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

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , ,

Solved: 200% Load on XenApp 5 for Windows 2008

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 …

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , ,

Citrix Summit SF 2011 – day 2

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 …

Tags: , , , , ,

Citrix Summit SF 2011 – day 1

Yesterday the first day for the Citrix Summit 2011 at San Francisco started and already some great news has been shared through the social media on the anouncements made:

Check out this links as well for more blogs and updates:

Hopefully more news will be shared for those of us that could not attend and are very curious on the latest buzz ;-)

Tags: , , , ,

XenServer 5.6 FP1 – Config NIC settings & Multipathing

During the installation of your XenServer, you only configure basic settings for your management Network Interface Card (NIC). Further, and maybe even more complex, configuration of your NICs can be set with the XenCenter GUI or with the xe CommandLine Interface (CLI).
The xe CLI can be run locally at the command prompt of the XenServer Console within XenCenter or you can use the ex.exe, which is part of the XenCenter installation and allows and administrator to remotely manage a XenServer from the command prompt of the Windows desktop. With the CLI you can also easily script some of the common tasks to perform on a XenServer.

This post contains additional xe CLI examples that are used for NIC settings on your XenServer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , ,