This blog post title can look a little agressive but that's intended

Why ? Simply because this post is my 2 cents regarding the marketing vs technical thing and reflects my feedback from the "trenches".

I'm now working with Citrix products for years and I've followed the move from Winframe to Metaframe then Presentation server, Access Suite and Now XenApp / XenDesktop Platinum.

Every new product release (mainly XenApp) was really expected because it was adding lots of highly requested features.

Unfortunately, starting with XenApp 5.0 for Windows 2008, even if new features were added, some (very important ones) were removed without notice although I did not see many articles / posts about it.

The fact is that XenApp 5.0 for Windows 2008 is not that much deployed and regarding my customers that's mainly because of these features removal.

Which Features ? : I'm thinking of Installation Manager, Application Isolation, Resource Manager and some other ones.

Let's now take the marketing answers and my comments ...

Following my experience, discussions with customers, other partners and CTPs, I've decided to write this blog post reflecting my thoughts about the "Virtual Desktop" buzz and the fact that for almost all vendors this is the place to go regarding the future of Desktop Computers, and moreover this is the place to go NOW.

At first glance, I'd say that the "Virtual" term does not apply really well to what the companies are really expecting from a new way of managing desktop computers, it's a good term for marketing things but not reflecting the reality of desktops, let me explain :

From the Datacenter to the Desktops

For the last years companies have moved to the server virtualisation solutions aiming to optimize their servers management and decrease costs by consolidating their infrastructure while rationalizing their deployments and management processes.

Servers virtualization solutions are now mature, but the thing that we should not forget is that even if we have more and more customers using them, they "only" represent 40.85% of the actual market (Forrester) and are supposed to hit the 60% within two years.

After optimizing their datacenters (servers) costs, IT departments are now looking for new costs centers to optimize them. This move has naturally led them to work on the Desktops side, a side they've "neglected" for years.

Why ? First because of the vendors marketing buzz, amplified by the economic crisis. These new constraints have quite "forced" IT departments to have a look at a question they had like "forgotten" : How much do my desktops cost ?

And that's not an easy question, because for some of my customers the answer is still based on the hardware cost only !

Many IT departments still do not have any figures reflecting the real cost of their distributed computing architecture and even if this is now changing, this will take time (also because these kind of figures may be kept hidden because they could be "bad").

The "Virtual" Desktop term is answering (from a marketing point of view) to all goals IT Department are trying to aim regarding their Desktops in the future, because it seems logic for them to optimize Desktops like they've done on datacenters : "optimize management and decrease costs by consolidating their infrastructure while rationalizing their deployments and management processes" .

However, from a technical point of view, I'd prefer the "Centralized" term to reflect the Desktop reality, instead of the "Virtual" one.

Why ? Because the Desktops world is far away too complex to summarize it to only one solution like Pooled Desktops running within VMs in the datacenter, just like it was (and is) possible for servers ...
 

Working on a tool I had to face the specific case of writing large integers into a REG_DWORD value.

The problem is that basically you cannot write anything superior to the Integer.MaxValue() object in a DWORD value using the .Net Managed APIs Registry.SetValue(), which can be problematic (in my case that was for XenApp DefaultPRNFlags and I really need to be able to write these settings down).

To overcome this issue ...

Following my First Blog Post regarding this subject we've been able to work on this issue with both Microsoft and Citrix support.

To find an alternative to the workaround mentionned in the first article, we did some tests and found that the issue could be stopped by disabling ...

I've not had any free time to blog this week and I only wrote about it on my Twitter Account.

Citrix has extended the Citrix Professionnal Award (CTP) this week to include new members.

I'm really honored as I'm one of these new members, joining a Community of really valuable professionals.

CitrixTools.Net WebSite and Tools are really taking me lots of time and that's awesome to get such an award in return, because I have to admit that ...

I've worked this week on a critical production issue involving Provisioning Services 5.1.

The symptoms were the following :

• explorer.exe freezing randomly for some seconds (8 to 30)
• Logons stalling randomly for 8 to 30 seconds
• Microsoft Office Applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint ...) Freezing randomly when doing File / Open or File Save for 8 to 30 second
• Start Menu freezing for 8 to 30 seconds
• ...

Actually, anything that can use the SMB Network stack was randomly freezing on Provisioned devices.

During our tests, we've confirmed that the Master Target (the device used to create the vDisk) was not impacted at all, and that we were able to reproduce only on provisioned target devices.

We've been able to reproduce the issue and found that even if the symptom was an application freezing, the issue was impacting all XenApp / Terminal Server sessions on the Target Device at the same time.

The case is now escalated and hopefully we should get an hotfix for it (and I'll update this post as soon as we've validated it).

Fortunately we have been able to find a workaround and as this case is critical for users I'm sharing it (to be honest we just found it )

To explain the problem and the workaround, I'll describe the Architecture we're using to understand the context and see if the workaround could be applied in your implementation ...

When running a XenApp environment, there is a huge need of getting all sensible datas saved.

Even if you're running a regular DataStore backup, you can't sometimes deal with it when it comes that the database is corrupted.

Why ? Because it is often hard to know when it was corrupted, so you could waste a lot of time in looking for the specific not corrupted backup, specific backup that may not contains an updated configuration.

Scripting all Farm / Servers settings is quite easy but every application publication / policy creation is not.

To deal with this problem, I'm implementing on my customers site a daily Published Applications / Policies export with XenApp Application Export Manager and XenApp Policies Export Manager ...

CitrixTools.Net has celebrated (silently) its first birthday on June 2009.

After one year online I wanted to use this new "Blog" area to write something about this website creation and its first online year.

Behind the site, there are some tools I've developped, so we can say the story began with tools.

I'm working with Citrix technologies since 2001 and as all of You I've started writing my own scripts / reg files to ease my deployments.

Actually I've never been ...

I'm currently working for a customer on automating Citrix Provisioning Server through Powershell Scripts.

For those who have had a look on how to automate PVS, there are three ways on how to achieve it :

• The provided Mcli.exe command line tool
• The PowerShell SnapIn
• The PVS SOAP API

The PowerShell SnapIn was more suited to my needs then I've started writing some scripts to achieve typical configuration and Admin tasks.

The first scripts I'll publish are dedicated to Add / Rename / Delete a Device.

As PowerShell does not support spaces within Command Line Arguments, the only limitation is not to add spaces for item names.

Please also remember that PVS Devices Name should be limited to 15 cars.

As RIM just released the Blackberry App World v1.1 and with this release allows French people to use it I decided to get it up and running on my BB Bold.

I have to say that it was not easy ! (Maybe it's me, maybe it's because my BB is in French, I don't know)

The first thing I've tried is to go the the RIM Website (http://www.blackberry.com) and navigate to the AppWorld section.

From this page I could send an email to my device with the download link. That's what I've done.

The problem was that when connecting to the link provided in the email the portal was saying that my device does not meet the requirements for App World (sic)

I've then tried to install it through my computer ...