments are concentrating more on hardware/Windows 7 migrations than they are on VDI projects. Last year many companies were trying to do both since these projects usually go hand in hand. Many companies that are still doing POCs or extending their testing phases are now starting to feel a time crunch. Because of this, many companies are giving priority to the refreshes and letting the VDI projects become a secondary project. That’s not to say VDI is not important, it’s just that many companies need to prioritize resources and personnel and choosing to allocate these at the refreshes. It’s funny because this has been happening all around me and to friends at their companies but I didn’t fully realize how industry wide this shift of priorities was until Brian said it out loud. So the takeaway is, get your refreshes completed first if you don’t have enough resources to handle both. You DO NOT want to get caught in 2014 with any XP machines on your network or something seriously needs to be reevaluated at your company. And it may end up being your job if you don’t drive the initiative to get your refreshes done well ahead of this date.

2. With all the different types of desktop technologies out there now:

DATA CENTER BASED INFRASTRUCTURE
-Remote Desktop Session Host (Terminal Server)
-VDI (Citrix XenDesktop, VMware View, etc)

CLIENT BASED INFRASTRUCTURE
-Client VM – Hypervisor on baremetal client (Citrix XenClient, VMware View Local Mode, Virtual Computer NxTop, MokaFive, Virtual Bridges VERDE, etc)
-Client VM – Hypervisor on existing OS (VMware Workstation, Virtual PC, Fusion, Parallels, XP Mode, etc.)
-OS Streaming
-Traditional desktops

Companies are having a hard time trying to decide what is best for their users. One of the slides shown showed the enumeration of these technologies into the environment and I swear, it was like a pack of Skittles. There are so many directions to go and for many different reasons but you really have to factor everything or you are going to have end up with one of these Skittles environments over time. The biggest take away here is that there is no ONE solution that is the BEST. Your infrastructure might be a few of these. But don’t let it run away from you, plan it well from the get go. Pretty much common sense to anyone working with VDI already.

3. So my co-worker asked how do you plan your VDI environment? How do you know what is best? Brian recommended a couple of products that can help you:

-LakeSide Solutions VMP – pulls stats on your environment and spits out a report that tells you which users are good candidates for VDI vs. Terminal Server vs. staying on a traditional desktop.

http://www.lakesidesoftware.com/systrack_vmp.aspx

-Liquidware Labs – does a lot of the same and comes with 30 day trial

http://liquidwarelabs.com/products/stratuspherefit.asp

Another really good tool he suggested that was good for looking at the app compatibility and testing closer was App-DNA AppTitude. It does automated testing against 68,000 data points. They were acquired by Citrix just a couple of weeks ago:

http://www.app-dna.com/about-apptitude/automated-application-testing/

ChangeBase offers something similar and they were acquired by Quest just a few weeks ago:

http://www.changebase.com/

4. User workspace management. Let’s face it, any large VDI deployment across all the different infrastructure technologies above + across all the different OSes is going to be a nightmare if you don’t have some way of managing the user workspace. Brian talked about the concept of layering hardware, OS, application, and users. Not unfamiliar to anyone that has worked with VDI. He talked about 3rd parties like AppSense, RES, LiquidWare Labs, etc. vs. what’s being offered from Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware. I’m not going to go too much into this because I plan on writing an article about user workspace management and a comparison of the different options soon. But just know that this is a big point that will break or make your VDI project.

These were some of my main takeaways from the seminar without going into too much detail. There was a lot of information covered and I have to thank Brian & TechTarget for putting this on. Doesn’t matter if you’re just in the planning stages of your VDI project or if it’s been running great for years, I guarantee you will learn something new or what’s coming down the pipe in the VDI world at one of these seminars. You can sign up for one in your city here:

http://events.techtarget.com/desktopvirtualization/

I received a request today to gather all the IPs of users that have been hitting a specific URL on an IIS web server for the last several months. Naturally, I turn to LogParser which I have blogged about quite a bit in the past. I copied the required IIS logs to the same path as LogParser since I was going to archive them anyway but you can just specify the path to your IIS logs just as easily. Then I wrote this query to quickly show the date, time, and IP for the URL I’m web page I am looking for, in this case test.htm:

logparser "SELECT [date], [time], [c-ip] as UserIP, [cs-uri-stem] as URL FROM ex*.log WHERE [cs-uri-stem] like '%test.htm%'" -rtp:-1 -i:iisw3c

This gives me a nice report of every hit in chronological order. I chose to use like statement above because sometimes there might be other URLs buried deep in your website structure and if you are not familiar with it, you might miss these hits from being calculated. It helps identify users who might be using a URL they really shouldn’t be using anymore and no one is aware they are still using these legacy hyperlinks. You can export the report to a txt file by just adding “>> IPs.txt” to the end of the string and it will drop the screen output into a file called IPs.txt for you.

Or you can use the datagrid option which I have blogged about before, just search for LogParser in the search box in the top right corner of this site.

From here, I want to find only unique IPs. So I wrote another query that did a GROUP BY on the IP:

logparser "SELECT [c-ip] as UserIP FROM ex*.log WHERE [cs-uri-stem] like '%test.htm%' GROUP BY [c-ip]" -rtp:-1 -i:iisw3c

Even gives you a nice total count at the bottom:

So now I have a list of unique IPs but I want to find if these IPs are still alive and talking on my network and if so, what their machine name is. For that, I turn to nmap (with the Zenmap GUI if you are using Windows). Just copy and paste all your IPs from before into the Target field and change the scan profile to “Ping scan”. Yes, you can copy and paste your whole list at once into that little Target window, it will take them all. In this example, I copied and pasted 3 IPs at once and it parsed the carriage returns just fine:

Once you begin the scan, it will ping sweep the IPs and do a reverse DNS lookup all at the same time.

If you want to take it one step further and find the currently logged in user, you could use PsLoggedOn from Sysinternals to accomplish this or even WMIC to pull the info via WMI.

PsLoggedOn info: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897545

WMIC info: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb742610.aspx

WMIC syntax would be something like:

wmic /node: machinename get username

Very easy! Let me know if you have any questions or come up with a better way.

If you ever wanted to force an uninstall of XenApp or Presentation Server, you can do it with just one command. There are many scenarios where you might have to do this. Forcing an uninstall should always be a last resort though. You just navigate to your setup files to where mps.msi is located and run the following. In this example, I have copied the XenApp 6.5 install files to my D: drive:

D:\InstallFiles\XenApp6.5\XenApp Server\w2k8x64

and type the following command:

msiexec /x MPS.msi CTX_MF_FORCE_SUBSYSTEM_UNINSTALL=YES

This will bring up the following prompt:

and then you just run through the uninstaller and reboot when it prompts you.

Now if you don’t have mps.msi on your server and don’t have time to find the media and copy the install files over, here is a nice trick. Open regedit to edit your registry and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

Now find the key with the Display Name of Citrix Presentation Server or XenApp, here is a screenshot from a Presentation Server 4.5 box for example:

Right on the key and copy the key name:

Paste it into Notepad. It will be the full path of the key but just copy the key part only:

Then open up a command prompt and type the following but with the key you saw on your server. Here is mine for example::

msiexec /x {44412985-02EE-4824-9EA5-B2AF6D98924E} CTX_MF_FORCE_SUBSYSTEM_UNINSTALL=YES

Once you hit enter, it will pop up with the uninstall dialog and you can run through it to complete your uninstall:

Just keep in mind that the force uninstall switch only uninstalls XenApp/Presentation Server. It will not uninstall all of the little plugins and other modules that were install when you original setup your Citrix server:

BEFORE:

AFTER: