A couple months back, I was working on a XenDesktop 3.0 installation.  The customer was having some issues with licensing, so my first thought was to upgrade the license server to the newest version – because historically that’s been the recommended first step in dealing with license issues.  In this case, though, it turned out to break other things – but in the end gave us some very valuable information.

First, a little background information.  XenDesktop uses an agent on the virtual workstation images that communicates with a server piece called the Desktop Delivery Controller (“DDC”).  This agent/server communication happens on TCP port 8080.

Unfortunately, in this specific case, the Citrix License Service was running on the same server as the DDC service. And in the latest version of the license server service, Citrix changed the port that the License Management Console uses to communicate with the license server to…yeah, you guessed it: 8080.

This conflict prevented the XenDesktop machines from checking into the DDC, so the DDC, which, as you might infer from its name, is the broker service that controls the delivery of virtual desktops to client devices that request them, viewed them all as “offline”.  It therefore believed that there were no virtual desktops available, so no connection requests were being serviced. In technical terms, this is what we call a “bad thing.”

The solution in this case was to change the port that the License server and License Management Console communicate on to port 8082 – which just happens to be the port it used in previous versions… hmm…

It should be noted that this can affect more than just XenDesktop Agents.  Port 8080 is heavily used for other Citrix functions, such as the XML service.  Why Citrix would change the license service to port 8080? Why do people jump out of perfectly good airplanes? Guess it seemed like a good idea at the time…to somebody, anyway.

Once we started digging for it, we found detailed steps on editing the license server configuration in the License Server 11.6 readme, and it’s obvious from the text that Citrix knew using port 8080 could cause conflicts:

When you install the license server components, version 11.6.1, on the same server as other Citrix products, the License Management Console is configured to use port 8080, by default, which may conflict with the other Citrix products (for example, they may use the Citrix XML Service which may use 8080 as well). To resolve this issue:

1. Navigate to C:Program FilesCitrixLicensingLMCtomcat
   confserver.xml
2. Open the file in Wordpad.
3. Replace the port number (8080) in the following line with 8082:
   <Connector port=”8080″ protocol=”HTTP/1.1″
   connectionTimeout=”20000″ redirectPort=”8443″/>
4. Save the file.
5. Reboot the server.

The other way we could have solved the problem, of course, would have been to move the license service to a server that had no other Citrix components running on it. We generally recommend that as a best practice, if at all possible (although we realize that sometimes it isn’t).  It just makes things easier in the long run.

We here at Moose have been working with Web Interface 5.2 (hereafter referred to as WI 5.2) more and more these days, and the question was bound to come up, “Can I use the new WI 5.2 with my old Presentation Server 4.0 farm AND my new XenApp 5.0 farm at the same time?”

Yes, you absolutely can.  The Admin guide for WI 5.2 states that it is compatible with the Windows 2003 and UNIX versions of Presentation server 4.0 up through the current XenApp 5.0 versions.  However, it is not 100% compatible right out of the box.

You can configure your old Presentation Server 4.0 farm in the WI 5.2 farm properties and then login to the WI and see all of your published apps, but when you go to launch one you will receive the following message:

“An error occurred while making the requested connection.”

The solution is detailed below.  These exact steps are from Citrix KB article CTX123003

1. On the Web Interface 5.2 server, locate the WebInterface.conf file (InetpubwwwrootCitrixXenAppConf) and open it with a text editor.
2. Locate the following entry around line# 169:
   RequireLaunchReference=On
3. Replace it with the following entry:
   RequireLaunchReference=Off
4. Save the WebInterface.conf file and test.
5. Users should be able to launch applications from the XenApp 4.0 farm successfully.

That said, it is important to note that Presentation Server 4.0 hit “End of Life” on Dec. 31, 2009. (Citrix lists product lifecycle information for all of their products on their Web site.) This means that product downloads and hotfixes are no longer available, and tech support is limited to whatever information you may be able to dig out of the Citrix on-line Knowledge Base. So we sincerely hope that the only time you would ever be using the information in this post is when you’re in the process of transitioning from Presentation Server 4.0 to your new XenApp 5 (or, very shortly, XenApp 6) farm!

The big Webcast just wrapped up, and will be available for replay shortly at http://www.desktopvirtualizationhour.com. Click on the “videos” tab to get to the selection of recorded videos. Several changes were announced. Unfortunately, they don’t become effective until July 1, but you can’t have everything.

• VECD is dead, long live the VDA. For all practical purposes, the VECD license is history. Effective July 1, if your client desktop is a PC that’s covered by Software Assurance, you will no longer have to purchase a VECD license to access a virtual Windows Desktop. That saves you about $23/device/year.

  If your client device is not covered by SA (e.g., a thin-client device), you will now be required to purchase the new “Virtual Desktop Access” (“VDA”) license, which will cost about $100/device/year. That also represents a savings of $20/year or so compared to the old VECD pricing model.

  In both scenarios, the “primary user” of that client device now has the rights to access corporate VDI desktops and Microsoft Office applications from other client devices, such as home PCs, Internet cafes, hotel business centers, etc.

• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 will have a couple of new features that will make VDI a friendlier place to go:
  • Dynamic Memory – Provided your guest operating systems support “hot add” for memory, you will be able to configure your Hyper-V host with minimum and maximum memory limits for the guests. So if a VM that’s serving a power user needs more RAM, more RAM will be dynamically allocated from the host server’s memory pool. When that additional RAM is no longer needed, it will be returned to the pool. Note that this assumes that there is unallocated RAM available – this is not the same thing as “memory overcommit.” This should increase VM density and require fewer Hyper-V hosts to support a given number of virtual desktops. Note also that Windows XP does not support “hot add,” so that’s just another reason to make the move to Win7 when you virtualize.
  • RemoteFX – This is a set of technologies that have evolved from Microsoft’s acquisition of Calista Technologies a couple of years ago. It’s primarily a set of enhancements to the RDP protocol, but the graphics virtualization enhancements will also benefit virtual Win7 PCs that are running on a 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V host. The performance that was demonstrated during the Webcast was pretty impressive, but in addition, Citrix announced that the “HDX” technology in XenDesktop would be enhanced so it could detect when the RemoteFX technology was present, and leverage it to make graphics performance even better. You’ll find more information on RemoteFX over at the Windows Virtualization Team Blog.
• The Citrix/Microsoft Partnership is still going strong, and a couple of new promotions were also announced today:
  • “Rescue for VMware VDI” – which is targeted squarely at people who have started to deploy VMware View, and ran headlong into problems with scalability, user experience over WAN links, etc. These customers will be able to trade in up to 500 VMware licenses for the same number of Microsoft VDI Standard Suite subscription and Citrix XenDesktop VDI Edition annual licenses at no cost. Note, however, that these are annual, subscription-based licenses, so they are going to start costing you money after the first year.
  • “VDI Kick Start” – Eligible customers can pay only $28 per device for up to 250 devices to license the Microsoft VDI Standard Suite subscription and the Citrix XenDesktop VDI Edition annual licenses, allowing you to roll out a 250-seat VDI deployment for only $7,000 in licensing costs – roughly a 50% savings. Again, note that these are annual subscription-based licenses, so you’ll start paying the regular price after the first year. Still, that’s a pretty aggressive offer.

The big loser in today’s announcements? VMware. In addition to the trade-in offer, Microsoft made it very clear where they stood. I submit for your consideration a screen cap of the Q&A thread from the Webcast:

If there was any doubt before about where the battle lines are drawn, there shouldn’t be anymore.

In closing, here are a couple of other links you may want to check out:

• Microsoft’s Press Release.
• More information on the new VDI licensing model.

Bottom line: While I didn’t get everything I’ve complained about in the last couple of blog posts, and I’ve got to wait a few months for some of the announcements to be effective (nothing new about that), it was not a bad day at all. Definitely a step in the right direction.

A while back we had a couple of posts talking about application virtualization and server virtualization as part of our “What is Virtualization” series. We continue with our series now with the exploration of storage virtualization.

Storing data has been and will always be an issue for most companies, particularly given the rate at which storage requirements are increasing. Data storage is much more difficult than, say, storage of your own personal physical stuff.

To help me understand a bit better how storage virtualization works I go back to my condo reference. Assume that I live in a condominium complex with a bunch of other people. Since the units are a bit small, the complex offers storage units for the tenants’ use…a place to hold that extra bookcase, the leaf to your dining table, or your velvet Elvis painting. Unfortunately, each tenant gets only one storage unit. This means that if your unit is full it does you no good to know that your neighbor’s unit has nothing in it, because you have no access to it.

Now I like to travel, and when traveling I tend to pick up some knickknacks and tchotchkes from wherever I end up. I get back to my condo and find that my storage unit is already so full there is a note on my door from the fire marshal.  So what do I do? I do what most folks do:  No, I don’t get rid of anything (are you kidding?) – instead I rent a storage unit from the self-storage guys down the street. Now I have stuff in 2 different places. After a few years I have to get a third unit – but the unit down the street is full so I have to rent yet another storage unit across town. Clearly I have a problem: Aside from the obvious problem of being a pack rat, I have 3 storage units in 3 different locations. What happens if I need to find something that I’ve stored?  Will I even know where to look? (Clue: Probably not, because if I was sufficiently organized to keep a record of what stuff is in which storage unit, I probably wouldn’t be the kind of person to accumulate that much stuff in the first place!)

How does this apply to your business data? Well, one of the biggest problems we run into when trying to organize data in the traditional way, where each server has its own local storage, is that Murphy’s Law dictates that free storage space never exists in the server that needs it.  If my Exchange Server is running out of disk space, it does me no good to have 200 Gb free in my file server – just as it does me no good to know that your condo storage space is empty if mine is full.  In fact, it’s even worse. If my condo storage space is full, and I really trust you, I might make a deal with you to use some of your condo storage space – but there’s just no way to make that free space in your file server available to your Exchange Server.

“Storage virtualization” refers to the process of taking a bunch of physical disks and turning them into a central “storage pool,” portions of which can then be allocated back to your individual servers in such a way that they believe that the storage is local to them when, in fact, it is not. This separation of the drives from the individual servers is the key to storage virtualization and its benefits.

Since the drives are now managed as one large pool it is possible to perform tasks that previously were not possible, such as the migration of data between drives without down time, or being able to allocate storage on demand to the servers that need it. Storage virtualization allows you to perform these helpful tasks from a single management point.  We generally refer to this kind of storage virtualization system as a “Storage Area Network,” or “SAN.”

“Thin-provisioning” makes it even better.  Instead of trying to guess in advance how much storage to allocate to each server, and then potentially having to adjust things later, I can tell each server that it has way more storage than is actually available.  For example, I might tell ten different servers that they each had access to a terabyte of storage when, in fact, I only had a total of two or three terabytes of physical space in my storage pool.  I then let my SAN dynamically allocate the physical storage to the servers that need it – but only allocate as much physical storage as necessary to store the actual data.  The SAN will then alert me when I get close to running out of physical space so I can increase the size of my storage pool.

If my condo implemented storage virtualization, I imagine it would work like this. I would have one key and one drop off spot for all my storage items. Once I drop off my velvet Elvis I wouldn’t have to worry about where it would be stored and how much space it would take up. The storage management elves would find a place for it, and fetch it for me again when I requested it.  Since I have so much stuff and my neighbor hardly has any we may end up sharing a storage closet, but neither of us knows, or cares.  Heck, our stuff may be scattered across every storage closet in the complex.

After a bit of traveling, I may have enough stuff to fill up 2 storage closets all by myself. But I can still bring it to the general drop off location and not need to worry about which closet it goes in…because to me it looks like there is only one big closet. If management decides it would be easier to manage my stuff if it was all together in one room, they may elect to put all my stuff in a new, larger storage unit. All this would happen without me knowing or caring where my stuff is physically located.

Storage virtualization is not the newest technology out there – in fact, people were deploying SANs for all of the reasons listed above long before server virtualization became a big deal.  But storage virtualization enables many of the coolest server virtualization features, such as live motion – the ability to migrate a running VM from one virtualization host to another.  And we haven’t even begun to talk about the additional tools you may have for data protection, backup, and disaster recovery, such as the ability to leverage SAN replication to automatically send a copy of your critical data off-site. At the end of the day storage virtualization is great tool to save time, improve hardware utilization, increase agility, and most importantly save you money.

Your data needs to be organized and secure…just like my personal stuff. In fact, protecting your data is arguably more important, because the condo burns down I can probably get an insurance check for my physical stuff. But simply monetary damages may not be sufficient if you lose your data. (Can you even put a price tag on your data? Hint: How much is your business worth? Hint #2: What’s it worth to stay out of jail for violating laws on record retention?) Storage virtualization gives you another big toolbox full of tools to help you organize and secure it.

However it is still not an excuse to not throw a few things out every now and then.

As most of you know, XenApp 5 is not compatible with Windows Server 2008 R2. Citrix has been working diligently on an R2-compatible version. The “technology preview” has been out for several weeks now. Apparently the new product is sufficiently different that Citrix decided it warranted a major release number – so a few days ago, Citrix announced the release of XenApp v6. Here are some of the high points of the new release:

• The biggie, of course, is compatibility with Windows Server 2008 R2. This means, among other things, that it will be a 64-bit-only release (since R2 is strictly 64-bit). And that has obvious implications for things like print driver and application compatibility.
• New setup wizards reportedly cut installation time in half.
• New “AppCenter” application management console. Includes the ability to manage and deliver streamed apps using both Microsoft App-V and Citrix application streaming from a single point.
• Better integration with Microsoft management tools, including PowerShell.
• “HDX” (High Definition User Experience) support for:
• Real-time audio and video collaboration using Microsoft Office Communicator and VoIP soft phones
• CD-quality audio with 90% less bandwidth
• Plug-n-play support for USB devices like Point-of-Sale interfaces, webcams, microphones, scanners, digital cameras, etc.
• Support for the new “Dazzle” self-service application storefront
• New Citrix Receiver for Android mobile devices (and a promise that BlackBerry support is coming soon)

Along with the release of XenApp 6, Citrix is also releasing XenApp 5 Feature Pack 3, which will port as many of these features as possible back to Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 (non-R2) users.

Customers with current Subscription Advantage as of March 17 will be able to download XenApp 6 starting March 24. And, since XenDesktop 4 Enterprise and Platinum editions include full access to XenApp functionality, this applies to XenDesktop 4 customers as well as XenApp customers.

For more on the announcement, check out the following video from Citrix TV:


And for even more product information, see the XenApp 6 product page on the Citrix Web site.