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Hotfix Rollup Pack 1 for XenApp 6 released (finally)

2011-12-04T22:20:00.001Z

After fixing both killer and smaller bugs on XenApp 6 one at a time for what seems like a year and a half (no, wait, actually its over that…) Citrix has released the first rollup pack of hotfixes for the product.

This is not a feature pack, so there is nothing “new” as such. Although if you are running a live XenApp 6 farm with no hotfixes installed the “new” thing will be that it will work. XenApp 6 had a few new features and importantly was tied to Windows Server 2008 R2 (which was much better for Terminal Services than Server 2008 and a hell of a lot more modern than Server 2003) but frankly was not that stable at release. There are about 22 public hotfixes out at the moment if you don’t install the Rollup Pack but the hotfix apparently includes all of them. In fact there are 105 hotfixes listed as being included, many of which were only previously released to those who paid for support and had a specific problem, though since they often replaced each other that overestimates the size of it. Actually, its only about 28mb but if it has the effect on a XenApp 6 farm that the public hotfixes had it will be essential.

Rollout is per server – every farm server from the Data Collectors down (but not Web Interface, License, etc) needs the install. Advice from Citrix is to start with the Data Collectors and rollout very quickly from there, and if you have a test server (or better a test farm) you should test there before installing it anywhere else.

Installation of Hotfixes should be uniform across your farm – the last thing you want is users landing on servers with different patch levels. Installation Manager is basic but will do just fine as it understands MSP files, which is what you have.

We’re testing now – benchmarking shows no real CPU or Memory difference (positive or negative) between a server with all the public hotfixes vs with the rollup pack – at least on a simple tests of about 50 Office 2010 users. But experience on XenApp recently would show it is best to take the risk and install patches early – personally I’ll have all servers patches to Rollup Pack 1 in a week. Just in case. If you are not convinced, check out the list of fixed issues…

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX130473

Creating a low disk space alert with EdgeSight

2011-08-18T13:06:00.001+01:00

EdgeSight is most useful when it actively alerts you about issues with your farm, rather than keeping it to itself and waiting for someone to notice. By default it will take in lots of Alerts but not have any useful actions. If you have not already done this, consider going to Configure > Alerts > Actions and creating an Alert for each event you are bothered about (in Configure > Alerts > Rules), sending an email if nothing else.

By default Edgesight DOES monitor disk space, even in Basic mode. You can pull off a nice report on free disk space in Browse > System Disk Usage, which is lovely as long as you do this on a regular basis. If you don’t, and don’t have any other monitoring software, you could have Citrix servers operating with almost no space free.

This is how to monitor for disk space alerts using the Event Log record a full server will generate anyway:

In EdgeSight, log in as an Admin and click Alerts (under Company Configuration) > Rules
Click New Alert Rule
Select System Alerts and click next
Select Windows Event Log and click Next
Give the rule a name (“Disk Space Alert”?), enter System as the Event Log Name, with Type as “Warning”, Source as “srv” and Event ID as “2013”. This should match alerts you will get on a Windows system with a full drive.
Click Next and Next (not Finish – you need an Action too), then select the part of the server tree you want to monitor – probably “All” at the top to select everything. You might need to click this again on the next screen to select it properly. Do this and click Next again.
Select “Create a new Alert Action” and click Next.
Now you decide what to do – SNMP might be useful here, or sending an alert MS SysOps. I’m just sending an email, so select “Sent an Email notification”
Enter a name for the Action and a subject, then select an address to send to. Click Test Action to check you get something.
Click Next and Finish and you should see your new alert under Rules and Actions
You should now get emails when someone fills your servers up!

Citrix IMA and MFCom services hung at Starting…

2011-08-17T13:03:00.001+01:00

Recently we had a bit of a Data Collector Election storm on a XenApp 6 farm, and about the same time noticed that newly built servers joining the farm or being moved from one data centre to another had a problem with the “Citrix MFCOM Service” (MFcom) and “Citrix Independent Management Architecture” (IMAservice) services hung at Starting.

The initial fix was removing them from the farm and rejoining them, which was a little time consuming.

We later found that if the local host cache (each server has one of these, its a record of the farm it exists in) was recreated, the server should be able to participate in the farm again. This required the IMA and MFCOM services to be forced to close since they were hung on starting, so we used this script, with an attempt at a graceful stop of the services (with pings to give it time to stop), followed by TASKKILL to make sure the service was over, then a reboot. Hopefully this will be useful to someone!

Copy the following text into a new batch file and run it (As Administrator, if you use UAC) on a server with hung services, it should sort it out:

sc stop mfcom
ping localhost -n 10 > nul
sc stop CitrixWMIService
ping localhost -n 5 > nul
sc stop imaservice
ping localhost -n 10 > nul
taskkill /IM imasrv.exe /F
taskkill /IM IMAAdvanceSrv.exe /F
taskkill /IM mfcom.exe /F
dsmaint recreatelhc
dsmaint recreaterade
shutdown -r -t 10

Thanks to this post for pointing us in the right direction: http://www.szeker.net/2011/02/08/citrix-xenapp-6-0-hotfix-xa600w2k8r2x64003-server-hangs-on-shut-down-problem-mfcom-service-hangs-on-starting/

Creating a Server Monitoring Graph in XenApp 6.0 and 6.5

2011-07-06T14:12:00.001+01:00

Knowing what is going on in your Citrix farm is always difficult when there are more than a few users and servers involved. Edgesight is very useful for this in XenApp, but it does lack a decent Dashboard function so you can tell at a glance what the load is like on your servers.

In previous versions of Citrix I’ve seen people write applications which use MFCOM to find out how many sessions are on each server and write them out to a nice graph – you can then see at a glance whether for instance everyone is on one server, or if a server appears to have rebooted or been left disabled.

The way I do this currently is using a PowerShell script, running as a scheduled task. This then creates image files which I can display in a webpage.

In this earlier article I showed how you could download and install the Citrix components into PowerShell and use it to control the farm. Its worth doing this, and also using the PowerShell ISE Editor to write your PowerShell scripts.

You should also download something that will let you create graphs from PowerShell. An easy and free way of doing this is the MS Chart Controls for .NET 3.5 download. You can download this from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=14422

The first step is to use Powershell to get a list of the server names that you are interested in, and a list of the active sessions on the farm. Install the XenApp Powershell SDK from here and run the following from a farm serer. The first line is required to load the Citrix add-ons you just installed to PowerShell:

Add-PSSnapin Citrix*
$filter = 'xen'
$servernames = Get-XAServer | where-object {$_.ServerName -match $filter} | select-object ServerName
$sessionsactive = Get-XASession -Farm | where-object {$_.State -eq "Active" -and $_.ServerName -match $filter}

The value of $filter can be edited to filter on server name – only server names including that string will be measured. If you set it to just be ‘’, all servers will be used.

This should give you a pair of arrays, $Servernames and $sessionsactive, containing all the names and session details. Now we can iterate through the server names, finding out the number of active sessions for each on and writing it to another array, then finally sorting that array into alphabetical order by server name:

$servercounts = @{}
foreach ($servername in $servernames)
{
$countActive = @($sessionsactive | where-object {$_.ServerName -eq $servername.ServerName }| Select-Object SessionId -unique)
$servercounts.add($servername.ServerName, $countActive.Count)
}
$servercounts = $servercounts.GetEnumerator() | sort Name

You now have an array called $servercounts. If you ran it and exported its contents it would look something like this:

Name      Value
----      -----
XEN01     28
XEN02     30
XEN03     31
XEN04     28
XEN05     28
XEN06     29
XEN07     28
XEN08     29
XEN09     27

Finally, time to generate the chart, if that is what you want. To use the MS Chart Controls (which will need to be installed on the XenApp server too) add these lines to the top of the script:

[void][Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Windows.Forms")
[void][Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization")

Then add these lines to the end of the script to create the graph and save it to the c: drive as a PNG file. Note the lines to create a title for it as well, so you know whether the image is out of date:

# create chart object
$Chart = New-object System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Charting.Chart
$Chart.Width = 900
$Chart.Height = 330
$Chart.Left = 10
$Chart.Top = 10

# create a chartarea to draw on and add to chart
$ChartArea = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Charting.ChartArea
$Chart.ChartAreas.Add($ChartArea)
[void]$Chart.Series.Add("Data")
foreach ($server in $servercounts)
{
    $dp1 = new-object System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Charting.DataPoint(0, $server.Value)
    $dp1.AxisLabel = $server.Name
    $Chart.Series["Data"].Points.Add($dp1)
}

$title = new-object System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Charting.Title
$Chart.Titles.Add( $title )
$Chart.Titles[0].Text = date
$Chart.SaveImage("c:\Graph\XenAppFarm.png","png")

The script is best being signed (or remove the need for signing in PowerShell scripts) and then needs to be scheduled. I do this with a scheduled task on a XenApp server, which calls a batch file with contents of:

call powershell -command "& {C:\Graph\Generate.ps1}"

Finally you need a way of viewing the image – I just use a HTML file with an automated refresh, such as this:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
    <title>XenApp Farm</title>
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="60">
</head>
<body>
    <img src="c:\Graph\XenAppFarm.png">
</body>
</html>

Just to recap, here’s the whole sample script:

# load the appropriate assemblies
[void][Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Windows.Forms")
[void][Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization")
Add-PSSnapin Citrix*

# get the server names and sessions
$filter = ''
$servernames = Get-XAServer | where-object {$_.ServerName -match $filter} | select-object ServerName
$sessionsactive = Get-XASession -Farm | where-object {$_.State -eq "Active" -and $_.ServerName -match $filter}

$servercounts = @{}

# count active sessions for each server name
foreach ($servername in $servernames)
{
    $countActive = @($sessionsactive | where-object {$_.ServerName -eq $servername.ServerName }| Select-Object SessionId -unique)
    $servercounts.add($servername.ServerName, $countActive.Count)
}
$servercounts = $servercounts.GetEnumerator() | sort Name

# create chart object
$Chart = New-object System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Charting.Chart
$Chart.Width = 900
$Chart.Height = 330
$Chart.Left = 10
$Chart.Top = 10

# create a chartarea to draw on and add to chart
$ChartArea = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Charting.ChartArea
$Chart.ChartAreas.Add($ChartArea)
[void]$Chart.Series.Add("Data")

# add a data point for each server
foreach ($server in $servercounts)
{
    $dp1 = new-object System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Charting.DataPoint(0, $server.Value)
    $dp1.AxisLabel = $server.Name
    $Chart.Series["Data"].Points.Add($dp1)
}
# set the title to the date and time
$title = new-object System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Charting.Title
$Chart.Titles.Add( $title )
$Chart.Titles[0].Text = date
# save the chart to a file
$Chart.SaveImage("c:\Graph\XenAppFarm.png","png")

Resources used to write the above include:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/richard_macdonald/archive/2009/04/28/3231887.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.datavisualization.charting.seriescharttype.aspx

XenApp 6 – Hotfix 068 fixes UI and server capacity issues

2011-07-06T13:13:00.001+01:00

Citrix released Hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64068 last week – available here: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX129741

This interestingly includes several previous hotfixes, including the quite recent public hotfix 056, which improved the stability XenApp 6.0 considerably, especially when combined with Windows 2008 R2 SP1. This fix therefore now addresses 13 separate issues.

Most interesting in the list of new fixes for me are those relating to screen flickering, windows maximising over the taskbar and poor server performance over about 70 connections:

Dock bars of published applications might overlap and obscure the local Windows Taskbar. This is the server-side component of the fix. To resolve the issue in its entirety, you must also install a client-side hotfix that contains Fix #206851.
[From XA600W2K8R2X64068][#210857]
Certain applications can perform slowly when run in seamless mode.
[From XA600W2K8R2X64068][#257490]
The CPU consumption of the winlogon.exe process can be higher than usual and cause new connection attempts to fail once a server hosts 70 connections or more. Eventually, servers can experience a fatal exception and need to be restarted.
[From XA600W2K8R2X64068][#LA0032]

These issues have been seen on and off since we starting to run large number of user sessions on XenApp 6 servers. Anecdotally, the issue of the Start Menu being obscured by Citrix sessions is quite widespread (though obviously more of an annoyance than anything). We know that sessions can flicker when being shadowed using Remote Assistance or SCCM if the client version is older than v12.1 – hopefully this is also fixed now. The last one, servers behaving badly with over about 70 connections, is also just what we have seen, with far less user density (number of user sessions on each server) possible than we expected to be the case from benchmarking. We’ll allow more sessions now and see whether the servers behave better.

Incidentally, the “client-side hotfix that contains Fix #206851” mentioned in some of the issues fixed was included in the Citrix Online Plug-In v11.2 and is presumably in later releases as well.

Installing XenApp 6.5 Tech Preview - Part 4 – Configuring the farm

2011-07-04T14:07:00.001+01:00

This is a test build of the new Tech Preview of XenApp 6.5 from Citrix. In the previous parts of this guide we set up a License server, Web Interface server and built the farm’s Data Collector, establishing the farm and its data store.

In this part we’ll continue this process by configuring the Web Interface and the first published applications for the farm. To be honest, this is all highly reminiscent of the process to configure the Web Interface and publish a simple application that was in XenApp 6. If you’re familiar with it, you should know all this already.

Logging onto our Web Interface box again we launch the Citrix Web Interface Management console from the Start Menu

In this we have no sites created yet, and we’re going to create one site under XenApp Web Sites (used for the web interface) and XenApp Services Sites (used for the Receiver client to create links in the Start Menu and on the desktop.

Creating a XenApp Web Site

Right click on XenApp Web Sites and click Create Site.

I’m happy with the name of the site, but I want to just type the server name in IE for it to work, so I click “Set as the default page for the IIS zone”. If there were multiple web interface sites, only one would want this on.

The point of authentication is simple since this is just an internal web interface site, so the default of “at web interface” should be fine.

A couple more screens of clicking Next and I can configure my new site, providing the name of the first farm server I just built.

On the Authentication Methods screen I just leave it as Explicit as I just want it to ask for a username and password.

I then restrict it to just my AD domain, choose the Full logon screen appearance (apparently it will look like this…)

The full interface gives some options to change the language and the reconnection options after logon.

Then I choose just “online” apps since I don’t stream to clients, then we’re all done with the web site creation.

After this I open a browser and go to my server, at http://xensvr02/ – it takes ages the first time and seems to be hung on “Loading…”, but it works after that and is super fast next time. I can log in okay (since I specified my domain name earlier I don’t need to enter that as part of my username) and I am told, quite correctly, that there are no resources available.

Creating a XenApp Services Site

Back in the main console of the Web Interface, I right click XenApp Services Sites and click Create Site. The default names are fine – interesting that Citrix still use the phrase “PNAgent” here, its been abandoned in most other places…

Next, Next, Next and configure the farm again. You can go in again later and add multiple farms by the way.

I choose “online” applications again and click through to the end of the wizard.

Publishing the first applications

When I learn a new programming language I always write a “Hello World” app first. When I produce a new Citrix farm I always publish Notepad first!

Log back on to the Data Collector we installed earlier. I’ve already set up the AppCenter (the new name for the Delivery Services Console), by loading it from Administrative Tools > Citrix > Management Consoles > Citrix AppCenter and choosing to add the local computer. You should see the new farm name under XenApp in the tree on the left. Click Applications and it should be empty. Right click and click Publish Application

Click Next and enter Notepad as the Display Name. Click Next and the following screen is the same as on XenApp 6 – apps can still stream to server, to client, be hosted or be content or a desktop. The default (“accessed from a server” – a tradition hosted application) is what we need

Click browse to find c:\windows\system32\Notepad.exe and it should fill in the command line and working directory.

The next questions are all easy (servers to publish on – there’s only one and no Worker Groups yet, so I pick that server, then my own account to see the app).

I can now log into my Web Interface site and see a nice Notepad icon.

When I launch it I get the expected notice that this is a technical preview license – after that, Notepad comes up – quite quickly actually…

Publishing the AppCenter

I’m not going to want to keep logging on to the Data Collector to use the AppCenter, so I publish that too.

This is the same process as before, it is “accessed from a server”, with the following target:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\Citrix Delivery Services Console\Framework\CmiLaunch.exe"

This works very nicely and I now have a published AppCenter.

Now we have a working farm I’m going to check out some of the new features of XenApp 6.5 – more soon.

Installing XenApp 6.5 Tech Preview - Part 3 – Establishing the Farm

2011-07-03T19:36:00.001+01:00

Building on our production of a license server (here) and web interface box (here) which can support XenApp 6.5 Tech preview, we’re now going to establish a new farm with the installation of the server which will become the Data Collector and the server hosting the management tools.

Please note this cannot be installed over a remote desktop. If its a VM, use the console (through XenCenter for instance), if its a physical machine, use ILO or a monitor, keyboard and mouse plugged into the box, at least until the main install is complete installed.

First, build your server – Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with a static IP (not DHCP).

Run Autorun.exe from the root of the installer share you created from the downloaded ISO of XenApp 6.5 Tech Preview.

Click Install XenApp Server

Click Add Server Roles

Choose your server edition (I’m personally installing Enterprise, so this will not cover Platinum only features)

Accept the EULA and click Next, then select just the XenApp role

You can now select the components. You might choose different options to me so its worth a look. First, take a look at the options:

Personally, I’m not using Single Sign-On, so I don’t select that (though it will STILL install the admin console anyway). I don’t use Power and Capacity Management either, so I don’t use install the Agent.

I do use Edgesight on production systems, but this being a test system I’ll skip the Edgesight Agent too. I’ll take a look at the new version of Edgesight separately.

The XML Service IIS Integration is automatically checked if you have IIS installed, where XenApp and IIS share a local port (80 by default). If you check it, IIS will be installed and configured in this way. But if you don’t have or need IIS on your XenApp servers (why would you?) and don’t need the extra features IIS has over the Citrix XML Service (like encrypting web traffic), don’t select the Integration checkbox. There’s a useful discussion of this feature on this Citrix Forums thread:

http://forums.citrix.com/message.jspa?messageID=1542227

Leave the default components selected (we want the Management Tools on this server and we’re going to have a look at the new Windows Desktop Experience Integration feature.

Click Next, Next and Install to begin the installation.

You may get this popup to install device software, it might be more simple if you click “Always trust software from ‘Citrix Systems Inc’”

Because this install has been launched from Autorun rather than a script, all the pre-requisites and server roles will be installed for you. Note you’ve not been asked for Farm details yet – like XenApp 6.5 you install XenApp first into an unconfigured state and then choose whether to join or create a Farm.

Click finish at the end of the wizard and click Specify Licensing, then enter the name of the license server you created in Part 1…

Click Test Connection and it should be successful, then choose the licensing model. Since this is not a XenDesktop trial, choose XenApp, which should be listed as Recommended.

Click Apply and you should have a nice green tick by Licensing. Now select Configure.

You can now choose whether to join an existing farm or create a new one. Click Create

Then enter your farm name and your own domain account to be the administrator.

At the next section you can choose to have a local SQL Express database (just for test farms or companies who don’t even have a SQL Server), or connect to an existing Database which you should precreate on a SQL Server box. See this link for Citrix’s recommendations regarding the database server. For this test I’m going to use the New Database option to install SQL Express 2008 on this server.

Choose the shadowing model you want. Make sure you get this right as it can override what you might choose later on. Personally I am hoping that shadowing will work properly in XenApp 6.5 and not require you to mess about with Remote Assistance instead.

On the next screen we can choose more options for this installation. Note the first options, to have a Controller or Session Only server – this is a new feature, where servers can be installed without the components to be a Data Collector (both types of server are capable of hosting published applications). They’re greyed out because this server needs to be a Controller because its the first one.

Click the XML Service and you can change the default XML port. Unless you have a reason to change it (maybe you’re hosting websites on your XenApp server?!), leave it as port 80.

Click the Receiver tab and you can specify the Web Interface URL that you set up in Part 2 of this guide.

Click Remote Desktop Users and you can change the default user groups who can log onto the server in remote sessions. I always untick Add Anonymous Users, which unless you actually want to allow unauthenticated use of Published Applications you should too. Authenticated Users are anyone with a domain logon, though if the Users group contains Domain Users, they’re already going to be allowed in most environments.

Click Next and Apply to set up the Farm…

Then click Reboot at the end…

After the reboot, log in as the account you specified as the administrator (your own account maybe?) and launch the new Management Console – the AppCenter. Citrix have done their level best to hide it by giving it a new name and putting it in the Administrative Tools folder!

When you launch it and attempt to discover the farm, you might get a message about the Single Sign-On Console – if you are not using this, go to Control Panel, Programs and Features and select the Citrix Single Sign-On Console, right click and Change, Remove, Next, Next and Finish. If you ARE going to use Single Sign-On, don’t do this!

Launch the AppCenter and you should see the Discovery Wizard automatically appear. Choose Add Local Computer and you should finally see your new farm.

In the next part we’ll look at configuring the Web Interface and publishing our first apps.

Installing XenApp 6.5 Tech Preview - Part 1 - License server

2011-07-03T11:49:00.001+01:00

Following on from my overview of the XenApp 6.5 Tech Preview (http://zenapp.blogspot.com/2011/07/xenapp-65-tech-preview.html), I am now going to build a demo farm and explore some of the new features.

For this demo I'll be building a basic set of servers, based on a fairly powerful server running XenServer and 4 virtual machines - a license server, a web interface and an application server.

xensvr01: License server
xensvr02: Web Interface
xensvr03: Data Collector
xensvr04: Application server

The first step for me is the License server - its specified during the setup of the main servers, so its nice to have it in place first, and XenApp 6.5 will require a later version of the Citrix License Server than the v11.6 License server which shipped with XenApp 6.

Step one has to be to download the files we'll need – I’ll assume from here on in that this is done and they’re extracted to a nice file share somewhere your servers can all access.

All servers built for this are Windows Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1 (so they’re all 64 bit, as 2008 R2 is 64-bit only). They've all got static IPs and anti-virus programs installed, but otherwise are fresh installs.

To set up the license server, I go to my installer share on my first server and execute \Licensing\CTX_Licensing.msi

Accept the EULA and click next until it finishes...

You then get a screen to configure the basics of the license server, and I'm keeping defaults. If you vary the license port, do remember what you change it to! Try to remember the “admin” password as well if you can. :-)

Click the Start Button and select Citrix, Management Consoles and License Administration Console

Click the Administration tab and enter your admin username and password you set up earlier...

Click Vendor Deamon Configuration (catchy...) and click import license

Click Browse and find the license file you downloaded earlier - this is a time limited evaluation license, it should have the expiration date in its name. Click Import license and you should get a nice green message.

As it says, you need to restart the Citrix License service to get the licenses. Click Start, Administrative Tools, Services. Find the Citrix License service and give it a bounce.

Go back to the Dashboard on the web page and you will see you have 99 Platinum and 99 Enterprise concurrent licenses, plus 4000 startup licenses. Interestingly, this seems to be a reduction from the 5000 servers the older license server supported...

And that's it! Not even a reboot in sight. Bear in mind that you also need Terminal Services (sorry, Remote Desktop Services) licenses, though of course RDS has a 120 grace period on a newly built server, which is plenty for this test. I tend to combine RDS License and Citrix License services on a single server in production, though there's no requirement for this.

Next phase is to get a Web Interface server up and running, then we can actually establish the farm.

Installing XenApp 6.5 Tech Preview - Part 2 – Web Interface 5.4

2011-07-03T11:43:00.001+01:00

Continuing my build of a demo XenApp 6.5 Tech Preview farm, I’m running through the setup of the new Web Interface, v5.4. In truth there’s nothing new in the initial phase of this setup so first I’ll have a look at what Citrix have to say on the subject.

The Citrix eDocs site for this version of the Web Interface is here: http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/web-interface-impington/wi-library-wrapper-impington.html

New Features:

Updated end user interface. The layout and color scheme for end users has been updated to help improve navigation and readability.

Session sharing for VM hosted applications. The Web Interface now supports session sharing for Virtual Machine (VM) hosted apps. This feature is only available for seamless applications and non-anonymous users.

Multiple desktop access for users. In previous versions of the Web Interface, users could only access a single instance of a desktop per desktop group. Now, users can access multiple instances of desktops in desktop groups. For more information about assigning desktops to users, see the XenDesktop version 5 documentation.

Improved smart card support for Access Gateway. Smart card authentication to the Web Interface is now compatible with more environments. The Web Interface can now accept User Principal Names (UPNs) from Access Gateway as well as the user name and domain. Additionally, the Web Interface has been updated to comply with FIPS. This new functionality can only be used with the pass-through authentication for smart card option and you must be logged on as a domain administrator. For more information about configuring smart card support for Access Gateway, see the Access Gateway documentation.

Ability to set additional default values. Administrators can configure default values for all bandwidth-related settings, such as audio quality, color depth, bandwidth profile, printer mapping, and window size.

ICA File Signing. The Web Interface digitally signs generated ICA files, to allow compatible Citrix clients and plug-ins to validate that the file originates from a trusted source.

Before we can install the Web Interface, we need the J# Redistributable, which is not installed by default. Its on the XenApp 6.5 DVD though, so run it manually from here (use the 64-bit one if this is Windows Server 2008 R2):

\Support\JSharp20_SE\vjredist64.exe

On J# is installed, run Server Manager from Administrative Tools. Right click Roles, Click Add Roles. Assuming it is not installed, select Web Server (IIS) on and click Next.

If Web Server (IIS) was already installed, select it in Server Managed (under Roles), right click and select Add Roles Services.

Leave the defaults selected, but turn on ASP.NET if not on already (agreeing to the other components turned on by this)

Then scroll down to Management Tools > IIS 6 Management Capability and turn on IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility too.

Click Next and Install to install IIS with the IIS 6 Metabase option. If you miss these components, the main Web Interface install will fail with a message telling you what you need on.
From the XenApp 6.5 installer file share, find the "Citrix Receiver and Plug-ins" folder in the root of the folder and copy it to the local drive of your new Web Interface server.
Execute \Web Interface\WebInterface.exe from the file share.

Select your language and agree to the EULA.

On the Location of Clients page, click "Copy the clients to this computer" and enter the location of the "Citrix Receiver and Plug-ins" folder you copied in earlier

Click Next and Next to install.

After Install (should only take a few seconds) leave the checkbox to Start creating sites now selected and click Finish

At this point we can’t go any further without creating the farm, so we’ll come back to the Web Interface setup in a while

Is the Citrix Online Plug-in being discontinued?

2011-07-01T20:21:00.001+01:00

I’m currently having great fun playing with the Tech Preview of XenApp 6.5, which should hopefully be finished later this year. There’s lots of interesting stuff in it, including new versions of every major server and client component of the XenApp suite and some great changes to the core functionality.

But where is the PN Agent?

Its been called the Citrix Online Plug-in for a while now, but I still call it the Agent. Its great. It can make shortcuts on your desktop or Start Menu, plus you can launch apps straight from your System Tray, down there by the clock. You can use the same icon to logon as different users, change your authentication and session options, launch Connection Center, refresh your apps, or close Citrix down. I love it. I’m currently busy replacing all my 12.0 installations (which is full of bugs) with 12.1, which has been out a suspiciously long time with no major updates.

To be fair some people choose to click through the Start Menu rather than launch from the system tray, but without being unfair they are generally the people who don’t use computers much. The expert users figured out ages ago that the “little blue icon” was two mouse clicks less and have no interest in using the Start Menu.

So where the heck is the Online Plug-in on the XenApp 6.5 DVD? Does the lack of a v13 agent-style Online Plug-in mean its been replaced by the Receiver?

We’ve investigated the Receiver already and discounted it. We even built a Merchandising Server 2.1 box which we never used as its only any use for the Receiver. The Receiver takes away that lovely launching apps from the System Tray functionality and does its best to hide the Connection Center. Considering we only just persuaded lots of out users to move from the aged Program Neighborhood to the Online Plug-in (which they now love) we’ll be really popular if we tell users that they had forget everything and instead stagger through the Start Menu to find their applications.

The most annoying thing (apart from a lack of official word from Citrix to actually help us plan) is that some functionality in XenApp 6.5 (such as pre-launching client connections to speed up logons) will only work in v13 of the client – which looks like its going to be Receiver only. I am hoping this is not the case.

Citrix, are you reading this? Can we have some information? Anyway, from this forum I’m not the only one unimpressed by the Receiver’s deliberately reduced functionality:

http://forums.citrix.com/message.jspa?messageID=1455633

XenApp 6.5 Tech Preview

2011-07-01T12:50:00.000+01:00

Now at Tech Preview stage, XenApp 6.5 (previously known as Project Iron Cove) has been in development for over a year, and since this beta is now available for public download the final release should available in around August 2011.

The downloads can be found here:

http://citrix.com/English/ss/downloads/details.asp?downloadId=1861926&productId=186

You'll need a MyCitrix logon which access to XenApp, and make sure you get both parts - the (huge) iso file and the license file. The ISO is too big to burn to a single layer DVD anyway, so just extract it with 7zip or a similar product to a shared location all your servers can use.

XenApp 6.5 is clearly less of a revolution than the last two major releases, XenApp 5 and XenApp 6. Both of these introduced support for new Operating Systems as a big part of the release, and though nearly every main component of XenApp is upgraded in the release of XenApp 6.5, its more of a gradual evolution from version 6. The look and feel of both the management tools and the front end should be pretty familiar to anyone with a good knowledge of XenApp 6.

New features introduced in XenApp 6, such as PowerShell management capabilities, Active Directory policies and the unified management management console remain and are developed further. The Operating System requirements for XenApp 6.5 are unchanged – the 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 only (I would strongly recommend SP1 as well). As in XenApp 6, some components such as Web Interface can probably go on older OSs, but I would personally use 2008 R2 for all server roles.

One interesting change in the client tools is that the Citrix Online Plugin v12.1 seems to be replaced by the Citrix Receiver v13 – not something everyone might welcome.

This is a version number comparison of the main components between the Tech Preview of XenApp 6.5 and its predecessor, XenApp 6:

Component	XenApp 6	XenApp 6.5

EdgeSight	5.3	5.4
EdgeSight for Load Testing	3.7	3.8
License Server	11.6.1 build 10007	11.9.0 build 11007
Offline plug-in	6.0.1 (later 6.0.2)	6.0.37
Online plug-in	11.2 (later 12.1)	Citrix Receiver v13
Power and Capacity Management	2.0	2.1
Secure Gateway	3.2	3.3
Streaming Profiler	6.0.0.1	6.5.0.6
Web Interface	5.2 (later 5.3)	5.4
Single Sign-On	4.8	5.0

New Features

This is a quick rundown of the new features in XenApp 6.5, as seen in this Tech Preview. I’ll cover some of these in more depth later, once I’ve documented the installation of a test farm.

New Server types – this is similar to a feature which was meant to be in XenApp 6, but which never appeared. That was the idea of having dedicated Data Collectors – XenApp servers which could only be DCs and which presumably would be stripped down. This is that idea in reverse, with servers being either capable of doing all roles (“Controller Servers”), or only hosting applications (“Session-Only Servers”), and not being Data Collectors. They lack features such as XML service and don’t participate in Zone Data Collector elections.
XenApp Connector for Configuration Manager 2007 – Lets you use SCCM to manage windows updates and publish applications on the XenApp servers
Session Prelaunch – for client PCs with v13 or later of the client only, Session Linger creates a connection with the farm under configurable conditions, such as a user logging onto a PC. This sounds great, although those sessions will take up both server resources and concurrent user licenses. And frankly users can achieve something like this by putting a Citrix application in their Startup folder. That said, its innovative and will be very useful for some people. As long as it doesn’t become compulsory.
Session Linger – extending the other end of a normal Citrix session, Linger means that when a user closes all their apps, their connection stays open for while in case they launch another app, saving the time to log back into the farm. Streamed to Server apps in XenApp 5 and 6 work this way already by default, with a 5 minute linger. Personally I turn this off already to save load.
Fast Reconnect – unlike Linger and Prelaunch this doesn’t need to be configured. It claims to reduce the time to reconnect to existing sessions. We’ll see.
Power and Capacity Management – This is now enhanced with the ability to power on Hyper-V and VMware based XenApp Servers.
Load Evaluator changes – Load Evaluators are no longer assigned to servers, but to Worker Groups or OUs.
Application Streaming support for VHDs - This feature copies the profile contents into the VHD and mounts it in the RadeCache location at application launch.
Application Streaming improvements – other changes to streaming include handling the AppHubWhiteList registry key better (it was a pain in XenApp 6) and launch time improvements, especially in Outlook apparently! Outlook 2010 streamed was not good in XenApp 6 so that sounds good.
AppCenter – yes, they’ve renamed the management console AGAIN.
Migration Center – a tool to help migrate from previous versions of XenApp
Printer Optimizations – printing has been getting better and better recently, with the dynamic printer mappings being added to XenApp by a Hotfix and the 12.1 being especially good. XenApp 6.5 builds on this, further improving printing.
Windows Desktop Integration Experience – A Windows 7 look and feel for published desktops – it has to be said this wasn’t terribly hard to accomplish in XenApp 6, but it sounds easier to turn on. It’ll be interesting to see whether this includes Aero.
HDX Enhancements – Generally better apparently.
Multi Stream ICA Client – v13 of the client is now multi streamed, meaning it can connect over multiple ports at the same time (this is configurable), improving performance.

Citrix Online Plug-in v12.1.44.1 brings IE9 support

2011-06-30T13:19:00.001+01:00

Citrix have released a minor upgrade for their now pretty aged v12.1 of the Citrix Online Plug-in, which has been the current version of the client since November 2010. This is to fix issues which some users had in launching applications after they upgraded to Internet Explorer 9.

IE9 is a little annoying at the best of times with Citrix’s Web Interface as it now often asks you to download and open an ICA file instead of just launching your application, but some users have reported that they don’t even get the option to open the ICA file with the old version, v12.1.0.30, due to a sharing violation. The problem was certainly not seen by everyone – I have been using IE9 with more than one Web Interface site for over a month without issue. Users on the same sites and same browser and OS versions reported issues to me.

The new client has no other fixes listed than support for IE9 (which can still display the ICA download popup message – but it actually works now) so a major rollout of this client would probably be unnecessary. Citrix even state on the notes for this release “Any known issues in Version 12.1 of the product, except for the specific issues resolved in this private online plug-in, still apply.” Those known issues can be seen here: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX126965

Oddly, the old broken 12.1.0.30 client is still the main plug-in to download – you need to logon to MyCitrix to download the working version.

Full details here:

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX126653

Installing XenApp 6 Hotfixes

2011-06-28T15:11:00.001+01:00

Until Citrix release a proper service pack for XenApp 6 (I’ve heard this might still be months off), having your Citrix hotfixes up to date is really important. Frankly, there are some killer bugs in the initial release of XenApp 6 – luckily the patching system works well.

Download the Hotfixes from here:

http://support.citrix.com/product/xa/v6.0_2008r2/hotfix/general/public

I build my servers using Altiris, but I have found that using Altiris can be an unreliable way of installing Citrix hotfixes. Instead I now have a file share with the hotfixes in, together with a batch file that installs them all in one go and then reboots once at the end. Rebooting after every hotfix is not necessary, although the order they are installed in can be important.

The script I use is adapted from one written by Paul Johnson which I got from the forum below, so all credit to Paul for sharing this:
http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=282008

Note that the script I use does not install every hotfix Citrix have released – some fix issues I have not come across yet, others are for other versions or languages only. Therefore, this might not be a complete script for you – its worth looking at the other hotfixes on the Citrix site.

Anyway, this is the current script!

@echo off
setlocal
Change user /install

echo Installing XenApp6 Hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64002 (CTX126123)...
START /wait msiexec /p \\filesvr01\xenapp$\XenApp6Hotfixes\002-XA600W2K8R2X64002.msp /passive /norestart /Liewa c:\logs\XA600W2K8R2X64002.log
timeout /t 10 /NOBREAK

echo Installing XenApp6 Hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64010 (CTX126490)...
START /wait msiexec /p \\filesvr01\xenapp$\XenApp6Hotfixes\010-XA600W2K8R2X64010.msp /passive /norestart /Liewa c:\logs\XA600W2K8R2X64010.log
timeout /t 10 /NOBREAK

echo Installing XenApp6 Hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64017 (CTX126958)...
START /wait msiexec /p \\filesvr01\xenapp$\XenApp6Hotfixes\017-XA600W2K8R2X64017.msp /passive /norestart /Liewa c:\logs\XA600W2K8R2X64017.log
timeout /t 10 /NOBREAK

echo Installing XenApp6 Hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64029 (CTX127405)...
START /wait msiexec /p \\filesvr01\xenapp$\XenApp6Hotfixes\029-XA600W2K8R2X64029.msp /passive /norestart /Liewa c:\logs\XA600W2K8R2X64029.log
timeout /t 10 /NOBREAK

echo Installing XenApp6 Hotfix XAE600W2K8R2X64020 (CTX127025)...
START /wait msiexec /p \\filesvr01\xenapp$\XenApp6Hotfixes\020-XAE600W2K8R2X64020.msp /passive /norestart /Liewa c:\logs\XAE600W2K8R2X64020.log
timeout /t 10 /NOBREAK

echo Installing XenApp6 Hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64021 (CTX127036)...
START /wait msiexec /p \\filesvr01\xenapp$\XenApp6Hotfixes\021-XA600W2K8R2X64021.msp /passive /norestart /Liewa c:\logs\XA600W2K8R2X64021.log
timeout /t 10 /NOBREAK

echo Installing XenApp6 Hotfix XAE600W2K8R2X64018 (CTX127023)...
START /wait msiexec /p \\filesvr01\xenapp$\XenApp6Hotfixes\018-XAE600W2K8R2X64018.msp /passive /norestart /Liewa c:\logs\XAE600W2K8R2X64018.log
timeout /t 10 /NOBREAK

echo Installing XenApp6 Hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64012 (CTX126679)...
START /wait msiexec /p \\filesvr01\xenapp$\XenApp6Hotfixes\012-XA600W2K8R2X64012.msp /passive /norestart /Liewa c:\logs\XA600W2K8R2X64012.log
timeout /t 10 /NOBREAK

echo Installing XenApp6 Hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64040 (CTX127523)...
START /wait msiexec /p \\filesvr01\xenapp$\XenApp6Hotfixes\040-XA600W2K8R2X64040.msp /passive /norestart /Liewa c:\logs\XA600W2K8R2X64040.log
timeout /t 10 /NOBREAK

echo Installing XenApp6 Hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64056 (CTX128945)...
START /wait msiexec /p \\filesvr01\xenapp$\XenApp6Hotfixes\056-XA600W2K8R2X64056.msp /passive /norestart /Liewa c:\logs\XA600W2K8R2X64056.log
timeout /t 10 /NOBREAK

endlocal
shutdown -r -t 0

I save the script in the same folder as the hotfixes called “installall.bat”. On a single server I build I’d just run this manually from the console, with a lot of servers to build I would use Citrix’s new Installation Manager (which is basic, but it does work…) to create a new schedule – for instance:

Obviously if a single new update comes out I can then create another batch file to just install that one and reboot, then set Installation Manager to do the whole farm out of hours.

Note that you can then use the Delivery Services Console to find servers which are lacking hotfixes. To see the servers at a glance…

Launch the Citrix Services Delivery Console (installed on manually built servers by default)
Set your farm connection up if needed
Click your farm name under the XenApp link on the left
Select the Hotfix Summary tab
You should now see all your servers, along with a useful count of hotfixes installed

If you then find a server which is missing hotfixes in the Servers section and click its Hotfix Details tab, you should see a list of the installed hotfixes. So for the server above with only two hotfixes installed, I can go to it and see this is very out of date!

Note if you want to search for a server missing a specific hotfix, Open the DSC, click Search, and select Servers without hotfix:

XenApp 6 and Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2

2011-04-28T11:21:00.001+01:00

No-one who has had a production XenApp 6 system since mid-last year would claim they have had no issues, but with all the latest hotfixes from MS and Citrix we do seem to be getting closer to stability, and a big part of this is Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2.

This is something of a relief after I tried using the beta of SP1 last year – that broke XenApp altogether!

Citrix have said that they support the use of XenApp 6 with 2008 R2 SP1, and I can confirm that I have SP1 servers in production already and they are working perfectly – well, at least no worse than the non SP1 servers!

Citrix do have a page of known issues with SP1, though they appear to be fixed if you have installed the first XenApp 6 hotfix

Known issues: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX126711

Hotfix: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX125388

Apart from any general improvements and security fixes Microsoft have made, there are several which appear to be included in SP1 and are especially useful for XenApp 6 servers:

KB975777 (delays shutting down systems)
KB979530 (connections denied during heavy logon and logoff conditions)
KB980663 (stop error during heavy logon and logoff conditions)
KB2265716 (server stops randomly if heavily using group policy and SCOM)
KB2383928 (remote sessions to not completely exit)

I would still install this post-SP1 patch by the way:

KB2465772 (causes XenApp to stop randomly with lots of 7011 errors about services being unresponsive – a very long standing problem for us)

Personally by the way, I would probably rebuild servers with SP1 installed from the start, rather than add SP1 onto a server which has been in use for a long time. But then XenApp servers like being rebuilt now and then.

As a note, when I installed Service Pack 1 on a server which was already operational and had the EdgeSight Agent running, I then got an EdgeSight Operational Alert:

Error: An unrecoverable, fatal database error has occurred. Shutting down the Citrix System Monitoring Agent.

Nice. EdgeSight carried on working afterwards though.

Citrix Web Interface errors: Some of your resources have not been reconnected…

2011-03-15T12:53:00.000Z

We had an annoying message suddenly appear this morning for all web interface users on logging in and out. When they logged in they were told “Some of your resources have not been reconnected. Try reconnecting to your resources again and, if the problem persists, contact your system administrator”:

And when they logged out, they were told “Some of your resources have not been logged off. Ensure you have shut down all your active resources. If this message does not usually appear at the end of your sessions, contact your system administrator”

Turns out the users were quite willing to contact their system administrator as well! Repeatedly. I especially like the way the second message assumes you might just always see this message and that this would be okay.

A bit of Googling turned up that we would get rid of this be turning off Workspace Control. This is in the Citrix Web Interface Management console – right click your websites, select Workspace Control and uncheck the first checkbox…

This removed the message – and also the Reconnect and Disconnect buttons. Not the end of the world, but not the intention either.

Then I noticed in the event log on the web interface box lots of Application errors of ID 31003 and 30015. These had messages of…

All the Citrix XML Services configured for farm Test XenApp Farm failed to respond to this XML Service transaction.
The Citrix XML Service at address http://xensvr01:80/scripts/wpnbr.dll [com.citrix.xml.NFuseProtocol.RequestAppData] is not able to process requests

It was just a test farm with one server which was set up in the web interface, and I was installing updates on it and rebooting repeatedly. Every time it was unavailable the website was giving the message to users logging in and out as a farm was offline – even though none of the users would be logging into that farm. Once the work was completed the error stopped coming up.

A good lesson that when you ignore some errors they fix themselves!

Streaming Firefox 3.6 on XenApp 6

2010-12-20T14:49:00.001Z

This appears to be a surprisingly simple app to stream on XenApp – so far. My one criticism is that its not very obvious how to customise the application, but after a bit of research it wasn’t too hard.

I’m assuming here you want to turn off any updates (its a stream, so you will need to re-stream it to apply any updates – which given the amount of bugs that are discovered in Firefox is a good idea to do on a regular basis) and you probably want to stop it being the default browser on your systems. After all, if you DO want it to be the default browser, you are probably not going to stream it – just install it on your XenApp servers properly.

Preparation – getting the files to configure

Step one is to download the latest installer from http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/. Install it to a PC manually and have it ready to use on your streaming profiler.

Make a copy of this file to edit… C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\defaults\pref\firefox.js
Remember on a 64-bit system this will appear in c:\program files (x86)…

Also get a copy of C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components\nsBrowserGlue.js

Finally, create a new text file called override.ini.

Put these three text files and the installer together and prepare them before streaming. Use Notepad++ instead of Notepad so it shows the line breaks properly.

Preparation – disabling the default browser check

Open your firefox.js file in Notepad++ – search for the phrase “checkDefaultBrowser” and change “true” to “false”

pref("browser.shell.checkDefaultBrowser", false);

Preparation – disabling updates

Still editing firefox.js in Notepad++, search for “update”. Find these lines and change “true” to “false”

pref("browser.search.update", false);

pref("app.update.enabled", false);

pref("extensions.update.enabled", false);

Preparation – pre-configure Proxy settings

Assuming you want to specify Proxy settings, search for “share_proxy_settings” in firefox.js. Change “true” to “false”

pref("network.proxy.share_proxy_settings", true);

You now should now add in a load of lines (assuming they are not already in the file) for your proxy settings. These are just examples – obviously put in your own settings for proxy server address, port and exceptions:

pref("network.proxy.ftp", "192.168.1.10");
pref("network.proxy.ftp_port", 80);
pref("network.proxy.gopher", "192.168.1.10");
pref("network.proxy.gopher_port", 80);
pref("network.proxy.http", "192.168.1.10");
pref("network.proxy.http_port", 80);
pref("network.proxy.socks", "192.168.1.10");
pref("network.proxy.socks_port", 80);
pref("network.proxy.ssl", "192.168.1.10");
pref("network.proxy.ssl_port", 80);
pref("network.proxy.type", 1);
pref("network.proxy.no_proxies_on", "localhost, 127.0.0.1, 192.168.0.0/16");

Preparation – prevent the annoying “Welcome to Firefox version 3.6” home page tab for new users.

By default a user in Citrix running Firefox will see an extra tab when they open it for the first time with a page extolling the virtues of the new version they just installed. This is not needed! Add this line to the firefox.js file:

pref("browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone", "ignore");

Preparation – getting rid of the “Do you want to save your tabs” dialog on closing Firefox

You probably want to just want your users to open their home page next time you open the browser, so the functionality to open their old tabs is not needed. Find and amend these lines in firefox.js to stop these messages:

pref("browser.tabs.warnOnClose", false);
pref("browser.tabs.warnOnOpen", false);
pref("browser.warnOnQuit", true);

// 0 = blank, 1 = home (browser.startup.homepage), 2 = last visited page, 3 = resume previous browser session
// The behavior of option 3 is detailed at: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Session_Restore
pref("browser.startup.page", 1);

Preparation – preventing the “Know your rights” button appearing

By default when you open Firefox it will keep producing a bar under the tabs list with a button called “Know your rights” and some text telling you that this is open source software. Very annoying, but easy to suppress.

Edit C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components\nsBrowserGlue.js in Notepad++ – remove or comment (with “//”) the line:

var rightsBundle = this._bundleService.createBundle("chrome://global/locale/aboutRights.properties");

Preparation – prevent the “Import your settings data data” wizard

The final annoyance, this wizard is launched the first time you open Firefox and isn’t useful in a Citrix environment. Edit the blank text file called override.ini and add these lines:

[XRE]
EnableProfileMigrator=false

Streaming Firefox

Now you have your installer and your three modified text files (override.ini, firefox.js and nsBrowserGlue.js), install is easy…

Open the Citrix Streaming Profiler on your profiler machine. If you are streaming this to Stream To Server on XenApp 6, this should be a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine
Create a new profile
Click Next until you get to the Quick or Advanced Install option – choose Advanced
Click Next and Next to run an install program
Browse to your Firefox installer and select it. Click next and Launch Installer.
Click Next, Custom, and keep pressing Next until you get to the default web browser checkbox- uncheck it so its not the default.
Click Next to install. Untick the box to Launch Firefox Now and click Finish
Click Next and Perform Additional Installations
Click Select files and folders and click Next
On the left hand side browse to the text files you edited earlier
Copy firefox.js into the profile at “C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\defaults\pref”, overwriting the existing file
Copy nsBrowserGlue.js into the profile at “C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\components”, again overwriting the existing file
Copy override.ini into the profile at “C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\” – this should be a new file
Click Next and Finish Installations
Click Next and run Firefox. You should now be able to check the settings you specified above on updates, default browser, wizards, etc – it should all be pre-configured if the files are right.
Close Firefox and click Next.
You can probably delete the entry for “Mozilla Firefox (Safe Mode)
Click Next and Finish, then save your profile on a network location.
Publish an application to your farm, streamed from the profile you just saved – you should get a nice, clean, pre-configured browser.

EdgeSight 5.3 and the empty reports

2010-12-06T14:06:00.001Z

I’ve just got EdgeSight 5.3 working, running with SQL Server 2008, after an unlikely amount of messing around. This surprised me as when I last installed this, using SQL Express instead of full-blown SQL 2008, it all went well.

This time I at first tried to be too up to date and used two Windows Server 2008 R2 machines for the website and SQL parts, backed by SQL Server 2008 R2. Turns out that SQL Server 2008 R2 is too advanced for EdgeSight 5.3 – it only supports 2005 and 2008. I wasn’t sure if Windows Server 2008 R2 was any good either, so went back to 2008.

Then I tried using a separate shared SQL Server which didn’t have Reporting Services on, planning to use SQL Express with Advanced Features (including Reporting Services) on the website box. That didn’t work out either as the version of Reporting Services you get with SQL Express can only report on local databases.

So I finally use a shared SQL 2008 (non-R2) server that does have proper reporting services on it, and it still doesn’t work. It looks like it will, Reporting Services setup went fine, but whenever I look at the reports, they’re blank. And I notice at the bottom of the page in IE it says “error on page”. Never a good sign.

Double clicking on this error gets some errors, generally from the “rsproxy” page, which mean nothing to me…

I also got an error that parametersController was null or not an object. Very helpful. Googling this got me learning too much about Reporting Services without finding anything useful.

Then I saw this Citrix article about an older version of EdgeSight which told me the problem…

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX119547

Basically, its a trailing slash in the Reporting Services URL. In EdgeSight, I clicked Configure, then Reporting Services, Report Server, took the end slash off the URL, entered my password and clicked Save Changes. The reports were recreated on the SQL box, which took a few minutes, I did an IISreset on the EdgeSight server and its all working – several weeks after I started trying!

I like the fact this has been a known issue for Citrix since version 5.0 and the interface still doesn’t strip off any slashes at the end of the Reporting Services URL…

Shadowing in XenApp 6

2010-12-02T14:02:00.001Z

The ability of an administrator or helpdesk to shadow their users is about as basic as it gets – a system like XenApp used to distribute applications remotely is unlikely to be serving a group of people in one room. Yet bizarrely this feature, hardly recent addition to Citrix’s offering, has had quite profound problems in XenApp 6.

Broadly, there are a couple of issues. The first is the Citrix client – versions 11.2 and 12.0 of the online plug-in had serious problems regarding shadowing which have only just been fixed in v12.1, which I am now recommending for anyone who might shadow a user. The second is the heady technology that is having two monitors. Basically, it would appear shadowing was only ever tested on machines with a single monitor – either that or Citrix released XenApp 6 knowing it had a major broken feature.

In my initial test environment when I started evaluating XenApp 6 I was using the v11.2 client on a pair of PCs with two monitors each so you can understand my initial estimate was the shadowing was in fact completely impossible.

The Client bug

The v11.2 and v12.0 online plug-ins do appear to support shadowing – mostly. But when it connects it often only displays part of the user’s screen, with the image clipped at the sides and no way of scrolling, and sometimes it just closes immediately with an Error 120 messagebox. This was not limited to XenApp 6, I had it on an old Presentation Server 4.0 farm. Apparently there was a workaround to publish the admin console as a non-seamless application, though the v11.0 client usually worked and the new 12.1 client does too.

Basically, upgrade the helpdesk users to 12.1 and the clipping issue should go away.

The Dual Monitors bug

Ah, the biggie. Basically, if the user being shadowed OR the user doing the shadowing has more than one monitor, you cannot shadow their seamless applications. Pretty basic, really.

Shadowing from a PC with one monitor to one with two gives the useful error “Error 7044 – The request to control another session remotely was denied”:

This sounds like an access issue, but it isn’t. Its been denied because its not possible. If you shadow from a PC with two monitors to one with a single monitor you get the real error - “Error 120 – this function is not supported on this system”. Because it isn’t.

I’ve raised this with Citrix – they say its a Microsoft issue with shadowing on 2008 R2. I build a Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services server hosting seamless applications through a web interface and it does indeed do exactly the same thing – sessions started on a PC with two monitors cannot be Remotely Controlled – you get told “Access is denied”.

Nice. So I raise it with Microsoft Support who say this is “by design”, not a bug. Though it might be “redesigned” in the future. Its actually easy to fix on RDS:

On each RDS server, open “Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration”
Right click RDP-Tcp, select Properties
Select Client Settings
Change the maximum number of monitors to 1.

Not much good if you specifically want a two monitor Terminal Services session, but it will work for seamless apps. Anyway, the same fix does nothing for XenApp I’m afraid.

Enough of this nonsense. These workarounds suggest themselves for XenApp 6 which will get shadowing possible in most cases:

Make sure your admin people have the v12.1 online plug-in
Publish your XenApp management tools as a Desktop, or even better as a non-seamless application. This will get around problems caused by your helpdesk and admin staff having two monitors. You can see instructions on how to force a single published application to be “windowed” rather than seamless here: http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=265084&tstart=0. But basically you edit the conf\default.ica file in each site on your web interface box to include some extra lines, starting with the name of the published app in square brackets, such as:

[XenApp Console]
TWIMode=Off
ScreenPercent=85
If a dual monitor user calls up and asks to be shadowed, tell them to close their Citrix applications, disable all but one monitor and launch them again! Just kidding, though that would work…
Ask said user to launch a published desktop which you have configured to be of a specific size – say 1024x768 or 90%. If this has a Citrix client in it, they can launch apps there and you will be able to shadow the desktop and see its contents.
Alternatively, get them to temporarily change their client to open all apps in a specific window size rather than seamless. So, if they use the online plug-in, right click its icon, select Options, Session Options and select a Window Size:

…or if they use the Web Interface, get them to go to Preferences, Session Settings and select the Window Size there instead:

The next session they start you should be able to shadow.

This is, of course, all a bit rubbish. Hopefully it will get fixed soon, whether its a Citrix or Microsoft fix.

UPDATE 20/05/2011

Thanks for the comments below – I had meant to update this entry anyway. We did make some progress on this, though it wasn’t great. We found that indeed Remote Assistance works fine, so have been using it on clients with two monitors. We also found that the v12.0 client was rubbish for this as well (the XenApp sessions work initially when shadowed but then start flashing dramatically – this is fixed with a v12.1 upgrade). At least the users could be shadowed, at least the ones on the network could. Not much use for someone on a remote PC not on our LAN though.

The comment below about using Remote Assistance to the server session is interesting though. I’m off to experiment now…

Publishing explorer.exe in XenApp 6

2010-11-12T13:22:00.001Z

Publishing windows explorer is something that I never thought was a good idea – but some people seem to like it! It is to be fair a nice, simple alternative a published desktop if people want to just open their documents and then double click on a file.

Its supposed to just be a case of publishing a Hosted application shortcut to c:\windows\explorer.exe, with a parameter of the drive letter or path you want it to default to, like this to start in the h: drive:

It should be that simple. But it isn’t. By default this will only stay open if there is another program keeping the session open – if it is launched first (which it would be, logically) it closes after an instant.

There is a registry fix from Citrix support though for this, which I found on this forum post: http://forums.citrix.com/message.jspa?messageID=1461520.

Create a DWORD (32 bit) setting called LogoffCheckerStartupDelayInSeconds with the value 10 at this location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Citrix\wfshell\TWI

If you want a reg file to just import to fix this, copy the following text into a text file and save it with a .reg extension:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Citrix\wfshell\TWI]
"LogoffCheckerStartupDelayInSeconds"=dword:00000010

Fixing session reconnect in XenApp 6

2010-11-10T09:52:00.001Z

Something I had noticed on a XenApp 6 farm I have running with a small number of servers recently was that the sessions were not reconnecting properly, especially when they had been created from different workstations. This is an issue for us as our users tend to move about, and the ability to migrate sessions is important. Disconnected sessions also needlessly take up memory on servers.

At first I thought this was just an occasional issue, then I found I could reproduce it by opening an application using the Online Plug-in (the Agent!), then selecting “Disconnect Online Sessions”, then “Reconnect Online Sessions”. This should obviously give me my sessions back, instead I got the message “There are no sessions available for reconnection”.

This may have been made worse by our using Passthrough Authentication. Anyway, I checked the web interface cluster and it had lots of this error for all the servers:

Event ID: 30105

Event Description:

Site path: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Citrix\PNAgent.

The Citrix servers do not trust the server. This message was reported from the XML Service at address http://xensvr02:80 [com.citrix.xml.NFuseProtocol.RequestReconnectSessionData].

This is something I remember fixing in Citrix Presentation Server v4.0, only of course the setting in XenApp 6 has moved.

In the Delivery Services Console, I selected Policies, the Computer tab, and the Unfiltered policy, which in my case is still the only policy. I selected this policy, clicked edit and Next.

First, I checked that Auto Client Reconnect was set to “Allowed”, though since this is the default setting I doubt that made any difference. Just to be sure I set it to Allowed and clicked OK.

The important setting though is the XML service. Scroll down the list on the left to XML Service and select the policy “Trust XML Requests”. Click Add and set the policy to Enabled.

The other policy setting – XML Service Port – does not need configuring get this functionality working.

I then ran gpupdate on the servers with disconnected sessions and attempted to reconnect – this worked immediately.

I’m not sure why the default configuration for XenApp 6 appears to be for session reconnection to be essentially broken, at least for users with the Online Plug-in and Passthrough Authentication. I also have not made any attempt to make sure that “only trusted services communicate with the Citrix XML Service”. I am assuming here that this would involve making sure only our Web Interface servers could communicate with the XML Service using firewall rules, so that might be something to consider next time we review our firewall policies.

This page does appear to confirm that this is the correct fix for a system with Passthrough Authentication clients who want session roaming…

http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/index.jsp?topic=/xenapp6-w2k8-admin/ps-sf-citrix-xml-service-port-set-v2.html

Citrix Online and Offline plug-ins updated

2010-11-08T13:20:00.001Z

Citrix have been quietly updating things again over the last couple of months – this mainly appears to be an exercise in bug fixing from the original XenApp 6 release!

Citrix Online Plug-in 12.1

I still call it the “Citrix Agent” y’know.

Anyway, v12.1 has finally been released and can be downloaded from here:

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX126965

It boasts a staggering 72 fixes to the previous versions which has got to make it an important release. The most important fix from my point of view is the end of the bug introduced in at least v11.2 which caused clipping to occur when shadowing users on apparently any version of Citrix farm. Previously I have been downgrading helpdesk users to v11.0 which usually fixed it, it is nice to have that problem removed.

New features of the client include

ICA file signing. Apparently our security is increased by this change.
The client end of the new XenApp Printing Optimization Pack. There is a corresponding update for the XenApp 6 servers as well – this should improve printing for clients using v12.1 connecting to servers with the hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64010 installed. Personally I am about to start testing to determine whether its worth updating ALL our servers and clients to get this or just let it creep in.
A new decoder for HDX 3D Pro Graphics, which apparently is something for XenDesktop - this explains why I have never heard of it before.

I think the 72 bug fixes are probably the big win here!

Citrix Offline Plug-in 6.0.1

And I still call this the “Streaming Client”…

Whatever it is called, it was updated last month and can be downloaded from here: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX125480

The good news for those with lots of application streams is that there is no new Streaming Profiler, version 6.0 is still current, so we should not have to recreate or update everything. Again.

Anyway, for an upgrade of one minor point version – 6.0.0 to 6.0.1 – it has a LOT of stuff in the Issues Fixed list – 45 at the moment, and I am sure this has gone up as well since they released it. Worrying issues this release fixes include scenarios where the XenApp servers could experience a blue screen of death crash (nice!) and a really annoying bug in streaming Microsoft Office where fonts fail to load. I’m fairly sure I spent some time trying to fix this before it became one of the many reasons I wrote off streaming Office 2010 to servers in this release and went Hosted instead.

There is still stuff in the Known Issues for the Offline plug-in, including incompatibility with UPM v3.1.0.86 (just upgrade to 3.2…) and an odd couple of issues if you uninstall the client, the fix for one of them being to run a Repair on XenApp itself.

So anyway, both client upgrades look like being a really good idea, fixing a phenomenal 117 issues between them.

Notes on PowerShell in XenApp 6

2010-11-05T13:43:00.002Z

Powershell v2 comes installed by default on Windows Server 2008 R2. Citrix have followed Microsoft’s example with products such as Exchange in providing a fairly thorough set of commands in Powershell to monitor and administer the farm. And with the loss of MFCOM as a way of command line farm administration, its become an essential skill. Personally I have no real need at the moment to use Powershell for actions such as publishing applications as our environment is still small enough to be faster to administer with the Delivery Services Console, but for any mass change to the farm the command line will become far faster and for monitoring, its great.
To easily be able to use PowerShell to administer XenApp 6, first you need to download and install the SDK. And I like to have my admin tools as published apps, so this is how to create a XenApp 6 PowerShell based management application as a hosted application on your farm:
Publishing the PowerShell console with XenApp commands

Download the XenApp Powershell SDK : http://community.citrix.com/display/xa/XenApp+6+PowerShell+SDK
Extract and execute the installer
Agree to change the execution level to AllSigned
Publish an application to this server with the following location:
C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -NoExit -File "c:\Program Files\Citrix\XenApp Server SDK\Citrix.XenApp.Sdk.ps1"
Launch your new editor
By default it will not be set up to recognise XenApp commands while editing, so use the command:
Add-PSSnapin Citrix*

Publishing the PowerShell ISE Editor
You can use Notepad to edit your PowerShell scripts – but that’s not very fun so let’s publish an application “Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE)”. This is a very good editor for developing PowerShell scripts, with a nice window to run them in and some basics like automatic colouring of your code. Of course, you can skip this if you like Notepad…

Login to your XenApp 6 server
Go to Command Prompt
Enter this command:
servermanagercmd -install PowerShell-ISE
It will whinge and then work anyway:
Publish a hosted application on your farm at:
c:\windows\sysWOW64\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\PowerShell_ISE.exe
Again, you will need to run the command “Add-PSSnapin Citrix*” to preload all the commands for XenApp. In ISE, you can enter quick commands like this in the bottom window, then build up your scripts in the tabbed top window. The middle window displays any console output.

Some useful basic commands for XenApp in PowerShell
I’m planning a much bigger post on this, but in the meantime, here’s some really basic bits of code to show you what you can do with PowerShell…

Display the farm name
$farm = Get-XAFarm
$farm.FarmName

Display the zone name data collector for a zone (the zone of the XenApp server you run on of course)
$zone = get-XAzone
$zone.ZoneName
$zone.DataCollector
Display counts for the total number of active and disconnected sessions in the farm
Get-XASession -Farm | where-object {$_.State -eq "Active" } | Measure-object
Get-XASession -Farm | where-object {$_.State -eq "Disconnected" } | Measure-object
Display a list of all your farm servers, listed alphabetically, with the number of sessions on each:
$servers = Get-XAServer -full
$output = "`nServers: `n"
    foreach($server in $servers | sort-object ServerName){
        $output+=$server.ServerName + " " + $server.SessionCount + "`n"
    }
$output

Remember if you are saving any of these its best to put the command “Add-PSSnapin Citrix*” at the top to make sure it always has the Citrix commands loaded. You should really consider signing your scripts as well – which is an art in itself!

Installation Manager for XenApp 6 – installing Acrobat Reader

2010-09-29T12:40:00.001+01:00

Now we have Installation Manager installed, we should probably use it. An MSI and MST file combination is a good standard install, so this is rolling out Acrobat reader to your Citrix servers.

Customising Acrobat Reader

Download Acrobat Reader – I got the latest version (9.3.4) from the Adobe website, after a little searching:
http://ardownload.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/9.x/9.3.4/enu/AdbeRdr934_en_US.exe
Also download the Adobe Customization Wizard 9:
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=3993
Install the Adobe Customization Wizard on your PC – accept all the defaults.
Extract the EXE using this command: AdbeRdr910_en_US_Std.exe -nos_ne
Wait for the window that pops up to do its work…
You should then find the extracted files in this folder on Vista and Windows 7:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Adobe\Reader 9.3\Setup Files
Run the Adobe Customization Wizard
Open the AcroRead.msi you just extracted into Setup Files
Select Installation Options on the left – set to run Silently and Suppress Reboot

Select Shortcuts. Remove the desktop shortcut.
Select EULA and Document Status. Click the checkbox to suppress the EULA dialog
Select Online and Acrobat.com Features. Disable all Acrobat.com features and all updates.
Exit from the application and it should ask you if you want to save changes to AcroRead.msi. Say yes, and it will create the file AcroRead.mst in the same folder as the MSI file. Move the contents of this folder to your shared fileserver ready for Installation Manager to use them.

Distributing Acrobat Reader using Installation Manager

Open Installation Manager
Click “Schedule MSI/MSP package…” on the right hand pane
Enter a name in the Task name box
In the Target List box, you can just enter the names of the servers to install to, separated by commas (no spaces). Alternatively, click “Servers…”. This will bring up a worryingly empty list.

Select Citrix Server Selector (assuming they are in a farm – otherwise use the Windows Server Selector) and click Add
Enter the name of a Citrix server (maybe the Data Collector?) in the “Server Address” box and click GO!
You should get a nice list of your servers and server folders. Select servers (use CTRL to select multiple) and click “Add >” to select them.
Put the installation files you prepared earlier in a shared folder on a fileserver.
Select the MST and MSI files using the Browse buttons (or by just typing of course).
Enter a time for the install – or leave it as Now.
Select the checkboxes to log off users or reboot the server as needed. With this install I am just denying logons.

Click the Advanced button and change the cache location for this task to the one on the shared file location which holds and MST and MSI. I don’t know if this is necessary but without this change it seems to have trouble finding the task. You can also change the retry settings here. By default it will retry every 10 minutes for 1 hour.
Click OK to schedule your install!
Right click the task every few seconds and select Refresh. It should succeed – you also get the PowerShell code that is fired at the servers.

Distributing an MSP update

Once this is succeeded you should have Acrobat Reader 9.3.0 installed. To update this to 9.3.4 (currently the latest), create a new task, as before. This time, when you browse for the MSI file, change the drop down at the bottom to MSP files and you should see a list of MSP files:

Select (now for the annoying bit) the oldest. In the case of this upgrade you need to update it to 9.3.2, then 9.3.3, then 9.3.4. If you go straight for 9.3.4 it will fail with the status “Installation Failed: 1642”. So select 9.3.2 and carry on.
You won’t need a transform for this so just select the right servers and change the Shared Folder under Advanced settings to be the one with the MSP in and run it. It should work and you can check the installed version of Acrobat is upgraded.
Repeat the process creating installation tasks for the 9.3.3 and 9.3.4 updates. At least it will easy when the inevitable 9.3.5 comes along!

Installation Manager for XenApp 6 as a Published Application

2010-09-29T09:46:00.001+01:00

From XenApp 5, Installation Manager is a nice name for what is in fact a package of MMC add-ins, powershell scripts and the Windows Task Manager. The old Installation Manager from Presentation Server has basically been removed (let’s be honest, it wasn’t that great) and replaced with lots of standard Windows functionality.

Though everything is streamed, right, so you don’t need it anymore. Right? Well, just in case…

This is how to install IM on XenApp 6 and allow the management interface as a Published Application:

Download Installation Manager for Windows Server 2008 R2 from My Citrix and extract
On all the servers to receive deployments, install IMUtilities-x64.msi
Set up a network share that IM can use as a cache
On the server that will host the admin tools, install IMAdmin-x64.msi. There is a 32-bit version as well, but if this is on a 2008 R2 server, you need the 64-bit one.
Search in vain through the Start Menu for a link to it. There isn’t one.
Start, Run, MMC
Click File > Add/Remove Snap-In
Find Installation Manager and click “Add”
You will get prompted for your network location you created earlier

Click OK and OK to finish adding the snap-in – you should return to the MMC, now with the Installation Manager appearing on the left hand side, with the file server location you specified at the end of it.
Click File > Options to finish the configuration.
Click Change Icon if you want to give it a more jazzy icon than the standard MMC one. Click Browse and find an ico file – or load C:\Windows\System32\shell32.dll which has loads in it. I went for a nice floppy disk icon from here!

Change the console mode from Author – “User mode – Full Access” should do.

Save it to the local drive of the Citrix server and log off.
Open the XenApp Delivery Services Console
Right click Application, select Publish Application
Enter Installation Manager as the Display Name.
Click Next and Next to confirm as an Installed Application, accessed from a server.
You actually run mmc.exe with the name of the MSC file you just created as an argument. So, if you saved it as c:\installationmanager.msc, your command would be
%SystemRoot%\system32\mmc.exe c:\installationmanager.msc

Click next, add the icon to your admin users and click next again.
Click Change Icon again to find a nice icon again if you want to for your published application. Or pick a default one. It depends how much you like icons. Personally I am not a big fan of half the management apps on the farm having the standard MMC icon, but maybe I think about it too much.
Click next and finish to save the icon.
I would then edit its properties again and click the Limits tab. Set it to only allow one instance per user – a second launch will not work as you already have that MSC file open.

Refresh the application list on your client PC and you should see your new Installation Manager icon.

Load Testing Outlook 2010 on XenApp – Hosted vs. Streamed to Server

2010-09-22T14:39:00.001+01:00

After this initial test comparing the performance of Word 2010 Hosted against Streamed to Server on XenApp 6 showed some considerable advantages to using locally installed Office 2010 instead of Streaming it, I stepped up my testing and included Outlook 2010 instead. The test was more intensive, moving between the different screens of Outlook (Inbox, Tasks, Contacts, etc) and creating and deleting items.

Again, I set up EdgeSight for Load Testing to run 50 users on a single server – logging in at the rate of one every 20 seconds, staying logged in and “working” for 10 minutes and then all logging out in 3 minutes. They once again looked nice when they were all logged in…

Outlook 2010 Hosted

Outlook 2010 performed very well on XenApp 6 when installed locally. CPU time was quite acceptable throughout the test, being quite close to the performance of Word 2010 at the same load. Memory usage was slightly higher than Word 2010, being about 7gb.

Outlook 2010 Streamed to Server

Streaming added a couple of issues to the performance of Outlook 2010. Firstly, the logon phase involved far more CPU activity, being flat at 100% for about the last three minutes. CPU usage then remained very high through the phase of the test where Outlook was looping through simulated user activity, before dropping off nicely at the end of the test as the users logged off. Memory usage was more worrying. Its not that it was much higher than hosted – it was higher, though not substantially so. The worrying part was that it increased through the 10 minutes after logons stopped as each OUTLOOK.EXE process slowly ate more RAM. The Hosted Outlook processes did not behave in this way. We tried this again over a much longer period with more users and this continued, Outlook using ever more memory until being logged off

Conclusion

This test was more conclusive than the Word 2010 test, with far more gap between Outlook 2010 when Hosted and when Streamed to Server. Performance of the application when open did appear to be roughly the same, but with logon time more than double for the streamed application, this is not enough to justify streaming. The higher CPU usage after logons stopped would indicate using Streaming to Server would reduce the number of active user sessions the server could support quite substantially and on this hardware could not be recommended.

Load Testing Word 2010 on XenApp – Hosted vs. Streamed to Server

2010-09-22T13:25:00.001+01:00

As part of a decision on how to present Office 2010 to our XenApp 6 farm we benchmarked Office applications as Streamed and Hosted applications. When we tried this on XenApp 5 with Office 2007 the difference between the two did not seem very great – this time around the Streaming version seems to put on some considerable load.

With each test we logged on 50 users in 16 minutes (one logon every 20 seconds) and ran them for 10 minutes, typing random text Word. They then all logged out over a 3 minute period. They look very pretty when they’re all running:

Word 2010 Hosted

The locally installed on the server version of Word 2010 performed very well. It easily handled logins every 20 seconds with the CPU (on a medium spec dual processor server) at about 30% in the logon phase, 15% when all the users were logged in and a peak of over 50% during the rather rapid logoff. Memory usage peaked at about 6gb

Word 2010 Streamed To Server

The second test was using the same hardware, users and script as the first – but this time Word was streamed to the server. The difference was apparent from the first login, which took a lot longer – about 25-30 seconds, almost double the Hosted logon time. CPU usage was consistently 10-15% higher in the initial logon phase and then built alarmingly as the user count reached 50. It then dropped off very nicely once the users were logged in. Memory usage was higher, peaking at about 7gb.

Conclusions

Overall the Hosted version performed very much better than the Streamed to Server version with Word 2010. As you might expect, most of the difference was in the logon phase, where CPU activity was much lower on the hosted version. Logon times were also longer using Streaming, by at least 15 seconds. This makes sense as the Streamed to Server version has a bit more work to do creating the Sandbox environment. The lower memory footprint of the Hosted install overall might also mean that greater user density would be possible using Word 2010 installed directly on the servers.

However, the Streamed to Server version did have lower CPU usage in the later phases, so this test might be considered more even, depending on the pattern of your logons and logoffs. It must be said that the test did not make an effort to push Word in this middle phase, it was just some light typing. A more intensive test might show more difference at this point.

This test was conducted using v6 of the streaming client and profiler and XenApp 6 running on Windows Server 2008 R2 on a single dual core server with 12gb RAM. The test was performed with EdgeSight for Load Testing v3.7.

XenApp 6 – Publishing a Delivery Services management console to non-admins

2010-09-20T14:40:00.001+01:00

I’m assuming here you have a first line support and they can be trusted with logging off users? We don’t want them reconfiguring the farm though, do we – they might get dangerous!

Simple stuff really, but good to get right. Incidentally, this is to get the console working as a Hosted application – I would like to stream it really, and indeed had it streamed in XenApp 5. I’ve not had any success streaming the updated version in XenApp 6 though. If anyone has a working process, do let us know.

Publishing the Delivery Services Console (DSC)

UAC – if this is enabled, disable it on the servers you will host the console from as this apparently can cause trouble with this application – according to various posts on the Citrix Forums site and this eDocs article. I’ve not tried it personally, I have UAC off on my XenApp servers.
Install the Management Tools on a live XenApp server that you want to publish them from. If you have run the install manually, they’re on by default. If you scripted it you might have well not installed them (best not to, really). On a XenApp Server without the DSC, click Start, Citrix, XenApp Server Role Manager and XenApp Server Role Manager.

Click Add server roles and admire the nice animated progress bar.
Select your XenApp edition and accept the terms and conditions
You probably have something like the screen below, with only XenApp selected. Just click next to continue
On Choose Role Subcomponents, make expand Default Conponents and you should see “XenApp Management” is ticked but not greyed – that means it is not installed, but will be. Click Next, Next and Install to install the tools and their pre-requisites…~
You should now see the folder Citrix > Management Consoles in the Start Menu. Before you proceed, do you use Citrix Single Sign On? If not, remove this from the console or it will keep prompting you about it. Go to Control Panel, select Uninstall a Program. Find “Citrix Single Sign-On Console 4.8” , right click and select Change. On the screen that pops up, select Remove to get rid of it.
Launch the Citrix DSC on your server. You’ll be asked about “.NET Authenticode”. If you are behind a Proxy I would disable this:
The “Configure and run discovery” wizard should now run. You should be able to click Next, Next, Add Local Computer, Next, Next and Finish to see your farm.
Right click Applications and select Publish Application. Configure it as an Application, Accessed from a Server and Installed rather than Streamed. The location of the executable will be “C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\Citrix Delivery Services Console\Framework\CmiLaunch.exe”. You should know the settings for the users who will see it and the servers to host it from.

Configuring non-administrator access

In the DSC as a Farm Administrator, right click Administrators (immediately under your farm name) and click Add Administrator
On the Select Users screen, add in the users or groups that will be helpdesk users on the farm. Use an AD group for this, so in the future you just have to add a user to this group. It might be an idea to present the published icon to only this group as well.
You then get options to create the users as View Only (pretty useless), Full Admins (overkill!) or Custom. Choose Custom.
You now get a very nice console which by default gives your users no permissions (you’ve got to admire that kind of attitude). Go through the tree and turn on anything you want to give out. For instance, if your helpdesk users are only going to log users off and reset sessions, click the Servers or Applications tabs and click the appropriate check boxes. On Applications and Servers folders, make sure you include “View Server Information” or “View Application Information” otherwise the users will have the permission to configure settings but not to see the interface to do so.

If you have subfolders in Servers and Applications, click “Copy to Subfolders” after doing this to copy those permissions down – if you want to do that of course. You might have servers you don’t want anyone to administer but you. When you create folders in the future, remember to allow them to inherit permissions.
If you want to change these permissions in future, just right click the entry in the Administrators section of the DSC and select Administrator Properties and the Permissions tab on the left.
Your non admin users should now be able to launch the DSC, run “Configure and Run Discovery” as you did (clicking Add Local Computer to connect to the farm) and see the elements you selected for them.
If your users get the error “Errors occurred when using [servername] in the discovery process” and when you double click it you see the error “This user account is not an administrator of the farm”, make sure that the user has the right “Log on to Management Console” under the Administrators section.

Hosting the Internet Explorer 9 Beta in XenApp 6

2010-09-17T10:33:00.001+01:00

Installing beta software on your XenApp farm might sound like a bad idea – because it probably is actually. Still, if you have a server that you can use to host test applications for a while before being wiped it could be a good way of satisfying the curiosity of some users without them trying to install it on their main desktops.

This took a lot more messing about than I was expecting, I thought it might be worth sharing this in case anyone else is trying the same thing. I’d be very interested in how other people felt IE9 Beta worked on XenApp as well.

Pre-requisites and the Beta Service Pack

To install IE9 on your XenApp 6 2008 R2 server, first you need the pre-requisites:

The pre-reqs for IE9 Beta are generally on this page: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2399238

You should just need the one in near the end of the list for Windows Server 2008 R2. Personally I could not get the IE9 beta to recognise that it was installed though and had to go even further into Beta territory by installing the Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 beta!

Download from this site: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/evalcenter/ff183870.aspx (click the second green Get Started Now button…)

After a reboot I had an upgraded Windows 2008 R1 SP1 beta server! I’m really not going to put this into live service without a rebuild…

You are now ready to install the IE9 pre-req update. Go to this site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2399238

and click the link “download the x64 SP1 beta package now”

Install and reboot.

Installing IE9 Beta

You should then be able to download the IE9 beta – get the x64 version from here:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/internet-explorer/download/ie-9/worldwide

Scroll to the bottom of the screen to the server section and download the version for Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit

And run the executable! Follow the installation through, with the above updates it should succeed. Reboot at the end of the install.

Publishing IE9 Beta to the farm

After a reboot I did indeed have IE9 installed locally…

Finally, I published an IE9 as a Hosted Application on my XenApp 6 farm (launching from "C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"). I put a start page on the end of the address as well to give the users something nice to look at.

Fixing the server!

Sadly, when I came to test the application as a Citrix app I found it would not work. I tried publishing both IE9 x86 and x64 and even tried Notepad with the same impact – when it connected my server would drop all its external connections and become unmanageable until rebooted. Also, Windows was worryingly claiming that Remote Desktop Services was unlicensed. I assume this is all because SP1 is not ready for launch yet. I went into Control Panel and into Programs and Features and Installed Updates then removed the beta Service Pack then rebooted again!

I then removed the update KB2259539 that I installed earlier and installed the one for 2008 R2 without the beta service pack and rebooted. Again.

And it works! I have IE9 published on the Citrix farm, from a server which I still wouldn’t trust with anything else but that is more stable than when it had SP1 beta (which is NOT ready for a XenApp Server trial!).

A quick test revealed that HDX MediaStream for Flash still works in the IE9 beta, which is a bonus. Seems very fast and stable. And a bit like Chrome…

Profile Management 3.2 – bug fixes and a name change!

2010-09-14T16:50:00.001+01:00

The marketing department of Citrix have struck again and renamed “User Profile Manager” to “Profile Management”. Why? Honestly I don’t know why they bother. Apparently this has been the case for some time, its such a pointless change I only just noticed.

Profile Management (for those not using it) is a much more intelligent way of handling user logons than either Mandatory (which is a bit harsh) and Roaming profiles (which tend to bloat and corrupt more than is good). There are plenty of third party alternatives, but this is included in your Citrix license and is a lot better than nothing. It allows you to specifically exclude HKCU registry settings and files from the user profile at logoff, have your Citrix profiles all in one place (if you want – or in the users’ home folders) and cope well with multiple logons and logoffs at the same time without profile corruption. A good recent feature has been “Active write back”, which when enabled will only pull some of the profile over to the server at logon and write files back to the profile store as and when they are created rather than all at logoff. This improves logon and logoff time but just as importantly helps protect your data against a server crash.

Profile Management 3.2 is available to download through My Citrix. Documentation for it is here.

It can be installed on Windows 2003 Server, but requires these hotfixes or the installation will fail and rollback:

Anyway, the bug fixes in the new version (replacing v3.1.1) of what I will continue to call UPM for at least one major version after this sound nice to have. Note that for at least one of them to take effect you need to import a new ADM into your Group Policy.

Issues fixed in Profile Management 3.2

If profile streaming and active profile write back are used, Profile management might unnecessarily copy unchanged files from monitored directories to the roaming profile store.

[#229893]
If a folder name is specified in the Folders to mirror policy that does not exist verbatim in the user's profile (for example, if the folder name is misspelled), the user session can wind up locked unexpectedly. The issue occurs because the service continues to attempt to locate the non-existent folder during logoff and eventually becomes unresponsive. The service starts again after a certain winlogon time-out period but then the user session is locked by winlogon.

[#235033]
When a user logs on to a computer running Version 3.1 of profile management and then to a computer running an earlier version, such as 3.0, an entry should be logged on the computer running the later version, stating that a server with an earlier version pf Profile Management exists on another server and specify that server name. Instead, the log entry states: "An older version of Profile management is running on server <Unknown>."

[#235323]
Applications can become unresponsive without logging any error messages when the cachefill mechanism conflicts with anti-virus software settings. This enhancement adds an Event Viewer message indicating the problem.

[#235486]
When Profile management is installed on the terminal servers, Wbemtest.exe reports new user objects. However, when users log off, the report is not updated and user objects remain on the root\rsop\user namespace. With this fix, Wbemtest does not show a namespace for the user after logoff if Delete local profile during logoff is enabled.

[#235532]
When the usn journal is deleted and the Profile management service restarted, a "CJIncreaseSizeIfNecessary" error is written to the Event Log. With this fix, the error is replaced by a warning as Profile management enables journaling.

[#235781]
Two or more Profile management 3.x sessions running concurrently can break backward compatibility with earlier versions of Profile management.

[#236670]
In scenarios with Profile management Version 3.1, the Delete locally cached profiles on logoff (Citrix User Profile Management GPO) setting enabled, and the Application Data folder redirection (Microsoft GPO) setting enabled, an error occurs when a new user makes the second attempt at launching the same Microsoft Office application. To resolve the issue, enable the Delete Redirected Folders setting available after importing the new .adm template.

[#236686]

http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx126527

Checking HDX MediaStream for Flash on XenApp is working

2010-09-07T13:49:00.001+01:00

HDX MediaStream for Flash on XenApp is great. It makes Flash content render really fast, saves CPU time on your sever and has a cool name.

There are a few gotchas that can trip it up though, and if all its conditions are not satisfied it will fairly silently not work and render Flash on the server instead, causing poorer user experience and server slow down. This guide should include all the pre-requisites to it working: http://zenapp.blogspot.com/2010/09/hdx-mediastream-for-flash-on-xenapp-6.html

There are a few ways of checking it is working in a XenApp published Internet Explorer window.

CPU Activity

Simple one – look at Task Manager on your client and server PCs when intensive Flash content is playing – one will probably have high usage against your user and that should be the client if HDX is working.

Task Manager

Still in Task Manager, while you are looking at Flash content, look for PseudoContainer.exe both running and probably using CPU time. If PseudoContainer.exe is not running and you have Flash content being delivered by a XenApp server, its not using HDX.

Look for the Cyan

The HDX client uses Cyan as a background colour when its working. Go to a flash site and resize the window by dragging its side out. You should see a momentary flash of a light blue colour at the side as you do, like below:

Use the HDX Experience Monitor for XenApp

This is the last word in telling whether HDX is active and working. Download this tool:

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX126491

Note this needs the Citrix Receiver to work, so if you don’t have a Merchandising Server, this is a good time to build one!

Install on the XenApp Server you are hosting Internet Explorer from – install the x86 version if you are deploying the x86 version of IE as a Citrix Application.

Make this available as a Hosted Application (configured to only run one copy per user):

And run it in the same session as Internet Explorer. If it sits on a screen waiting for performance monitor counters, you may have installed the wrong version (the x64 edition did this on my server). It also won’t work in an RDP session.

If you launch this first it should say under Adobe Flash that “Receiver is compatible” (if it is!) but that “Flash redirection is not active”. Once you launch IE in the same session and view Flash content it should change to active.

If you click the Adobe Flash entry you should see more details about HDX on this connection. In this case, everything is fine except the network latency, which is too high and will block HDX from working. This threshold can be configured in the Policies section of the XenApp 6 management tools for the farm.

Finally, there should be a Diagnostics section at the bottom of the screen. Click “Run HDX Flash System Verifier” to launch a very useful tool that will check all the pre-requisites on your client PC. This takes several minutes to run so be patient – it should tell you why HDX is not working if it still mysteriously is not.

HDX MediaStream for Flash on XenApp 6

2010-09-07T13:18:00.001+01:00

HDX MediaStream for Flash (let’s just call it HDX, okay?) is a very good recent feature of XenApp. It crept into XenApp 5 in the second and third feature packs and is installed by default in XenApp 6.

And its quite cool – well, most of the time. Essentially it offloads the processing of Flash content from the server to the client when using a Citrix distributed copy of Internet Explorer. The result is that the playback on the client PC is noticeably better than without it in most cases. It also hammers the CPU of the client PC instead of the CPU on the server so should improve the user experience for everyone else too and help get more users per server.

Despite being installed by default in modern clients and on XenApp 6 servers there are a few things that might trip it up. If any of these occur the client will generally silently fall back on the standard way of processing Flash content on the server.

For HDX Flash processing to work all these must be true:

Server Side Requirements for HDX

The components must be installed on the server. They are in by default but can be removed. If you need to re-install them, get them from the “HDX MediaStream for Flash\X64” folder on the XenApp 6 media.
HDX can be blocked by policy on the server. To check this, open your XenApp 6 admin tools (the DSC in its current name!). Click Policies and edit the computer policy that applies to your server – Unfiltered if you have configured no other ones. Under ICA > Multimedia find the HDX MediaStream Multimedia Acceleration policy. If unconfigured, this will be on.

The Flash 10.1 client must be installed on the XenApp 6 server. This is true even if you are streaming IE plug-ins I’m afraid – it needs to be installed “properly”.

Client Side Requirements for HDX

The Flash 10.1 client needs to be installed on the Client PCs as well – all of them. Without it, HDX will not do anything.
Your Online plug-in version must be at least v11.2
As well as the client being up to date, it needs to have been installed with the right switches to include the “Flash” element. If you just installed with no defaults you should be fine, but if you installed with switches then you need to include the Flash switch. The easiest way to find if your client should work is to look for the file “PseudoContainer.exe” in the Citrix client install directory. This is C:\Program Files\Citrix\ICA Client by default (in the x86 version on 64-bit clients). If PseudoContainer.exe is not on your system HDX will not work.
The client must confirm that HDX can execute. See below for an alternative, but by default the user will get the following prompt when trying to access flash content for the first time in a session:

Turning on HDX by default on Client PCs

An alternative to that rather rubbish box (which is, to be fair, useful when testing to easily determine whether HDX is improving your user experience) is to use group policy on your client PCs. On a PC which has the right client installed (so, it has a PseudoContainer.exe file), look for this file:

C:\Program Files\Citrix\ICA Client\Configuration\en\HdxFlash-Client.adm

Import into the computer group policy for your desktop PCs using Group Policy Management. Edit the policy settings at Computer configuration > Administrative Templates > Classic Administrative Templates > HDX MediaStream For Flash – Client

Change the top setting to be Enabled and “Always”

Installing Merchandising Server 2.0

2010-09-03T21:47:00.001+01:00

Merchandising Server is a fairly recent addition to the XenApp suite and one which I have held off implementing a while, for a couple of reasons. The first is that frankly, I have enough XenApp servers now thanks very much, and the second is that its use in life appears to be limited to supporting the Windows and Mac editions of the Citrix Receiver.

We have a big implementation of the Agent which works very nicely so I had no need for the Receiver, so no need for the Merchandising Server.

But then the newly released HDX Experience Monitor for XenApp only supports the Receiver and I need that, so here we go.

By the way, here’s the Citrix eDocs site for Merchandising Server:

http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/merchandising-20/merchandising-20.html

Downloading the Merchandising Server

The Merchandising Server is unusual in that it comes as a XenServer or VMware exported VM. The VM is actually a 1GB CentOS 5 machine which comes all ready to configure, so the process can be over remarkably fast. I started with little idea what I was doing at about 9am and had a working system before lunch, hopefully these notes will help someone get it done a bit faster.

These download links will require a valid logon to My Citrix.

XenServer download:
https://www.citrix.com/English/SS/downloads/details.asp?downloadId=2303447&productId=1689163

VMware download:
https://www.citrix.com/English/SS/downloads/details.asp?downloadId=2303453&productId=1689163

The main server download is a “bz2” file – 7zip should be able to extract this for you, its about 4gb extracted. There is also a plug-ins ZIP file which is worth downloading, though not essential.

I’m assuming here that you have a XenServer machine – mine is a slightly old XenServer 5.5 server so all the instructions are for the XenServer edition, I doubt the VMware edition is much different.

Importing the VM into XenServer

Firstly, setup your XenServer machine and XenCenter client tools on your workstation, if you don’t have these. Your XenServer host will need 1gb of spare memory and 20GB spare storage.

Right click your XenServer in XenCenter, Import VM:

Browse to the extracted xva file and click Next

Click Next and Import to select the host and storage repository. Select the networking – link it to your real network. It won’t use DHCP, so until you give it an IP it won’t do anything.

Click the Logs tab in XenServer to import:

At this point I have had the unhelpful message “This file could not be imported”. I downloaded the whole file again and extracted it with 7zip instead of WinRAR, then I imported it again using locally installed XenCenter tools and a Console session, rather than XenApp streamed tools in an RDP session. I don’t know which of these steps fixed it, but it imported fine the second time.

A successful import should take about 10 minutes.

Once the server is imported it should start automatically by default.

Select your Server in XenCenter and click the Console tab to view its setup functions

Configuring the Merchandising Server’s Network Configuration

You will need to know the Hostname you want to use for the server, and IP addresses for the server, its netmask, DNS server IPs and the gateway IP to get the server working. You should now see the following screen in your Console window:

Click 1 and enter a hostname and domain, then follow the menu through to steps 2-5 to complete the rest of the networking. When you’re done, press 9 to save the changes:

Type yes to confirm, then enter a new root password. The system will reboot and return to the menu

To finish this section, update the XenServer tools while you have chance. Click the DVD Drive drop down menu and select xs-tools.iso. In the rebooted server’s Console window, select 8 for Diagnostics. You will now see these options:

Select 3 and press y to start the upgrade – this will cause one last server reboot. In the Search tab of your XenServer’s host you should now see CPU and memory usage for the new guest OS.

You are done with XenCenter now and can close it. The rest of the config is in the web interface.

Configuring the Merchandising Server

Before you can use the web interface, you may need to configure the DNS record to point to the IP that you have the server. Pick something friendly as the DNS name as this could be something you’ll expect users to remember. Mine is called “xenmerchant”

You will get a certificate error as it starts with a self signed certificate with less than a month left to run:

After accepting the certificate you get put into the default download page. You don’t want this, so remove the download part of the URL – you want http://servername/appliance

You should now get this:

Username: root

Password: C1trix321

Once logged in click Change Root Password first – enter a decent password.

Working up the menu, click Configure AD

Fill this in, using a service account on your Active Directory that has a non-expiring password. This should be a non admin user and only needs to be a member of Domain Users. These are some example settings – obviously, change your source name to a domain controller, the Bind DN and Bind Password to your non admin user and Base DN to the Distinguished Name of your domain.

Click Save and Sync. The Sync will take a few minutes and you might need to wait for it to complete.

Click Permissions and enter your administrators name (your name?), then click Search. Select yourself and click Edit. Give yourself Administrator privilege and Click Save. Set up any other admins you need.

Click Log off and Log in again with your domain username and password. Your username should be in the form DOMAIN\username.

You finally see all the options and it should look like this:

Adding plug-ins

Merchandising Server appears to be basically a mechanism to get a real Citrix client to your users, and so it doesn’t do much without any plug-ins. You can download clients directly from the Citrix site (although of course you can only really get the latest client from the Citrix site itself). If you do this, remember to get the metadata file too.

Once you have the XML and executable file for the plug-in, click Upload in the plug-ins section and select them. You should not normally have to change the metadata (though you can). Once the upload is complete it will be present in Uploaded Plug-ins. Don’t worry about the fact you have not configured the client yet – you will configure the essentials later.

Otherwise, just click Get New under the plug-ins section. It should detect the available plug-ins and download them – assuming it understands your internet connection. Personally, my proxy server foiled it.

Creating Rules and a Delivery

Now you have a plug-in uploaded to the server, its ready to be able to deploy it.

Click Rules under Deliveries.

You might have lots of rules here – of course you might not care who downloads clients from your server and might just put in one very permissive rule. In my case I only care that the PCs are domain computers, so I just selected Computer Domain Membership. You might want to create rules for specific groups of users of operating systems, such as Mac users.

Click Save

Click Create / Edit to set up a Delivery.

Enter sensible values for this – have a think about the Completion Text, the users will see it!

Click the Plug-ins tab at the top and click Add to select the plug-in that you want to distribute. Note this can be a delivery to Uninstall a client as well as Install it.

Click the Configuration tab – this will look different depending on what was in the Metadata file for the client you just selected. In the case of my Online plug-in, it asks me to supply the Web Interface Server URL. This field is required.

Click Rules and select one of the Rules you created earlier. Note if you checked the Default Delivery button on the first page, this page doesn’t do anything.

Click the Schedule tab and then button and if you are happy to save it without scheduling it for a specific time.

Using the server

That’s the easy bit. Go to the website from a PC and enter the DNS name you created earlier.

Agree to the Terms of Use and click Download to start the installation of the Receiver. This will require Firefox 2 or IE7, .NET Framework 2 and local admin rights – at least for the install. After installation the Receiver will be able to keep the clients up to take based on the rules and deliveries you specify.

Installing EdgeSight Server 5.3 with SQL Server Express 2008 Express on Windows Server 2008 R2

2010-08-04T13:30:00.001+01:00

EdgeSight is an essential part of a modern XenApp implementation, though only Platinum customers get the full blown version. In Citrix’s usual way these are named “Advanced” and “Basic” – there’s never a “normal” one anymore, is there?!

Anyway, if you need the Advanced features you can install a test system for a couple of weeks and join a freshly installed XenApp server to it – you get a 14 day grace period followed by a 7 day allowed “violation” period before it stops working. Bear in mind you can have multiple EdgeSight servers, though an individual XenApp server can only see one at a time. Whether to have the EdgeSight Agent installed on every server is an interesting question – it does create an overhead – but without that overhead you might not realise your server is overloaded.

Below are basic instructions on installing an EdgeSight 5.3 server to monitor a XenApp 6 farm, though to be honest they are mostly the same as the instructions for EdgeSight 5.2 for XenApp 5 on Server 2008 R1.

I’m using SQL Server 2008 Express. Express does work with EdgeSight, with the exception of Scheduled Reports, which rely on the SQL Agent, a feature of full blown SQL Server. Bear in mind that the use of SQL Express is not supported, and depending on how much data you keep its 2gb limit on databases could be a serious issue. For a temporary system to run in Advanced mode for a fortnight though, its going to be fine.

In this example I installed EdgeSight and SQL on a single server – this might not be a good idea.

I did this install with UAC turned off.

Preparing SQL - Install SQL Express 2008 with Advanced Features

You need the Advanced Features if using Express as you need Reporting Services. If you’re installing full SQL Server, install the Reporting Services components.

Download from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=B5D1B8C3-FDA5-4508-B0D0-1311D670E336&displaylang=en

Run the installer (as Administrator). Click Installation on the left and then select “Next sql server stand-alone installation…”

Ignore the warnings about SP1 if you’re on Server 2008 R2 – you can install this afterwards

Accept the license terms and continue through install accepting the defaults.

Run install and select Reporting Services, Database Engine, Client Tools.

Accept defaults on the Instance Configuration screen, choosing a named instance of SQLExpress. Click Next, Next.

Click “Use the same account for all SQL Server services” and enter a domain user created for the purpose. This domain user should be an administrator on the server.

Click Next. Set to Mixed Authentication and set the SA to something you will remember. Setup the administrators to something sensible.

Click the Data Directories tab. Set all Data directories to c:\MSSQL except backup - set to c:\MSSQL\Backup. Okay, so you don’t need to do this, I just like to keep the data somewhere easy to get to, not buried in Program Files.

Accept the rest of the defaults until you get to the main Install, which should take a few minutes. Close the installer when finished.

Download and install the “Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Backward Compatibility Components” for the version of SQL 2008 you have installed (its part of the feature pack). The x86 version (should you need it – if this is Server 2008 R2 you should be using x64 software though) is at:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123702&clcid=0x409

The x64 version is at:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123703&clcid=0x409

This is because the SQL-DMO Objects are required but not installed in SQL Server 2008.

Finally, update your SQL installation to the latest service pack. At the moment this is SP1 (x64 edition) – this will take a while.

Installing Edgesight

Turn off IE ESC – Enhanced Security Configuration. This is because the last stages of setup use the local browser, though you could use a browser on another system if you really wanted to. It is turned off in Server Manager or group policy – click here for detailed instructions.

Download EdgeSight 5.3 or extract the XenApp 6 media and run Autorun

If getting it from the XenApp 6 media, click Manually Install Components, Server Components, Application Performance Monitoring, EdgeSight Server

By default a server will not have the necessary pre-requisites and will probably come up with these messages:

Go to Server Manager, select Role Manager. Click Add Roles, select Web Server and go on to choose its components. Select Application Development (with default sub-components), Windows Authentication, IIS 6 Management Capability. Click Next and Install.

In Server Manager again, add a Feature – Message Queuing, with default options.

Reboot and try again.

Select Website and Database assuming this is a new system

Accept the EULA

Enter your SQL details and click Test Connect. If you have used the full version of SQL you probably just need to put the server name, otherwise SQL Express or another named instance will need the instance name. Use the sa password to connect and test the connection.

Assuming this is a new installation, create a new database. If not, you should be able to join an existing one.

Enter a domain username and password to connect to the database. Personally I make this an administrator on the server and a sysadmin of the SQL Server instance. I’m not sure if these steps are needed I’m afraid.

Choose defaults for the recovery model and paths, and click Install.

At the end, click Finish to load the website. Make sure again that IE ESC is off!

Click Next to start creating your Company (which is the way that EdgeSight will organise a group of servers).

Enter the name of your super administrator – this can be a group or a person but should be something you will remember. EdgeSight can be tied to active directory but you will need to be able to get in this account too.

Enter the SMTP details for the server to send out mail as well.

Enter your licensing details and the level of EdgeSight Agent to support.

The license server needs to be v4.5 or higher. If you have platinum XenApp you can use the Basic And Advanced Agents. If you have Advanced or Enterprise you can only use the Basic clients unless you have specifically bought Advanced EdgeSight Agent licenses.

Note you do not actually need to get these details right to click next, so if your license server is not ready (or will never be ready and you are just building a temporary server) you can continue in the grace period for 14 days. You will get a message on every screen in EdgeSight saying there is a problem with the license server until valid details are entered.

Click Next when done and you will see the main login screen. Enter the Super User credentials to log in.

Open another IE window on your server and go to http://localhost/Reports_SQLEXPRESS/Pages/Folder.aspx?SelectedTabId=PropertiesTab

Fill in as below:

Go back to your new EdgeSight website and enter the username and password you just gave admin rights to the database. Enter the URL as:

http://sqlservername/ReportServer_SQLEXPRESS/

Obviously, put in the name of the server instead of “sqlservername”.

You should then see a popup window which will run through setting up EdgeSight in Reporting Services. It will error at the end if using SQL Express with “Error publishing default schedules…” – this is because SQL Express does not support this functionality.

Configuring a XenApp Server to use the EdgeSight Server.

Install the client on the server and reboot (yes, you need to reboot).

Go to control panel and switch the view from Category to Small Icons or Large Icons.

Click Citrix System Monitoring Agent

Click Mode to change between Advanced and Basic, depending on your license.

Click the EdgeSight server tab and enter your server name – should still be port 80 unless you changed it. Obviously, it needs to be able to contact that server on that address.

Click OK and within about 5 minutes you should see an email about the new instance that has been discovered, assuming you set up the emailing details properly.

In the EdgeSight website, look in Configure > Devices to try to find your device. If you can’t see it, look in Configure > Unmanaged Devices

This should be enough for a basic implementation of EdgeSight. There is a lot of work to do if this is going to be a fully fledged systems monitoring a lot of systems, and the size limitations of SQL Server Express will mean that in long term use you might need to adjust the Data Grooming settings. By default they keep data up to 30 days – I’ve had to set this down to 7 days before. If its full SQL, kiss goodbye to a lot of disk space instead.

You can also link it into Active Directory and administer it with your normal account, but hang onto the Super Administrator username and password in case it has trouble connecting to AD in the future.

Disabling IE ESC – Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration on Windows Server 2008 R2 for XenApp 6

2010-07-27T22:30:00.001+01:00

IEESC (IE Enhanced Security Mode) is a very good feature on most servers – you shouldn’t be doing much web surfing from your server’s desktop anyway and this helps protect you from malware, which is the last thing you want on a Windows Server system.

Of course if Microsoft had any guts IE would be disabled by default, but I digress.

On a Citrix server of course IEESC is a pain in the neck since general web surfing is exactly what you want to do. There are manual ways (below), but you don’t want to do this on every server, so Microsoft provided a way on Windows 2003 Server to set it via group policy. There does not appear to be an equivalent on Server 2008 and R2 but oddly the 2003 way still works!

Turning off IE ESC via Group Policy for Windows Server 2008 R2 (and R1 and 2003)

First, download the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools (yes, I know you are not using Server 2003 anymore…) from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en
Install them somewhere temporary, go to that folder and find the file “inetesc.adm”.
Load the GPMC (Group Policy Management Console) on a Windows Server 2008 R2 server.
Expand your Forest, your domain and find the OU your XenApp servers are within.
Edit or create a group policy that will apply Computer settings to that OU and its contents.
Expand Computer Configuration and Policies and right click on Administrative Templates

Click Add/Remove Templates
Click Add and find your inetesc.adm template. Import it.
Expand Computer Configuration, Policies, Administrative Templates, Classic Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Internet Explorer, Enhanced Security Configuration.

Set the two policies to be disabled. When you reboot your servers in that OU (any servers of course, not just XenApp ones…) will have Internet Explorer fully enabled.

Just in case you just want to do this once, here’s how to do it on each individual server…

Turning off IE ESC Manually

On Windows 2003 Server it was easy – just open up Add/Remove Programs and remove the component from the server – IE becomes fully opened up.

Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 had a nice easy way to do this as well. Just load up Server Manager (you know, that annoying screen that pops up every time you log in… okay, its in Administrative Tools if you have never used a computer before). About a third down, see the Configure IE ESC link.

Click it and you should see this box – by default a XenApp 6 server will have IE ESC turned off the users (cleverly) but on for administrators (annoyingly, especially if you are an administrator and you actually use Citrix). Configure as you see fit – personally its Off for both for me on all Citrix servers.

UPDATED: Profiling Office 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 for XenApp Streaming

2010-07-22T21:17:00.000+01:00

This is a fully working and tested guide to streaming Office 2010 to XenApp 6 (streamed to server), activating with a KMS server.

It has taken me a couple of months on and off messing about with getting Office 2010 applications to stream on XenApp 6, with all the problems coming from the Office Software Protection Platform service that Office uses to activate now. The problems I was having were not with the capturing of the stream (as you might assume) but with the setup of the XenApp servers to host the stream.

So, this guide should work – providing you are activating with a KMS server rather than MAK keys, which I am afraid I have not tried.

NEW - Install a KMS server

The installation of your Key Management Server to activate Office 2010 isn’t something I am going to cover and many people will want to use MAK keys, but for this guide to work you should have KMS server. Check you can actually install the apps you want to stream on a PC and that they activate (go to File > Help to see if they are activated – you should also see events in the KMS server’s event log)

NEW – Install a fresh XenApp Server

If you have previously tried and failed to stream Office 2010 to a XenApp server, just rebuild it. Same if you have EVER installed any Office 2010 products (including Outlook, Project and Visio 2010) to that server. Flatten it. It should be a server that has never activated an Office product, or tried.

NEW – Use the Office 2010 Deployment tool for App-v

Yes, I know you’re not using app-v. Just do it, it is essential if you ever want to host more than one SKU on this server. So you might not need to do this if you are only going to use the main Office media, but be aware that the Outlook 2010 standalone media, Project 2010 or Visio 2010 won’t stream to it.

Download the tool from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=479f12f2-5678-493e-bce1-682b3ece5431

There are instructions on how to use it here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/983462

For instance, if you were to want to host Office Professional Plus 2010 and Project Professional 2010, extract the main download (the x64 one for Server 2008 R2) and run this command on the extracted files:

msiexec /i OffVirt.msi PROPLUS=1 OUTLOOK=1 PROJECTPRO=1

You should see a couple of events on the KMS server almost immediately containing the name of the new XenApp server. The main problem is that after a reboot this will stop working, so if you are going to use this app to activate your servers with the KMS for Office licenses you should put this command in a startup script for the server.

If someone else has a better way of keeping these applications activated I would love to hear it!

Add the AppHubWhiteList entry to the XenApp server’s registry

If you will not sign your profile, you will need to add a registry key fix in order for the service that is a necessary part of the product’s activation system to work.

For details on this registry fix see this: http://community.citrix.com/x/RQLUBw

Basically, you have to create a REG_SZ registry value at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\Rade called AppHubWhiteList containing a list of the names of the file servers your streams will be served from, separated by semicolons if needed.

Install a profiler

Install a Profiler machine. This should be the same OS as the one you are going to stream to.
- This needs to be at least v6 of the Streaming Profiler, the version that ships with XenApp 6. Microsoft Office 2010 includes Services that will not work with previous versions of the Profiler.
- If using Streamed To Server in XenApp 6, it should be a Windows Server 2008 R2 server and ideally be an member of the XenApp 6 farm (but don’t publish apps to it…)
- It should not have the streaming client installed.
- The Streaming Profiler can be downloaded from My Citrix or from the XenApp 6 DVD.

Run the Microsoft Office Customization Tool

Copy the installer to your Profiler
Run setup.exe with the /admin switch (so if it is in c:\office14, click Start > Run > “c:\office14\setup.exe /admin”)
The Customization Tool should launch. Pick your product edition or select an existing customization file if you’ve been here before and are making changes:

You get a popup about the OpenDocument file format. What you choose here might depend on your company policy. I selected Keep current settings but will look at the settings later.

On the left hand side, select “Install Location and Organization Name” in the Setup section. Enter your company name.

Select “Licensing and user interface”. Enter your MAK key if you are using one, otherwise select “Use KMS Client key”. Accept the license agreement, select “Basic” and “Suppress modal”.

Click Features > Modify User Settings. There are loads of settings here! This is a screenshot of my completed settings (with “show configured settings only” selected"), the actual settings are below. Look through the other settings, there may be other things you need.
- Microsoft Office 2010 > Global Options > User Clear Type (enabled, set to “Office will use ClearType for text display”)
- Microsoft Office 2010 > Global Options > Customize > Menu animations (disabled)
- Microsoft Office 2010 > Tools | Autocorrect Options > Correct Two Initial Capitals (enabled)
- Microsoft Office 2010 > Tools | Autocorrect Options > Capitalize first letter of sentence (enabled)
- Microsoft Office 2010 > Tools | Autocorrect Options > Capitalize names of days (enabled)
- Microsoft Office 2010 > Tools | Autocorrect Options > Correct accidental use of Caps Lock key (enabled)
- Microsoft Office 2010 > Help > Office.com (disabled)
- Microsoft Office 2010 > Privacy > Trust Center > Disable Opt-in Wizard on first run (enabled)
- Microsoft Office 2010 > Privacy > Trust Center > Enable Customer Experience Improvement Program (disabled)
- Microsoft Office 2010 > Privacy > Trust Center > Automatically receive small updates to improve reliability (disabled)
- Microsoft Office 2010 > Language Settings > Primary Editing Language (enabled – choose your language!)
- Microsoft Office 2010 > Services > Fax > Disable Internet Fax Feature (enabled)
- Microsoft Outlook 2010 > Account Settings > Exchange > Cached Exchange Mode > Cached Exchange Mode (File | Cached Exchange Mode) (disabled)
- Microsoft Outlook 2010 > Account Settings > Exchange > Cached Exchange Mode > Use Cached Exchange Mode for new and existing Outlook profiles (disabled)
- Microsoft Outlook 2010 > Account Settings > Exchange > RSS Feeds > Turn off RSS feature (enabled)
- Microsoft Outlook 2010 > Account Settings > Exchange > RSS Feeds > Default RSS feeds (disabled)
- Microsoft Outlook 2010 > Account Settings > Exchange > SharePoint Lists > Default SharePoint lists (disabled)
- Microsoft Outlook 2010 > Outlook Today Settings > Outlook Today availability (disabled)
- Microsoft Outlook 2010 > Outlook Social Connector > Turn off Outlook Social Connector (enabled)
- Microsoft Outlook 2010 > Outlook Options > Other > AutoArchive > Disable File|Archive (enabled)
- Microsoft Outlook 2010 > Outlook Options > Other > AutoArchive > AutoArchive Settings (disabled)

Click Features > Set Feature Installation States. For any Office applications you do not need, click the grey box by the application and select Not Available. In my case, Access, OneNote, InfoPath and Publisher are not required. For everything else, set them to run all from the computer.
Click Additional Content > Add Registry Entries. Add the entries below (change the server name and port to the actual name and port of your KMS server. If you don’t use a KMS server, you don’t need those). The ShowOptIn is a REG_DWORD, the PONT_STRING is a REG_SZ.

Click Outlook > Outlook Profile (this is assuming you are using Microsoft Exchange and want to auto configure accounts)
- Select Modify Profile
- Click Add accounts
- Select “Customize additional Outlook profile and account information”
- Click Add
- Enter something for Account Name (like “exchange”)
- Enter an Exchange server
- Leave User Name as %username%
- Click More Settings
- Click Cached Mode
- Click Configure Cached Exchange Mode.
- If you are going to disable Cached Exchange Mode on the XenApp servers (I would – but maybe not if streamed Offline to client PCs), leave this as is. Otherwise, click the “User Cached Exchange Mode” checkbox.

Click OK and Finish.

Click File > Save As and save it to the Updates folder within your Office 2010 installer folder. Give it a name starting with a “1” so it always installs before other updates you may put here in the future.
Close the Customization Tool and confirm.

Profiling

Open the Streaming Profiler and click New Profile.
Click Next and give it a name (it can be changed later, but I would include a date or profile version number when saving it)
Click Next and do not Enable User Updates
Link Profiles if you wish – up to you. It can be changed later as well.
Click Next past the Operating System screen, assuming the OS you want is selected. Best practice is to have a new stream for every client you are streaming to – which if you are streaming to server is nice and easy as its just one OS to support. Assuming you are streaming to server and you are using the same OS as the servers you are streaming to, just click Next.
Choose Advanced Install
Select Run install program or command line script
Find and select Setup.exe in your Office14 folder
Click Next and Launch Installer
Click Customize and you should see any options you disabled (such as Microsoft Access) in the customization as disabled. This is a good easy way of double checking your customization has been picked up okay.
Click Install Now.
Installation takes some time…

Click Close at the end of the install, then Next.

Click Next to Finish Installations if you have nothing else you know needs doing to your profile. In this basic guide, we’re now done.

Run some of your key applications to check they perform as needed but DON’T run Outlook. I’ve seen this cause everyone to get the same mailbox!

Click next and remove any shortcuts you don’t want. This is a good place to add any switches you want to your applications, for example Outlook to configure it with a prf file. Delete any shortcuts you will not use.

Click next (terminating applications if needed) until you get to the end, then click Finish to build the profile.

Save the profile to a file share – you will need at least about 1.75gb free to do this.

Publishing Applications

You should now be able to set up application shortcuts on your XenApp 6 farm

Run the Citrix Delivery Services Console (installed by default on a farm server)

Run Discovery as needed.

Expand your farm and right click Applications, click Publish Application

Enter Word 2010 as the name and click Next

Change the drop-down to Streamed To Server and click next

Locate the folder you saved the profile to and double click its .profile file.

Select Microsoft Word 2010 in the drop down and Next

Click Add to add servers. Click next when done.

Click Add to add users. Click Next when done.

Enter a folder for the shortcuts if needed.

Click Next and Finish.

If you now right click the new application and select Duplicate Application you can create copies. With these, right click each one and select Application Properties. In the Name and Location sections, rename them to Excel 2010, Outlook 2010, etc and change the dropdown to the right application.

Running the profile

Once you have your Profile, create a new application (Streamed to server in this example), pointing at your XenApp server and use the stream you just made.

Before you launch them for the first time, remember to check the AppHubWhiteList reg key (see above) is there and right, unless you signed the profile. Also check you have used the Office 2010 Deployment Tool for app-v on it if you want to stream multiple SKUs to the server. It should ideally be activated for Office 2010 on the KMS before your stream ever runs.

When you launch them for the first time you should see a new service start with some random characters at the start, like q2qwerqfq-osppsvc. That’s the streamed service, and it should be running when your apps are. Multiple logons will create multiple services.

When they are launched, you should not see Setup continuing (that’s it trying to activate), it should just load the application. You should also be able to go to File > Help and see those lovely words, Product Activated…

Unattended\Scripted Installation of XenApp 6

2010-07-15T14:31:00.001+01:00

This is the end of a 5 part guide to making a simple XenApp 6 farm. These are the other sections:

I imagine that Citrix will tell you that you don’t need to do unattended or scripted installations, just buy Provisioning Server! But back in the real world you’re likely to be installing XenApp 6 on hundreds of servers in even a medium sized farm and unattended scripts are the way forward.

In this I am making the assumption that you already have an established XenApp 6 farm and you are just joining servers to it, though its only the “XenAppConfigConsole.exe” step below that would need to be changed to create the farm instead, assuming you also created the SQL database manually. This is also quite a simple farm with everything in the same Zone, but you get the idea. I’m also making the assumption you have a Data Store database already created on a full SQL Server which you know the details for and that you have a working license server.

Citrix have changed the way that scripted installations work since XenApp 5 incidentally, so you can forget MSTs and mps.msi, its all different now!

Finally, you’ll have to decide how you are going to actually copy the files and run the commands listed here – I used Altiris, which worked fine. I’m sure you have your own ways and means. If you are installing the XenApp Server steps manually by logging onto the server’s desktop, don’t use Terminal Services. I haven’t actually tried this over a TS session but it didn’t work in XenApp 5 and I doubt its changed.

Install Windows Server 2008 R2 on a server. Join it to the domain, install anti-virus (if that’s your thing), sort the networking, etc. I’m assuming here you’ve turned off UAC which might not be a great idea but make the instructions more simple.
The command to turn off the Windows Firewall (should you be doing this – if not, you’re going to have to open ports) is:

netsh advfirewall set allprofiles state off
Add the required server roles. These are the GPMC (required to support the admin tool – this might not be needed on servers without the admin tools) and Remote Desktop Services. Other roles required will be added automatically. To do this execute the following commands, which will grumble about servermanagercmd being deprecated but will work fine:

servermanagercmd -install GPMC –restart
servermanagercmd -install AS-NET-Framework –restart
servermanagercmd -install RDS-RD-Server –restart

The last command will cause a reboot.
Install a XenApp client. I installed our standard v12.0 client by downloading the full Online Plug-in, copying it to the C:\ drive of the new server and executing this command:

c:\CitrixOnlinePluginFull.exe /silent ADDLOCAL="ICA_Client,PN_Agent,SSON" SERVER_LOCATION=http://xenapp/Citrix/PNAgent/config.xml ENABLE_SSON="Yes" ENABLE_DYNAMIC_CLIENT_NAME="Yes" ENABLE_KERBEROS="No"

The precise options will depend on your environment.
Copy the XenApp 6 DVD to your server or make it available on your network. In this I copied the extracted ISO to c:\XA6_2008R2_ML\
Execute the command to install an unconfigured XenApp 6 installation by using the XenAppSetupConsole.exe from the DVD. This is a valid string which will install just XenApp (not web interface, licensing server, etc, etc) but exclude the administration tools, which are included with XenApp by default. Miss the /exclude option out if you want the admin tools on this server. Set your product edition as well - my edition is Enterprise. This example logs to the root of the C: drive too. For a full list of switches for this part, see this http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/index.jsp?topic=/xenapp6-w2k8-install/ps-install-command-line.html:

"c:\XA6_2008R2_ML\XenApp Server Setup\bin\XenAppSetupConsole.exe" /install:XenApp /exclude:XA_Console /Enterprise /logfile:c:\ctxsetup.log

This is silent – if you are logged on you should see things happening in Task Manager such as msiexec.exe and XenAppSetupConsole.exe itself

EDIT 19 July 2010 - I originally posted this command wrong. I gave the edition switch as “/edition:Enterprise” for an Enterprise farm. Actually I misread the instructions, it should be /Enterprise for an Enterprise farm or /Advanced for an advanced farm. Any other setting will give you the default of Platinum. I’ve corrected the line above and the screenshot.
Once the command above completes, reboot your server to complete installation. If you are scripting this in a batch file, use this as the next command:

shutdown –r –t 0
Copy or create a DSN file for your data store as c:\sql.dsn. This doesn’t need the password of the SQL user you’re connecting with but will need everything else. If you don’t know what you’re doing with this, its a text file which you can create manually – this is an example, obviously replace the values for DATABASE, UID and SERVER with your real values:
You now have an unconfigured XenApp 6 installation and must configure it with the XenAppConfigConsole.exe tool from the DVD. Again, tailor the command to your own environment, especially the farm name, SQL Server username and password and the name of your License server. It should take a couple of seconds and end with Exit Code: Successful. Note the “/ExecutionMode:Join” part – this could be changed to create the farm.

"c:\XA6_2008R2_ML\XenApp Server Configuration Tool\XenAppConfigConsole.exe" /ExecutionMode:Join /FarmName:"XenApp 6 Farm" /LicenseServerName:licenseServerName.domain.local /LicenseServerPort:27000 /ZoneName:"Default Zone" /AddUsersGroupToRemoteDesktopUserGroup:True /AuthenticationType:sql /DsnFile:c:\sql.dsn /OdbcUsername:sqlusername /odbcPassword:sqlpassword /log:c:\joinfarm%1.log
Reboot to complete the operation – it will not appear in your list of servers in the XenApp DSC admin tools until you do this.
If you are using the User Profile Manager you will need to install this too. Download the latest MSI and copy to the C: drive:

msiexec /i c:\profilemgt3.1.1_x64.msi /qn
One last possible change – if you are streaming applications that use Services (Office 2010 being the obvious example) and you don’t sign your profiles, you will need to run this to add a registry key to allow the service to start. Replace “fileserver” with the name of the file server that stores your profiles. This can be multiple entries separated by semicolons.

REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Citrix\Rade" /v AppHubWhiteList /t REG_SZ /d fileserver

You should now see the new server in the DSC and be able to publish applications to it. Obviously these instructions have not been a fully unattended installation as such but providing you have a system such as Altiris to copy files and execute commands remotely they should be enough for you to build such a process.

Citrix Client v12.0 install fails with: Error 1606 Could not access network location components.

2010-07-09T07:48:00.001+01:00

I’ve had this error a few times now with a big PC rollout I’ve been doing of v12.0 client (that’s why I’ve not posted anything for ages! 5000 machines down, 2000 to go…) and thought it might be useful to share. A scripted install of the client crashes out with the useless error “Could not access network location components”, event ID 11606.

Each time this has been because someone has previously installed Firefox and then uninstalled it (tsk – non-Enterprise ready software! And users with local admin rights, always a dangerous combination).

To solve, check whether Firefox is installed (probably not – remove it if so) and blow away this registry key that it fails to tidy up:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla

The install should now sail through just fine.

I’m sure there are other things that could cause this error of course, but I’ve had it a few times now and its been a badly removed Firefox installation every time.

XenApp 6 – Streaming Acrobat Reader 9.3

2010-06-18T16:10:00.001+01:00

This is a guide of creating a Stream for Acrobat Reader 9.3 for a XenApp 6 farm. Its assuming you want to Stream To Server – if you need to stream to client the process is very much the same, except you would do it from a profiler running your Client OS. This is assuming you are using a Windows Server 2008 R2 server to capture the server stream.

Download the .exe from the Adobe site.
Run the install and leave it on the following screen:

Go to this folder (assuming you are on a Windows Server 2008, Vista or 7 PC):
”%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Adobe\Reader 9.3\Setup Files”
Copy these files out somewhere and cancel the install. Delete the original exe, you don't need it now.
Download Orca: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Authoring-tools/Setup-creators/Orca.shtml. Install it on a PC.
Run Orca, click File, Open and select the AcroRead.msi file you just saved somewhere.
Click Transform, New Transform
In the Tables column on the left, click Feature.
- In the right hand pane find the line starting "AUM". Double click its value in the Level column and change to 99.
- Then find the line starting "Updater". Double click its value in the Level column and change to 99. (These stop the updater from working)

In the Tables column select Property.
- Find "ENABLE_CACHE_FILES" - change to "NO" (Disables the copy of source files)
- Find "EULA_ACCEPT" - change to "YES" (Disables the EULA dialog)
- Find "SUPPRESS_APP_LAUNCH" - change to "YES" (Stops it from launching after install)
- Find "Agree to License" - change to "YES" (Disables the license popup on first launch)
Click Transform, Generate Transform and save it in the same folder as your MSI as custom.mst
Create a batch file as well in this folder with the following text:

msiexec /i AcroRead.msi TRANSFORMS=custom.mst
pause
On your Citrix Profiler, start a new Profile. Agree to defaults until you get to the Choose Installer screen. Select your batch file and click Next.

Click Launch Installer and you should see your batch file launch and install. Select the defaults in the installation and click Finish at the end. When the command prompt window is done it should say “Press any key to continue” – press a key to close this too.

Click Next to discover the application it should find “Adobe Reader 9”. Launch it and agree to the license agreement. Close Acrobat Reader.
Click Next, Next, Next. Click Terminate All if there are any processes still running. Click Next and Finish to build the profile.
Save it to your profile file share.
Load your Citrix Delivery Services Console to administer your XenApp 6 farm.
Create a new application.
Select “Accessed from a server” and “Streamed to server”. Click Next.
Click Browse to find the folder and profile file you just created. The drop down should show Adobe Reader 9. Click Next
Choose your server(s) that will host the stream.
Click Next and enter your users. Click Next, Next and Finish. You should now be able to launch the application.

Citrix Client v12.0 – Windows Installer requirements

2010-05-06T08:58:00.001+01:00

The XenApp Online plug-in v11.2 and v12.0 have a minimum requirement that I’ve just run into – the version of the Windows Installer has to be at least v3.0 or the install will fail with this lovely error message that “The version of the Windows Installer on this computer does not meet the minimum installation requirements”.

In case you don’t know your Windows Installer versions (shame on you!) click here or just remember that the default Windows Installer of Windows XP SP2 and later is okay:

Windows Installer version	Released with OS\Service Pack	Compatible with Citrix Client v11.2+

1.1	Windows 2000	No
2.0	Windows 2000 SP3, Windows XP	No
3.0	Windows XP SP2	Yes
3.1	Windows XP SP3, Windows 2003 SP1	Yes
4.0	Windows Vista, Windows 2008	Yes
4.5	Windows Vista SP2, Windows 2008 SP2	Yes
5.0	Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2	Yes

The fastest way to test which version of the Windows Installer you have will be to click Start > Run and type msiexec. You get a popup with the version number, like this from a Windows XP Professional SP1 machine:

You can also look at the File Version of the file c:\windows\system32\msiexec.exe – useful if you use SMS/SCCM.

Windows XP SP1 and RTM are probably your main concern – they should be upgraded to Windows Installer v3.1 (v4.5 is available too but requires Windows XP SP2) before you try to install the XenApp v11.2 or v12.0 clients. The install requires a reboot before you can use it.

Incidentally, v11.0 did not have this requirement and will install with at least v2.0 of the Windows Installer.

XenApp 6 on Windows Server 2008 R1

2010-04-22T16:48:00.001+01:00

Just in case there is any confusion on this matter, XenApp 6 will only install on Windows Server 2008 R2.

Trying to install on Windows Server 2008 gets you this nice specific error:

Some elements of the suite (License Server, EdgeSight, Web Interface) can be installed on Windows Server 2008 , but the main application will only install on 2008 R2, not 2008 R1 as it appears to now be called.

I only mention this as my web stats indicate this is something people are unclear on! If you have Windows Server 2008 you’re restricted to XenApp 5.

Upgrade. Its worth it.

XenApp 6 servers in 20000 state - “An error occurred while making the requested connection”

2010-04-22T13:20:00.001+01:00

A frequent error when establishing new farms and servers appears to be servers that have a bad licensing state. The error you get when trying to launch applications is “An error occurred while making the requested connection”.

To test whether your farm is in this state, open an administrative command prompt on the problem server and run the command:

query farm /load

(or qfarm /load)

If the server you are launching from has a load of 20000, it is not licensed properly.

There are a few different reasons why this might happen. This is not supposed to be a complete guide, but these are certainly things to try. After each step, try rerunning the qfarm /load command. If it goes down to zero, it looks like you have a licensed server.

Obvious things first – do you have a license server?! This is not Terminal Services licensing, this has a grace period of 120 days. Citrix licensing has no grace period as such (except when your license server fails after previously working, when you get about a month). I posted a guide about creating a license server here. Make sure you actually have a working server, that you have installed some real Citrix licenses to it, and that its a modern version.
When you are specifying the license server name, don’t fully qualify it – so say “servername”, not “servername.domain.com”
Look at the Dashboard on your licensing server and make sure the SA date is at least “2010.0317”.
Just in case, sort your TS licensing out while you’re at it!

Click Start, Administrative Tools, Remote Desktop Services, RDS Host Configuration
Click Licensing Diagnosis
You should see a number of CALs available to clients and a nice green tick at the top of the screen.
Check the users you are testing with are actually in the Remote Desktop Users group on the server.

Check with telnet that you can connect to your license server from your Citrix server on port 27000 (or whatever you selected as the licensing port). Could be a firewall issue on the licensing server.
Check you have enabled remote access on the server!! Click Start, right click Computer, Click Remote Settings and make sure the second, less secure option is selected:

Did you specify a license server on installation of the server you’re having trouble with? If you did, check the server’s console (by plugging in a monitor, using ILO or looking on the VMware\XenServer console) to make sure it is not coming up with an error saying “Citrix XenApp cannot contact the license server…”. You never know, you might have made a typo.
Check the value LSName at this registry location on the server:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Citrix\Licensing
Try running the XenApp Server Role Manager from the Start Menu on the server with the problem and disjoining the server from the farm, then rejoining, being very careful to get the licensing information right.
Try adding another server to the farm (I had one farm where nothing worked until a second server was added…), again getting the license bit right. See if that server works. If it does, its something you did on the first one.
Change the Load Evaluator your server is using to the Default one instead of Advanced (this was a problem in the Preview edition of XenApp 6, I don’t know if it is in the final release).
Set the licensing information for the farm in Group Policy…

Open the Citrix Services Delivery Console
Expand the farm and click the Policies node
Assuming you only have the Unfiltered policy, select the computer tab, Unfiltered and click Edit. If you have multiple policies, you might have to do this in all of them, depending on the make-up of your policy structure.
Leave “Enable this policy” ticked and click next
Click Licensing on the left. Click the Edit or Add button by the server host name and ports and enter the correct details.
Click Server Settings on the left hand side and click Add/Edit. Select the product version you have licenses for in the drop down. This should be the version you have licenses for on the license server.
Click Save
You should now see the settings you just entered in the Summary section of Unfiltered.
On the problem server, run gpupdate /force and reboot.

Try installing a new test license server in case the problem is there, especially if you have an old version installed.
Check the forums!
http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=261939&start=0&tstart=0
http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=261884&tstart=0
http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=257331&tstart=0

Windows 7 – Always show the Citrix offline plug-in (agent) icon in taskbar’s System Tray

2010-04-21T13:15:00.001+01:00

Windows 7 has a change to the default functionality of the System Tray in that icons created there do not display by default. Instead, users have to click a strange up arrow:

You then get that white box appear and can click on your icons. In this case the icons include that of the old PN Agent, the Offline Plug-in. This extra mouse click is annoying, but the fact that less clued-up users won’t even know they can launch their Citrix apps from down there is an active problem.

It can be fixed per user by clicking Customise, finding Citrix XenApp in the list and changing the drop-down to “Show icon and notification”.

But that’s a bit rubbish since it can’t be set (that I know of…) by a script and is per user. Nonetheless, that’s what I do on my PC.

To fix it for everyone your only option is to create a registry key which will force all System Tray icons to be visible on the Taskbar. To do this, Click Start > Run (or press Win-r) and type regedit.

Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

Right click Explorer, New > DWORD value called EnableAutoTray. Leave its value as 0 (zero). Log off and log back on and regardless of what you have previously set, all icons are now visible – including the Citrix agent. Setting it to 1 will set it back to default for everyone, and removing the key lets you define it per user by putting it in HKCU.

Here’s that registry key again:

Installing EdgeSight For Load Testing for XenApp 6

2010-04-20T13:28:00.001+01:00

The version of most software appears to have been incremented with the release of XenApp 6, and this includes EdgeSight For Load Testing (ESLT) which is now Build 3.6.1.24.

Oddly previous versions of ESLT appear to be a higher build number – the version I was testing XenApp 5 with was build 5.2 and it shipped with build 5.0. I assume they have reordered their build numbers! Please note that ESLT is a different program from EdgeSight – they can be installed on the same machine, but there is no reason as such to do so, and neither application requires the other to work.

Get a Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2 server (I’ve tested XenApp 6 with an R1 server just fine). You will need a XenApp License server set up too before you can use ESLT properly. Make sure its got a lot of memory if its going to run a lot of sessions – I have found to launch more than 100 sessions meant more than 4gb of RAM and of course 64-bit OS if using Windows 2008.
Be aware that ESLT actually consists of 2 parts – the Launcher and the Controller. You would only have one Controller usually to kick off the tests but you could have the Launcher software installed on several machines to actually launch sessions from lots of places. This might be better for you if you don’t have a powerful server to run everything – personally I’ve always used one server for everything which is fine – if its up to it.
Uninstall any previous version of ESLT.
Get the folder “Load Testing Services” off the XenApp 6 DVD and copy it to your new Load Testing server. Or download it from My Citrix.
Run EdgeSight for Load Testing.msi

Click next, agree to the EULA and click next again.
Click Custom (always click custom!)

Set all three components to install. The “Web Interface XML Service” allows you to connect to applications more easily without messing about creating ICA files so is good to have. It doesn’t actually use the Web Interface.
Enter a really good password

ESLT WI Support.msi is only needed if you are installing ESLT on a Web Interface server
After installation, you can make sure the essential service is started – its the Citrix EdgeSight Launcher Service and replaces the Launcher application from previous versions of ESLT

You can now run the LT Controller from the Start Menu

You will get a handy message about the changes you should make to your Citrix servers in order to be able to do Load Testing. These are important so don’t ignore them. You might well not want these settings on your live production servers!

To implement these settings, log on to your XenApp 6 servers and click Start, All Programs, Administrative Tools > Remote Desktop Services and click “Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration”
Right click ICA-TCP in the middle of the screen and click Properties. You should be able to follow the instructions above on the Sessions and Log on Settings tabs. So this on any server you will use for hosting Load Tested applications.
After the handy message about server settings, enter your password to get to the main interface.
The last step is to license it, or you will only have a 30 day 15 user license (which is not of much use). Click the Licenses menu and select License Server Configuration.

You are now ready to do load testing! The next high level next steps are

Create usernames to perform the load testing – I would create as many users as you will want to create sessions rather than reuse the same username lots of times. This also gives you the option to give them mailboxes etc later. Make your life easy though and make their usernames the same except for an incrementing number on the end and keep the passwords the same too.
Create a new EdgeSight test and connect it to an application on your farm (using an ICA file is one easy way to do this)
Enter your usernames and passwords
Record a script for load testing an application. Best practice is to have folders for the steps – a load section and a log off section with a folder in between set to “Iterate”. This section can then repeat infinitely until ESLT starts logging users off. If you don’t do this a long test will see constant logon/logoff activity which can cripple the test.
Enter figures for how to load the test. Usually, this will consist of a “log on” period where all your users log in at a realistic rate, a middle period where load is at maximum (this is a good time to test logon times and application performance of an extra session by logging on manually) and a short log off period where the tests complete and log off again.
If you’re testing Office 2007, you can download very good sample scripts from here: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX122568. They’re worth looking at even if you don’t use them as they’re well done scripts. They can be adapted to work in Office 2003 and Office 2010 as well.
Under Display > Counters set up connections to useful perfmon counters on the servers being monitored – such as
\\servername\Processor(_Total)\% Processor Time
Run tests – this will spawn many windows on your desktop (only have one user logged on to the launcher server or they can appear on the wrong session). Usually its best to right click the stack of windows and click “Show Windows Stacked” to display them nicely.
Record the results – screenshots of the “Monitor” section of Display are best though you can save reports.

Streaming OpenOffice.org 3.2.0 in XenApp 6 (streamed to server)

2010-04-19T12:01:00.001+01:00

Preparation – installing your environment

Before you can stream applications, you need a Streaming Profiler. This should be as close to the final environment as you can make it, so the same operating system, patches, and other applications. Best practice if you are going to Stream to Server is the Streaming Profiler should be the same hardware as the farm servers and a member of the farm (though certainly not used to host live apps). In this case, I am planning to stream to server so this is a Windows 2008 R2 server and a member of the farm. Install the Profiler from the XenApp DVD and make sure your Profiler does not have the streaming client (the XenApp Offline Plug-in) installed.
Ensure the Visual C++ redistributable 2008 is installed – if you are installing to a XenApp 6 Farm server, this should already be installed by the installation of XenApp. The same versions of the Redistributable should be on your intended clients (in this case the farm servers) too.
Download the latest version from http://download.openoffice.org/. This guide is for v3.2.0
Run the executable and select a directory for the extracted installer files. Cancel the installation once this directory is complete and keep the newly created directory. You can discard the original downloaded file.
The Java Runtime Environment is now not a requirement for either XenApp or OpenOffice so you might want to avoid it entirely. If you want it, install it manually to the Profiler and your XenApp machines before you begin and make sure everything is the same version. I’m going to manage without it.

Preparation – disabling the first-run wizard

If you are going to disable the First-Run Registration Wizard (which is annoying on a XenApp environment), go to this page http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/Administration_Guide/Deactivating_Registration_Wizard and download the oxt file for OpenOffice 3.2. Save it to a directory on the Profiler.
In the same folder as this oxt file, create a batch file with the following text:

cd \
“c:\program files (x86)\Openoffice.org 3\program\unopkg” add --shared c:\DisableFirstStartWzd_ooo32.oxt
pause

Preparation – changing default file formats

Since we’re not all using OpenOffice, you probably want your users to save in Microsoft Office format by default. This isn’t a very easy process and will need some preparation. I’ve adapted the instructions from here and here.
On another machine of the same operating system, install OpenOffice 3.2.0 using the same process below (only actually install it, not using the Streaming Profiler).
Browse to “C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenOffice.org3\Basis\share\registry\modules\org\openoffice\Setup”
First open Setup-Writer.xcu with WordPad (NOT notepad). It might be more readable if you disable Word Wrap.
Find this line:
<prop oor:name=”ooSetupFactoryDefaultFilter”>
Change the text of the line below it (there might be a few occurrences, do them all) to read:
<value>MS Word 97</value>
Open “Setup-calc.xcu” and find the line :
<prop oor:name="ooSetupFactoryDefaultFilter">
Change the line after to read:
<value>MS Excel 97</value>
Open “Setup-impress.xcu” and find the line:
<prop oor:name="ooSetupFactoryDefaultFilter">
Change the line after to read:
<value>MS PowerPoint 97</value>
Copy the three files you just created to the server you are profiling from so you can later add them to the stream

Creating the Streamed Profile

Click Start > All Programs > Citrix > Streaming Profiler > Streaming Profiler
Click New Profile

Click next
Give it a name (you can change this later). Click Next.
Do not enable User Updates and click Next.
Click Next past the linked profiles page (again, you can change this later).
On the list of Target Operating Systems you should see just Windows Server 2008 R2 selected. This is fine if you are streaming to server.

The only other OS that would probably work if you selected it now and tried to stream to a client on it later is Windows 7 64-bit, but there is no real point doing this. Click Next.
Select Advanced Install

Select “Run Install Program or command line script”

Click browse and find the setup.msi for OpenOffice in the folder you extracted. Click Next and Launch Installer.
Enter a generic User Name and Company and click next
Click Custom and next.
Deselect any main features you don’t need (in the screenshot I’ve disabled Base and Math as I don’t want my users messing about with these). Expand Optional Components and deselect On-line Update, Windows Explorer Extensions and Quickstarter at least.

Click next and clear the box to create a Start Link on Desktop.
Click Install and watch installation complete. Click Finish to return to the profiler.
Click Next.
Select Perform Additional Installations and click Next
Click Select Files and Folders
Copy your downloaded oxt file and the batch file you made to from your PC to the C: drive in the stream

Also find the setup-calc.xcu, setup-writer.xcu and setup-impress.xcu you may have created earlier to deal with default file formats not being Microsoft compatible. Copy them into the profile as well, into:
C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenOffice.org 3\Basis\share\registry\modules\org\openoffice\Setup
These should overwrite files and be newer and larger.
Click Next to perform additional installations again.
Select the first option again, to execute a program.
Enter the name of your batch file in the first text box and click Next

Click Launch Installer. You should see it successfully install the OXT and pause.

Click Next and select Finish Installations
You should now see a list of the main applications that you allowed at installation:

Select one and click Run. It should run without a first run wizard and have the expected default file format.
Click Next, Next, Next and Finish. After a few seconds it should finish building.
You should now see a screen with your new profile and some expandable folders beneath it. Note the asterisk after the file name at the very top, indicating it is not saved yet. You can make lots of changes to the stream here by right clicking the new profile and clicking Properties. These include adding pre and post launch scripts and linking other profiles. When you are happy, save the profile to a file share. Enter the path of your profiles file share in the top box and it will create the subfolder for you. Click Save. This will take up about 400mb of space. If you make changes and re-save, it will take another 400mb!
You are finished with the Profiler now.

Publishing your application

Open the Citrix Delivery Services Console (DSC) on a farm server with the Management Tools
Connect to the farm
Right click Applications and click Publish Application
Click Next and give it a display name – For example Word Processor

Select Application, Accessed from a server and Streamed to Server:

Click Next.
Click Browse to find your profile and select it. You should be able to select the application you want from the drop down:

Click Add to include servers to host the application.
Click Next to add users to get the application.
Finish the wizard, adding folders as required.
On a client in the name of a user who should see the application, do an application refresh and run the app.
Check the first run wizard does not run. Click File, Save As and check that the file format is Microsoft:

Repeat the process for Calc, Impress and the other OpenOffice applications as needed.

Citric online plug-in – changing the Server URL breaks shortcuts

2010-04-16T09:53:00.001+01:00

I’ve had a strange bug reported by one of my users when I changed the Server URL her PN Agent (sorry, online plug-in!) used to connect to the farm. She had dragged lots of shortcuts from her Start Menu to her desktop for Word, Excel, etc and now none of them worked – they came up with “The requested resource has been removed from the server”.

Which it hadn’t.

Anyway, the new and old Server URL went to the same Web Interface server and connected to the same farms, just with different options – after looking a bit closer though the capitalisation I’d given the farm names in “Server Farms” under the different Web Services sites were slightly different – same letters, just different capitals. I made them the same and the old shortcuts all started working again. I then went through every Web Interface site and made sure they were all the same!

Yet another picky “feature” of Citrix…

Installing XenApp 6 – Part 4 – Web Interface

2010-04-07T13:46:00.001+01:00

This is a 5 part guide to making a simple XenApp 6 farm. These are the other sections:

This section is about installing the web interface to support Web Interface and Agent clients. Note Program Neighborhood will not work with XenApp 6!

Install a Windows 2008 R2 Server with .NET Framework 3.5 sp1
Launch Server Manager and add the IIS role. Add the Windows Authentication element and the contents of Application Development. Also add the IIS6 Management Compatibility section further down.

Install the Microsoft Visual J# 2.0 redistributable. This can be found on the XenApp 6 DVD at \support\JSharp20_SE\vjredist_64.msi
Also from the XenApp 6 DVD, run \Web Interface\WebInterface.exe
Choose your language, click Next and agree to the EULA.
You will be prompted for a folder where the clients can be copied from so they can be made available on the server. You may not want to do this, but if you do you can use the folder Citrix Receiver and Plug-ins on the server. These will take a while to copy as they contain lots of languages, so you might want to clear out languages you don’t want first.
Click next at the end of the install to start creating the sites.

You can now create XenApp Web Sites (for Web Interface users) and XenApp Services Sites (for users of the Agent).

Creating a simple Web Interface website.

Specify the IIS Settings – you probably want to tick the checkbox for “Set as the default page for the IIS site”, assuming this will actually be the default page. This will mean users will be able to just type the name of the server (or an alias you create in DNS) into their browser and see the login page of this website.

For this simple guide I’ll assume this is just an internal server that is going to host a simple website to allow Citrix access. In this case, select “At Web Interface” for the point of authorisation.

After install, click next to configure the site.

Enter your farm name and a list of servers from the farm. These servers should all remain up from this point on to avoid errors for users logging on. Try to add at least two servers if you have them. Click Next when done.

A very important choice is how users will log on to the farm. Its unlikely you want to use Anonymous and if you don’t use Smart Cards, the third and forth options will not apply to you either. The first two are the most usual – Explicit and Pass-through. Explicit will prompt users for a username and password (and, optionally, a domain) before giving them their application shortcuts. Pass-through will use the logged on Windows username and password to automatically authenticate. This option is not applicable for every organisation as it may be considered a security problem (and obviously requires everyone to login using their own domain account on a domain PC, which might not be the case). Pass-through is also quite complicated to get working and requires considerable testing. When it works though, it is quite cool. For simplicity, I’ve left it as just Explicit. If you select more than one method you’ll need to decide later which is the default.

On the next screen you can restrict the domains allowed or allow any domain. Probably best to tie this down to a single domain if you can for security.

Choose the layout – full or minimal. Not a huge difference between them, especially if you are not going to put out messages on the site.

Choose whether this site will serve Online, Offline or dual-mode applications. Online applications are normal apps when the server and client are on the network. Offline apps are specially prepared streamed applications created with the Profiler application. They are downloaded to the client and can be executed when the network access is not available (at least for a time). You need a platinum farm or individually purchased license for this functionality, so if you don’t have them, choose Online. If you do have a Platinum farm, consider whether you want to support such apps and are intending to actually create them. Click next and finish to complete the website setup.

Open your browser and type in the name of the server, and you should see your new website

After logon you should see any applications that you have defined for your farm for this username.

Note you can now right click the website in the Citrix Web Interface Management tool and further configure it. This might include adding extra Server Farms (the web interface will seamlessly merge all the shortcuts for the different farms you specify), changing authentication methods, altering timeouts, etc.

Creating a simple XenApp Services site.

Specify the IIS Settings again – this time there is no option to make it a default.

After install, click next to configure the site.

Enter your farm name and a list of servers from the farm. These servers should all remain up from this point on to avoid errors for users logging on. Try to add at least two servers if you have them. Click Next when done.

Again, choose whether to support offline (streamed applications downloaded to the client – platinum customers only) applications. Click Next and finish.

You can now right click the website in the Citrix Web Interface Management tool and further configure it. This might include adding extra Server Farms (the web interface will seamlessly merge all the shortcuts for the different farms you specify), changing authentication methods, altering timeouts, etc. Checking that Authentication methods is set as you would like is especially important. Note if you want to enable Content Redirection (the ability to set local file associations on PCs to point to Citrix Applications), its here – in Server Farms > Advanced. This is a feature of Web Services sites only, not Web Interface clients.

As a final step in this configuration, you might want to consider installing more than one web interface server and joining them into a NLB cluster. This works very well with Citrix Web Interface and provides a good way of being able to make changes without removing service – i.e. you can remove a server from a cluster, update it, add it back in and then repeat with the other cluster members.

Click here: http://zenapp.blogspot.com/2010/03/web-interface-52-on-windows-server-2008.html

Installing XenApp 6 – Part 3 – Citrix Licensing v11.6.1 build 10007

2010-04-06T10:31:00.001+01:00

This is a 5 part guide to making a simple XenApp 6 farm. These are the other sections:

This section is about installing your licensing server and configuring your farm to use it.

Install another Windows 2008 Server R2 machine. Personally I would have this be my Terminal Services licensing server as well (you WILL need an R2 server for that – a 2008 R1 server will not give you the right CALs for a XenApp 6 farm) but that’s not covered here. Just install the Remote Desktop Services Licensing components, activate the server and add your CALs.
For Citrix Licensing, run this MSI from the main XenApp 6 DVD:
\licensing\CTX_licensing.msi
The version that ships with XenApp 6 is 11.6.1 build 10007
Agree to the UAC prompts and generally click Next until its installed. There aren’t any options and it doesn’t need a reboot.
After installation the configuration tool will launch. Change the licensing port if you feel the need (there’s nothing wrong with the defaults) and give it a really good password. Don’t lose it though.

You can now launch the Licensing web interface from the Start Menu (or from another machine on the URL http://servername:8082/). If you launch it from the server, turn off IE ESC from the server manager and try to get the localhost site into the Local Intranet security zone).
In the exciting new licensing interface you should see there are now 4000 Start-up licenses – this is because Citrix don’t bother charging you by Citrix server anymore, just by concurrent user. Therefore each installed license server can support 4000 citrix servers.

The next step is to get some licenses. If you are an existing customer, login to My Citrix and transfer some of your existing licenses from another server name to your new one to give it some real licenses. If you are a new customer, Citrix do offer 99 user evaluation licenses…http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/qa.asp?contentID=186&faqID=165260&title=Citrix+Presentation+Server+-+General+Questions
Once you have the license files, save them to your new license server and log into its licensing site by clicking Administration on the Dashboard screen. Login as Admin and your password you chose earlier.

Click Vendor Daemon Configuration to get to the import licenses button.
Click Import licenses and browse to the new *.lic files.

This is the tricky part. At this point it will probably tell you that the server name in the license file does not match the name of the license server. If you are sure you got this right, you can probably ignore this. Check the contents of c:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\Licensing\MyFiles on the license server and see if the license file is there now. If it is, restart the Windows service CitrixLicensing and then go back to the Dashboard. You should now see your licenses.

Now you just need to enter your license server name, port and server type (Enterprise, Advanced, Platinum) in the Policies node of the XenApp Management tools (the DSC). Its easiest to just edit the Unfiltered policy. To start this, open the DSC, click Policies and the Computer tab.

With the Unfiltered policy selected, click Edit.
Select Licensing on the left and click the edit buttons by the server name and port

Then click Server Settings and “Add”, next to the XenApp product edition. Select the edition you have licenses for and click Save.
Open a command prompt and run gpupdate. If you have entered the wrong details you should get an error of “the licenses required by this edition of Citrix XenApp are not present on the license server”. Correct the settings if you get this and run gpupdate again. “gpupdate /force” is more effective as it will rebuild all policies rather than just looking for differences. Reboot the server for the new Computer policies to take effect.

After the reboot, do a “query farm /load” again in CMD. If the server still has a value of 20000 it is still not configured right. Check that RDP is enabled in Start > right click Computer, click Remote Settings. Check it is set to “Allow connections from computers running any version of Remote Desktop”.

If you had this problem, correct it and reboot again. Do a “query farm /load” again in CMD and hopefully the load has gone down from 20000 (error) or 10000 (full load). It should be more like 100. If you still have a problem, best check your Event Viewer to see whether there is anything useful there.

Installing XenApp 6 – Part 2 – Establishing the farm

2010-04-04T14:22:00.001+01:00

This is a 5 part guide to making a simple XenApp 6 farm. These are the other sections:

After your server has completed installation Click the Configure button in the Role Manager to start establishing the farm. Start the Role Manager from the Start Menu if its not running.

You might find you have to minimise this screen to see the Join/Create farm screen! Click Create

Name your farm and add a good account as an administrator

Enter license server details if you have them – otherwise select the option to enter them later. If you don’t enter them here though, you will have specify them using Group Policy or by removing your server from the farm and going through this process again. I would really consider getting a license server set up with some real licenses on it before doing this step. If not, I’d enter the details you’re going to use for the license server. Click Next when done.

On the database screen, you can select the “existing database” option if you have pre-created a database on a SQL Server. Otherwise, New Database will go on to create a local SQL Express database. This is only much use for small farms and test installations. Enter credentials as requested.

Decide on a shadowing policy – generally a business decision, on a test farm of course you probably just want to allow shadowing, in a live farm you probably want to at least “force a shadow acceptance popup” so users cannot be monitored without their permission.

If you selected the EdgeSight agent, enter your information for it now. Decide on a company name (that’s how EdgeSight organises its servers into groups – personally each farm is a separate company for me). If you’ve not installed EdgeSight yet, enter the server name you will use.

The advanced settings screen can be skipped but is worth a quick look. Enter a Zone name if you are going to have different zones (unless you have different sites on a WAN with citrix servers at each, you won’t. On online plug-in enter your server name you will use for the web interface if you know it. On Remote Desktop Users the default settings might not be right for a live farm. Anonymous Users is obviously not very secure – Authenticated Users (i.e. anyone who has a valid domain username and password) might be a better choice. Users should include Domain Users which will generally have the same effect.

Click Apply to create the farm. Should take about 5 minutes. Close the wizard when it completes and manually reboot.

After reboot and login.

If you are not going to use the Single Sign-On feature of XenApp (note: this is different from clients using passthrough authentication and is only included in Platinum version by default), remote the admin tools for it or it will keep prompting you for information. Go to Control Panel, Uninstall a program, and remove “Citrix Single Sign-On Console” by selecting Change and Remove:

Check you can load the Delivery Services Console (DSC)...

In the discovery mode, add the local computer and complete the process to be able to see your farm. You should see the new server as the only member of the farm:

Your server is almost certainly NOT ready to host apps! This is because licensing is not sorted out. You can publish apps using the DSC but they would not launch. You can confirm this by launching CMD as Administrator and typing “query farm /load”. If this lists 20000 next to your server, it is not licensed properly.

So the next steps are:

Establish a license server
Configure license server details in Policies in the DSC
Run gpupdate on your server to take the new policies

And we should then be ready to install the web interface and use the farm!

Installing XenApp 6 – Part 1 – Manually installing

2010-04-02T22:08:00.001+01:00

This is a 5 part guide to making a simple XenApp 6 farm. These are the other sections:

Most XenApp servers will be installed by unattend scripts and images of course, but we have to start somewhere – and this is a quick guide to the slightly picky process to installing XenApp 6 manually.

Just as a note – I would really consider doing step 3 first, so you can fill in the details of a license server when prompted to join the farm in the second stage. It’ll reduce your chances of ending up with an unlicensed server…

Install Windows 2008 R2, with .NET 3.5 sp1 (no, it won’t install on Windows Server 2008 “R1”)
Logon to the server again but NOT USING REMOTE DESKTOP! Use VNC, use ILO, plug a monitor in, use VMware/XenServer/ tools if its virtual - just don’t use Terminal Services. It won’t work.
Extract the XenApp 6 ISO to a folder on the network with 7zip. Or burn it to a DVD if you must
Run autorun.exe (as administrator)
Click Install XenApp Server

Click Add Server Roles

Select your XenApp edition. In my case, its Enterprise.

Choose your server roles. You will need at least a license server as well, but if you have a spare machine (a virtual is fine) its a good role to have a dedicated server for. Remember it will have to be Windows Server 2008 R2 as well if its going to be serving your Terminal Services CALs.

Choose your server roles. XenApp Server is the only required one for your first server, but the XenApp Management role might be a good idea for one of your servers so you can host the app on the farm. You can also install the XenApp Management tools to your PC, which is a good idea for when there’s a problem with your farm that stops you launching apps! I’ve also selected the EdgeSight Agent as well since I’m planning to deploy an EdgeSight server later on.

That’s a lot of Visual C++ Redistributables. No Java pre-req though, thank God. Click Install to carry on, agree to any UAC prompts and log back in after reboots as needed. If you have not installed the Remote Desktop roles before install you’ll need to restart it manually when it tells you the restart was pending. After reboot, run XenApp Server Role Manager to carry on.

After install, click Finish. Select the Role Manager from the Start Menu if its not launched and click Configure to set up your farm.

I’ve now done a separate article on how to script your installs on the rest of your servers. Unless you are creating lots of farms (why?) you might as well create it by hand but you certainly don’t want to have to build every server manually.

Click here for my scripted install guide for XenApp 6.

And that’s the first part done – the next parts are:

Part 2 – Establish the farm
Part 3 – Install your license server
Part 4 – Web Interface install
Part 5 – Unattended Installs

Citrix Web Client 12.0 - “A remote application is trying to access files on your computer”…

2010-04-01T20:55:00.000+01:00

We’ve had some fun with the new v12.0 XenApp Client – by default each user on web interface sites is asked when they launch applications that try to use the local drives. The message below pops up, which is nicely redesigned since the previous versions.

If the user clicks Yes, access to resources such as local drive mappings is then enabled (read only if the checkbox was clicked). Otherwise, you can get errors such as “The folder ‘c:\*.*’ isn’t accessible”.

The solution to this is a registry fix that can be rolled out via a login script, SMS, etc. The registry file can be downloaded from here (though I have not followed their instructions exactly… http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX124871

Basically, download the reg file from this site and look for this line:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\ICA Client\Client Selective Trust\oidIntranetRegionIcaAuthorizationDecision\FileSecurityPermission]
"stereotype"="DbScalar"
@="3"

Change the 3 (prompt) to a 2 (full access)

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\ICA Client\Client Selective Trust\oidIntranetRegionIcaAuthorizationDecision\FileSecurityPermission]
"stereotype"="DbScalar"
@="2"

And apply the reg file. On command line this would be:

reg import c:\ssonregupx86.reg

Solution for v11.2 client

[Apologies for those who may have been misled by this article in the past – I originally posted this as a solution for the v12.0 client – actually v12.0 pays no attention to the webica.ini file. This works fine on v11.2 though, which exhibits the same problem, albeit with different error messages]

If you want to avoid errors such as this, decide whether you want applications to have access to local drives (different for everyone I’m sure, but you probably do), create a text file called “webica.ini” at these locations automatically at logon:

Windows Vista and 7: C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\ICAClient

Window XP and 2000: C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Application Data\ICAClient

The file contents for allow access and never ask is:

[Access]
GlobalSecurityAccess=405

Citrix Web Client 11.2 - “A remote application is trying to access files on your computer”…

2010-04-01T13:23:00.001+01:00

We’ve had some fun with the v11.2 XenApp Client – by default each user on web interface sites is asked when they launch applications that try to use the local drives. The message below pops up, which is nicely redesigned since the previous versions.

Windows Vista and 7: C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\ICAClient

Window XP and 2000: C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Application Data\ICAClient

The file contents for allow access and never ask is:

[Access]
GlobalSecurityAccess=405

XenApp client 12.0 released

2010-03-24T12:44:00.001Z

Just as I was set up for a big deployment of v11.2, they go and release v12. Typical. v12.0 of the Online Plug-in is the new version of Web Interface client and the old PN Agent. The Program Neighborhood is long gone of course.

At first glance it appears to be basically exactly the same as v11.2 with some bug fixes so I am not sure the major edition change was entirely necessary, but I suppose we should be grateful that its not been renamed! Suspiciously available on the same day as new versions of XenApp, the Streaming Client and Profiler and various other things, I can’t help but wonder whether the version change was decided on by Marketing.

Anyway, the client is available from here:

Online Plug-in - Version 12.0

And here are its list of issues fixed…

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX124172

SideBySide errors - Citrix XenApp client v11.2 requires Visual C++ Redistributable?

2010-03-19T13:04:00.001Z

When upgrading Windows XP machines to v11.2 of the client I’ve noticed lots of SideBySide (so, Visual C++) errors in their system event log. The odd thing is, everything appears to work fine, applications launch okay but cause these errors each time they do.

This issue is mentioned in the release notes of the v10.2 client and appears to still be the case with v11.2. This was seen connecting to a MPS 4.0 farm, I assume its not about the farm version though.

I can’t find what the actual problems caused by these errors might be, though the Citrix forums mention printing issues.

Anyway, installation of the Visual C++ Redistributable SP1 (x86 and x64) fixed the issue and the errors stopped. I’ve added this as a pre-requisite to the script that rolls out Citrix 11.2 clients to PCs now.

These are the errors it caused…

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    SideBySide
Event Category:    None
Event ID:    59
Description:
Generate Activation Context failed for C:\Program Files\Citrix\ICA Client\MFC80.DLL. Reference error message: The operation completed successfully.

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    SideBySide
Event Category:    None
Event ID:    58
Description:
Syntax error in manifest or policy file "C:\Program Files\Citrix\ICA Client\Microsoft.VC80.MFCLOC.MANIFEST" on line 5.

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    SideBySide
Event Category:    None
Event ID:    34
Description:
Component identity found in manifest does not match the identity of the component requested

XenApp 6 available for download March 24th

2010-03-11T11:43:00.001Z

The big wait for XenApp for R2 (which Citrix are finally admitting is called XenApp 6) looks like it might nearly be over – R2 is plastered all over the Citrix site and buried in there is the date for download availability – March 24th 2010.

http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?ntref=hp_news&newsID=1863096

I can’t wait (no, really!) to get my hands on this as the Tech Preview version was a huge step forward from XenApp 5 for us. In our benchmarking we saw some serious issues with long logon time and high CPU when we threw loads of Office users at XenApp 5 servers in benchmarking. XenApp 6 Tech Preview beat it with considerable ease, so assuming they’ve not broken it in the meantime it should be an obvious choice.

Web Interface 5.2 on Windows Server 2008 – configuring NLB Clustering

2010-03-10T15:28:00.001Z

This guide to clustering Web Interface is intended as an extra to this article on configuring web interface correctly:

http://zenapp.blogspot.com/2010/04/installing-xenapp-6-part-4-web.html

Install Windows Server 2008 on two servers (or more – up to 32) and give them unique IP addresses on the same subnet. If you can, give them a second NIC and give it another IP, also on the same subnet. If you don’t, you will have to use Multicast mode later, which might cause problems for your network. Enter a gateway for both network connections and check that they are both accessible on the network. Yes, I know it will whinge. For one of these connections go into its advanced networking settings and uncheck the checkbox for “Register this connection’s address in DNS”. This is the network connection you should use to be a member of the cluster.
Install the same version of the Web Interface 5.2 on both servers, configuring them with the same settings. Web Interface no longer supports centralised configuration so be sure that the configurations are identical. Comparing the resulting config.xml files in the sites you create is a good idea, they should be the same.
Test both servers are able to function correctly.
On each server, open Server Manager and select Features. Click Add Features and select Network Load Balancing, Next and Install.
On either server, click Start, Administrative Tools, Network Load Balancing Manager
Click Cluster > New. Enter the name of the server you are on and click Connect. You should see the Interface name and IP appear below.
Click Next and you should see something like the screen below. Assuming you are happy with the IP it has chosen (this will not be the IP of the cluster but the IP this host uses to participate in the cluster), click Next
Enter a new IP for the Cluster to be known as.
Enter a name for the Cluster (you can create a more friendly DNS alias for the cluster later).
Choose the operational mode. If you use Unicast Mode (where the original MAC address of the servers’ NICs are replaced by that of the cluster) and you only have one NIC per server, the servers will not be able to see each other which might be a serious problem as they need to communicate to load balance effectively. If you use multicast mode (where each servers’ NIC keeps its MAC address and gets a second new shared one for the cluster) you will probably have to make some network infrastructure changes to get other machines to see the cluster. So basically, get a second NIC in each server and choose Unicast.
Click Next and Finish to accept the rules.
Check your sites are available on the cluster IP address.
On the second server, open Network Load Balancing Manager. Click Cluster > Connect to existing and enter the name of the first server (or the server name or IP)
Right click the cluster name and click Add Host To Cluster. Add the second server and choose the network connection that is not set to register in DNS (assuming you had two). Agree to everything else and the second server should then appear in the list and move quickly to “converging” status. After a minute, refresh the list and it should go to Converged.
The cluster should function correctly now without further changes, but I would also add some text to the web interface sites on both servers so you can tell where the content is coming from. This will make troubleshooting easier later on. Open the Citrix Web Interface Management tool on each server and right click each of the Web Sites. Select Web Site Appearance. Click Content, Add, choose your language code, click Next. Select Footer Text, Next and enter the server name in the text box. Click Finish, OK and OK.

Quick Launch and ICA file creator for XenApp

2010-02-25T09:32:00.001Z

The QuickLaunch bar has for some time been the main use I’ve had for the old Program Neighborhood and the only reason I didn’t want to lose it by updating to client v11.2, so this free tool released late in 2009 from Citrix is an essential part of replacing the old client…

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

Not only does the QuickLaunch tool replicate the functionality of the Quick Launch bar of the old PN client, it also acts as an ICA file creator. Note the ICA files it makes do not have usernames and passwords by default, so you can edit them to include the necessary fields – for example (passing the password in plain text!)…

[WFClient]
Version=2
TcpBrowserAddress=servername.domainname.local
[ApplicationServers]
Word 2007=192.168.1.1
[Word 2007]
Address=Word 2007
TransportDriver=TCP/IP
InitialProgram=#Word 2007
WinStationDriver=ICA 3.0
Username=username
Domain=DOMAINNAME
ClearPassword=password
DesiredColor=8
DesiredHRES=1024
DesiredVRES=768
AutoLogonAllowed=On