virtuEs.IT

… sharing my IT Quests

Archive for 2011

Looking back at a great year

Dec 31

Posted by virtuEs in News | 5 Comments

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These last few days of the year are one where alot of reflection takes place on set goals and how good we’ve managed to accomplish them, on great events that took place and how they effected us and on the lessons we have learned and will take with us.

 

New professional roles and challenges

A few years ago I already started to promote my new goals for becoming a good Infrastructure Architect with my manager, which resulted in a shift in client assignments for the usual administrative assignments to more Citrix Engineer and design suited projects. And even though I worked as a Citrix Architect on a great Technology refresh in 2010, I managed to write my first solo design for a Citrix XenApp infrastructure at the start of 2011. Getting complemented for the documentation of that design and the impact of it on the environment and related systems was a great boost of confidence. I finally saw myself as a Citrix Architect as well and had fun in this new role.

I was even more lucky and was asked to not only design a Citrix XenServer/XenApp/RES Workspace Manager infrastructure for the next assignment, but also implement my design and ensure the administrators would know which skills were needed to support this new environment. Having some info sessions with them and sharing my knowledge on the products was great fun as well.

 
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Where’s the XenServer 6 auto start VM feature?

Oct 11

Posted by virtuEs in HomeLab, HowTo, Hypervisors | 9 Comments

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Yesterday I finally had some hours left to spare at home to attend to my Homelab. as I’m prepping the environment for my next exam (A19 Citrix XenDesktop 5 Administration) I did wanted to upgrade the XenServers to the latest version. So I spent yesterday evening cleaning up the servers with the old VMs from previous studies and left the two XenApp 6.5 servers and my domain server in place.

 

Upgrading the XenServer Homelab

The upgrade itself was done easily with the single disk image. This time I was smart enough to learn from my previous mistake, so I brought down any running VMs (even disabled the auto start options to be sure) and started with my Pool Master upgrade, without triggering any Maintenance Mode. The upgrade went smoothly for both servers, so I was quickly up and running again and checking all VM settings.

 

VM auto start feature

I was a little puzzled on how I could set up my License Server VPX appliance to auto start on booting my XenServer, but I figured it was now set with the vApp features and settings. However the GUI did not offer a select box to enable the auto start feature at the Start Options in the General Properties of the VM. I did not configure HA as it is not necessary right now for my Homelab environment. I just made the assumption that creating and configuring the vApp would enable the auto start feature all the same. And turned off the Homelab servers to test it when I would boot my servers the next day.

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A new ambitious Quest: Taking my Citrix certification to the next level

Sep 11

Posted by virtuEs in HomeLab, Quests | 2 Comments

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The last couple of years, I’ve been taken on new customer assignments that took placed me in new roles. No more administration of existing Citrix XenApp environments, but I was given the assignments to design new Citrix XenApp environments and be the one to decide how they would be implemented. After commenting on improvements I saw as an administrator, I was now in charge of making those design calls from the start. So I’ve spent the last years reading about a lot of features, new version improvements and design consequences for Citrix XenApp and XenServer environments.

And even though I’ve been complimented by customers on the quality of my design documents and seen my designs grow into production environments, I still miss some recognition as a Citrix Architect by my peers and some colleagues.

So it is time to take my CCA certifications to the next level and go for the CCEE and CCIA certifications and ensure my level of expertise is reflected by the right set of certificates.

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Solved: 200% Load on XenApp 5 for Windows 2008

Jul 25

Posted by virtuEs in HomeLab, Install | 5 Comments

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I’ve been wrestling all weekend with the setup of a new training lab environment for my Citrix XenApp 5 certification studying. To quickly built my Citrix servers, I disabled the Windows firewall and run the developed scripts to auto install all prerequisites and the Citrix components. Everything seemed to be installing without problems and I quickly had my test environment up and running ….. at least so I thought.

When I tried to start a published application through the Web Interface I was presented with a vague error and a event log stating the XML service was too busy.

As I’m studying for the A08 Advanced Administration for XenApp, I figured I’d dive right into troubleshooting and get my hands-on experience with some tooling

So I started running some tests …

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Citrix Summit SF 2011 – day 2

May 25

Posted by admin in Citrix Synergy, News | 1 Comment

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While SF is still asleep (or slowly waking up), hereby a quick blogpost on the buzz from the second Citrix Summit day. The last day exclusively for partners and system integrators, as today the Synergy starts, which opens up the event for all clients and users as well.

The second Summit day mostly consisted on Hands-on-Labs reports, with little detailed information, due to the NDA.

With little information found so far, here are some ‘newsflashes’ I tracked down regarding the Citrix Summit:

  • XenDesktop
  • XenApp
    • “Citrix XenApp 6 gets full aero and HDX 3D support. Also combination with client v13 is adding a lot of cool features!”
      eDocs can be found at: http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/index.jsp?topic=/xenapp/xenapp-wrapper-tp.html
    • “Citrix License server support 170 check-outs per second.”
    • “Cool feature : you can specifity 32bit or 64bit application directory (program files vs program files x86) with policy”
  • Coming soon: Citrix Tools as a Service (TaaS): https://taas.citrix.com/
    • “Citrix Tools as a Service (TaaS) is coming soon, the future of support.”
  • “I heard that more than 5500 people attend Citrix Synergy which means the largest Synergy so far!”
  • “Cisco wins Citrix Ready Business Solution of the Year”
I’m looking forward to te keynote to start the Synergy part of this event, with probably some new great announcements.

 

Some interesting links:

More news tomorrow …

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