JimMoyle.com

I was just with a client and needed a tool to launch a direct ICA connection to a server.  I knew such a Citrix tool existed, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember the name of it.  My Google skills also somewhat deserted me at the time and it was only later that I found the correct CTX article.

I was also under the impression that Nick Holmquist had stopped development on his xConnect tool which did a similar job.  Nick kindly pointed me to the correct Citrix Tool which is Citrix Quick Launch and told me that in fact he has not stopped developing his xConnect tool (think of it as mstsc for ICA).  You can find the beta download for his tool at tekhelix.

So I’ve had a chance to play with the new Citrix XenClient Express RC for a couple of days now, I was lucky enough to have a laptop on the HCL (a Lenovo T400) with enough RAM to cope with multiple VM’s.  When testing I’ve tried to keep in mind that this is a a 1.0 release candidate and not as yet ready for production.  Ian Pratt has famously said that if he knew how hard this was going to be he wouldn’t have done it, so was all that effort worth it?

Installation

Installing the XenClient host software was very easy and went exactly as it was supposed to, although there is no option to slip the hypervisor under the OS, or backup and retrieve the OS, so as yet, no in place upgrades are possible.  Whether it is possible to use XenConvert or Sysinternals disk2vhd to create a VHD, load it into the Synchonizer server and redeploy I don’t know, it’s certainly not a documented feature (edit: See comments).

There is two parts to the host installation software, though both install as one, the Xen hypervisor itself and what Citrix call the Citrix Receiver, now this is what they usually call their client software, so presumably it will act much more like it’s namesake later.

Installing the Synchonizer server was equally as simple, just import the xva into a XenServer and spend a couple of minutes configuring it as per the documentation.  I’m not surprised that there isn’t an option to use Hyper-V or ESX at the moment, although Citrix have shown that they are willing to port their virtual appliances to other hypervisors, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see the virtual appliances arrive on competing hypervisor products at some point.  At this point I would recommend a little bit of further configuration, which I will cover below in the XenClient with Synchronizer section.

Guest Installation

Creating the VM’s is again very simple, pick your OS, RAM and vCPU’s and that’s about it.  One issue with creating the VM is that the wireless card can only be used in shared mode, while the wired card can be used in the more traditional shared, bridged or host configuration.  This means that you can only use NAT with the wireless card, this could of course cause issues.  For instance you can’t configure an extra IP address on the card.  I get the feeling that getting the wireless networking to work was one of the harder things that Citrix had to do.

So far, supported Guests are limited to Windows 32 bit client operating systems, Windows XP, Vista, and Win 7 32-bit.  I decided to install Windows 7.  There is no option to mount an iso file and I had to search around to find a burner to produce the installation disc.  Windows 7 installed without a problem, though I felt perhaps a little slowly.  This may just have been a case of a watched pot, but I think without the guest tools installed, this would make sense.

The XenClient iso is automatically mounted into the operating system on boot, although this is the only iso file you can mount using the hypervisor.  The installation of the XenClient tools was very temperamental, either giving errors or missing installing the audio device. The installation takes a while longer than I’m used to, but I suppose it’s doing a lot more, after it’s finished two reboots are required.

Experimental Features

The two experimental features available are 3D support and application publishing.  I hope that both features make it off the experimental list and onto the supported list by release.

3D support is configured by enabling it within the Citrix receiver console and installing software in the guest VM.  This went pretty smoothly, I took a couple of screenshots of the windows experience index before and after the 3D was enabled, unfortunately I didn’t take a screenshot before I wiped my laptop to give the best comparison, but here are the two shots:

Before 3D

After 3D

As you can see the 3D performance is dramatically better.  How close it is to native performance I’m not sure.  3D can only be enabled on one running VM at a time.  Also you can’t publish applications from a 3D enabled VM, presumably as the publishing protocol (modified ICA?)  can’t handle the difference in screen output.

Application publishing seemed to go well and worked as documented.  You need to install software on both the publishing VM and the receiver.  I wonder if the traffic goes over IP or through the hypervisor, through the hypervisor would be more secure.

Peripheral Support

What is and isn’t supported seems to be a bit of a mystery at the moment, I can’t find any documentation on which classes of device are supported.

The extra buttons on my mouse don’t work, this is apparently because all mouse and keyboard input goes through the hypervisor and the more advanced features are not supported, I would guess that this means any proprietary buttons on a keyboard would be non functional too.  This is actually a much bigger problem than it might appear, with any new tech user acceptance is key and taking away functionality from such basic things as mouse and keyboard would affect almost all users and cause numerous complaints.

USB hard drives worked fine, except they were not recognised on boot, they had to be unplugged and re-plugged to be picked up, presumably the tools need to be running before the device is plugged in.

My USB headset was not recognised at all, despite the drivers being native to Win7.

The fingerprint reader on the laptop also wasn’t recognised.

Although I didn’t have a webcam to test, there are a few forum posts complaining about lack of functionality.  Citrix say they are hoping to have these in by release.

I said before that Wireless support was one of the harder things to do, I think that USB support may well be the other thing they had trouble with.  In device manager I always got a non functional USB hub, whether this is just me or an issue with the tools I don’t know.

XenClient with Synchronizer

Creating the template VM was simple, though remarkably slow, my transfer rate was between 500 and 2,500 kbps, this really needs to improve if you are transferring Gigs of data.  I then created a new VM and used the template for install, again worked fine, if painfully slow.

I then installed a few apps and took a backup of the OS, after which I destroyed my local VM.  Restoring it worked, but first the client downloaded the six Gig template image, then the 10Gig of backup, why not just restore from backup?  This also happened at a snails pace, I had to leave it over night .

Additional users can be created in the synchronizer or imported from AD, once there though they can’t be deleted.  This is due to issues with checked out VM’s.

One thing with the Synchronizer appliance, it starts with a default of 20Gig disk space, this will obviously get used up very fast.  Either you can connect it to an NFS share or expand the disk, I’d advise you do one of these at the very start to avoid space issues.

The Synchronizer seems to be very basic at the moment, I’d expect the feature set of this to be expanded before release.

Other stuff I tried

Windows 2008 server (32 bit of course) installed OK, and seemed to work fine, but installing the tools broke the wireless networking.  If you don’t need wireless I don’t see why this shouldn’t be absolutely fine.

Ubuntu wouldn’t install, it hung very soon into the process, though it would run live from the CD.

Is it any good?

I have to say I’m impressed, the consoles were snappy and easy to use, apart from some issues with installing the tools everything worked as documented.  I expected the USB support to be iffy and the HCL to be small. both of these will improve over time.  The HCL especially will get better quickly as Dell and HP OEM XenClient and add their own drivers.

Peripheral support is a big deal, they really need to get USB support as close to native as possible, or acceptance is going to be hard.

Guest support is OK, though Linux guest support needs to arrive quickly, one of the major benefits of having a client hypervisor will be having 3rd party virtual appliances sitting in the background. I’m sure this is where major innovation and value add from third parties is going to come.  Without Linux support, that’s not going to happen.

This list is taken from the CTX125133 article Citrix XenClient 1.0 RC User Guide.

Although as yet the HCL list is currently very small, I bet Citrix will be relying on third party vendors to OEM XenClient and add their own drivers.

Supported laptop models

*The 15.4″ Premium, UltraSharpTM WUXGA (1920×1200) Display with High Brightness (Wide View) is not supported. Only the 15.4″ Premium WXGA+ (1440×900) LED Display (Wide View) and 15.4″ Premium WXGA (1280×800) Display models are supported.

Hardware requirements

XenClient runs on the 64 bit hardware platforms listed above only. The additional hardware requirements are:

• Intel Core 2 Duo series processor with Intel VT-x Technology and VT-d Technology (Intel vPro Technology)

• 4GB or more memory recommended

• 160GB or more disk drive space recommended

• Intel Integrated Graphics 4500MHD

Note:

XenClient does not support the use of non-symmetric RAM DIMMs.

Supported operating systems

XenClient supports the installation of the following operating systems:

• Microsoft Windows 7 32bit

Note:

If you prefer to use Windows XP Mode to run your Windows XP applications on your Windows 7 VM, (instead of using a separate Windows XP VM) please ensure that you download the latest version of the Windows XP Mode software from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/. Some earlier versions of the Windows XP Mode software used Intel VT-x virtualization technology in a way that conflicted with XenClient operation. The latest version of Windows XP Mode does not use Intel VT-x virtualization technology.

• Microsoft Windows Vista 32bit SP2

• Microsoft Windows XP 32bit SP3

Note:

The installation or modification of software directly on the XenClient host file system is not supported.

As I’m pulling together my session for BriForum I need to choose which Cloud provider to use for the demo.  I’ve come up with a list of seven pre-requisites I need and thought I’d share them with you.  I’ve refined this list as I’ve experimented with various providers to try and judge their suitability.  This list has been compiled for what I consider to be the minimum for a production IaaS offering.  Don’t take it as gospel though, your needs may be different, regard it as a starting point.

1. Open API

This is needed to automate the start-up, configuration and termination of cloud instances.  Without automation the cloud infrastructure is no use to you, a manual web page driven administration process is not going to win a provider any points with me.  As a secondary point, it’s even better if they provide tools that integrate with these API’s.  Making me write tools, is again, not going to win any points.

2. Secure IP connectivity

By this I mean the ability to secure the connection between a cloud IP subnet and private infrastructure.  If I need to create instances on demand I need to be able to securely access the subnet they are on and hide those machine from the ‘net,  only being able to access machine securely on an individual basis will not do.

3. Decent guest start-up time

By this I mean under ten minutes guaranteed.  If you only promise between 15 and 45 minutes (RackSpace) then it’s too slow.  Also as billing usually starts from the request not the availability I don’t want to be paying for time I’m not using.  The solution for this would be to move to a billing from availability model, this would motivate providers to get guests up quickly.

4. Support for new Guest versions is quickly adopted

If a new hypervisor, or a new OS version comes out I want to be able to take advantage of those features quickly, I especially don’t want my local infrastructure to be held up by interoperability problems with cloud services if they are behind the upgrade curve.  When you are waiting on a large corporation to upgrade and your business is too small to put pressure on them to make you a special case then you are going to get pretty angry pretty quickly.  There is at least on cloud provider (I’m looking at you Amazon EC2) which doesn’t support Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 and it’s nine months after RTM.

5. Hypervisor Access

I need to be able to upload my own virtual machine appliances, whether they are from a third party or one I’ve made onsite.  I also need to be able to manage the hypervisor layer with the same tools and using the same skills that I already have in house.

6. Keyboard Video Mouse console access

There is a reason that servers have KVM boards, it’s that not all problems happen after you have RDP or SSH access.  You lose a whole lot of troubleshooting information if you lose visibility of the console.

7. Hourly billing

All instances should be able to be billed hourly, I don’t mind if you have monthly charges as well, but hourly should always be available, if I need a resource permanently, I might as well host it myself.  Give us the option to try out, demo and burst into the full range of your offerings.

So have I found a provider that fits the bill?  The short answer is no.  The slightly longer answer is that I’ve found one who are really close, close enough that I’m happy to use it.  That provider is SoftLayer.

I reserve the right to change my mind at any time as providers change their offerings.

BriForum this year will be running from June 15th to 17th in Chicago, this is a conference that I have wanted to go to for a long time, but never before had the chance.  This year not only will I be going for the first time, but will be speaking alongside my colleague Rick Dehlinger.  The topic is spun out from my blog post Do we have the right tools to cloudburst xenapp into ec2?  and will be a deep dive into what it takes to do this.  If you are planning on attending BriForum, come along and see what we have to show you, or just come up and say hello.

Here is the topic detail:

CloudBursting XenApp – hype or reality?

It seems like every vendor in the world is hyping ‘cloud’ somewhere in their marketing pitch. The noise is so prolific that’s it hard for any astute technologist to ignore. As desktop and application delivery specialists, many of us have been building and running ‘clouds’ for quite some time, albeit ‘private clouds’, private delivery systems, centralized hosting environments, or whatever the term du jour may be.

As we’ve come to expect, the delivery technologies we use and the plethora of available services delivered out of the cloud have evolved at a dramatic pace. As we dive down into the microcosm of our specific niche of the industry, we’re seeing a couple vendors pitching a hybrid approach to cloud service consumption – Citrix and Amazon. The noise they’re making together means that we’ll all likely have to field questions on the topic sometime soon, which begs the question: Is it real, or is it hype?

This session explores this hybrid approach to cloud usage (which has been called ‘cloud bursting’) and seeks to answer some of the key questions on all of our minds. It will seek to answer the following questions:

• What is ‘cloud bursting’?
• Why would anyone want to do it?
• Is it reality or hype?
• What are some of the things we have to consider before adopting such an approach?
• Which vendors provide the right cloud infrastructure?
• What are the infrastructure components we need to achieve the right result?
• How do Citrix and Amazon do it?
• What support does Citrix provide to help?
• What support does Amazon provide to help?
• How do I build it?
• Can I do it with ‘off the shelf components’?
• Can I extend my existing infrastructure?

With the release recently of the Amazon workflow studio library for Citrix’s Workflow Studio product, one of the major pieces fell in to place to enable us to cloudburst XenApp into the EC2 cloud.  Now it’s here I want to have a look at whether we now have all the tools we need to start putting this into practice.

So what is cloudbursting and why would you want to do it?  Cloudbursting is the ability to expand your existing datacenter infrastructure into the cloud.  This could be useful at times of high demand, for instance seasonal peaks around Christmas, or if your existing infrastructure loses capacity in a disaster recovery situation.

One of the major stumbling blocks on the way to widespread acceptance of utilising cloud infrastructure is the fear in the eyes of many executives of losing control of their data.  What happens when your critical data is stored on someone else’s infrastructure?  Is it secure?  Is it reliable?  Is the support good enough?  What are the response times?  Can you believe the providers when they say you don’t have to worry about your fears?

This is why a XenApp workload is particularly suitable to cloudbursting, there shouldn’t be any data stored on XenApp servers.  Also they should all be identical, making them conducive to fast provisioning.

Imagine the situation of a sales call center, over the xmas period they hire temp staff to cope with extra demand, as their software is provided via XenApp, the company needs to have enough infrastructure to cope with the demand peak, but sits idle most of the year.  As EC2 charges per hour then the ability to use EC2 to cope with the extra demand could save large sums of money.

Now we have decided that cloudbursting is a good idea, can we actually do it?  By this I mean are the tools available off the shelf, without a large development effort.

So what do we need?

• A secure link between the cloud and your datacenter
• The ability to quickly provision and decommission servers in the cloud
• WAN acceleration between the cloud and you
• Monitoring to know when to cloudburst
• Automation to control it all

Lets take these needs one by one:

A secure link between the cloud and you, currently Citrix provide an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) template for Citrix Access Gateway (CAG) with one in the cloud and one in the premise you can have a secure channel between the two. You could also use the Vyatta AMI.  Full marks

With the new workflow studio library we can quickly provision our own saved AMI’s and destroy them when needed.  The question here is why are we not using Provisioning server?  It would be best to provision a ‘bare metal’ server and PXE boot to receive a provisioning server vdisk. So Half marks.

WAN acceleration is possible, you can install the software repeater client on the XenApp servers, but a proper Repeater AMI would be better. Half marks again

Monitoring could be done either with Edgesight or the power and capacity management feature, so full marks.

Automation is the big problem, although workflow studio, now it’s 2.0 with more libraries, is getting there, at the moment it simply doesn’t have enough pre-configured workflows or libraries to cope.  We need a way to join the Servers to the domain and farm and publish the applications. (Although XenApp 6 will let us do this using GPO’s). We could script this, but I want to do it without any dev work. It also needs to be able to take in the output from the power and capacity management feature set.

So where does that leave us?  I’d say it leaves us almost there, in fact with a little powershell knowledge and using the tech preview of XenApp 6 it’s possible right now.

If I have time over the holidays I think I’ll try and set it up and let you know how I get on.

With the announcement of the inclusion of the PC over IP (PCoIP) Teradici in VMware View this week at VMworld.  I think that there is something people may be missing.

The big disadvantage of the original hardware to hardware PCoIP implementation was that each connection to the server required it’s own Teradici card.  This is obviously not a scalable solution.  As the software to software solution is unveiled at VMworld, the attention seems to be on the fact you can get the performance without stuffing your servers full of Teradici cards.  To my mind the software to software approach has a big flaw, you need power on the client. Power on the client means either a full PC on the other end, which defies the point, or a really expensive thin client.

The real key would be to go from software to hardware.  A software client on the server communicating with a hardware Teradici chip on the client.  You could avoid all the issues of managing the ‘almost PC’ modern thin clients and go back to the cheap, minimal management, devices I think thin clients should be.

I’m curious as to why this is not being made more of as the client devices are already there like this one from Samsung and if you look at the Teradici video on Brian Maddens site they say it will work.

As the devices get cheaper, maybe down to about $200 with the great performance of PCoIP I can see this being the ‘killer app’ for VMware in this space.

Edit: This post is relevant up to 11.2, Citrix changed everything with 11.2 Look for an update sometime in the future.

Generally the ICA client doesn’t get much attention, undeservedly so in my opinion.  So I decided to make this guide as a quick reference sheet for all you need to know about the Windows client for Citrix XenApp.

Most people install the client when they set up their first farm and forget about it, maybe upgrading with a major server refresh.  The people who leave old clients on their desktop estate are missing out on a whole lot of functionality.  So my first and most basic bit of advice is to upgrade your clients!

As the first bit of advice is to upgrade I’ll show you how to best do that below.  The rest of this post will only be relevant for clients from 10.2 onwards, if you have an earlier client, I’m sorry, but this post isn’t for you.

For a complete list of the features included in the latest client have a look at the Citrix Client Feature Matrix PDF.  Hopefully the new cool stuff (and the weird errors from supporting a mess of clients) has persuaded you to upgrade your desktop estate to the latest client which at the time of writing is the ‘XenApp Plugin for Hosted Apps’ 11.000.

A lot of administrators don’t even know which client versions they have out there, and unfortunately Citrix doesn’t help you very much in this regard, as it only shows the build numbers for connected clients and not the version numbers i.e. version 10.2 shows up as 02650.  In XenApp 5.0 and later, this client build number can be seen by selecting the user session in the Access Management Console and selecting the Client Build Number column.  So now you need to know what the build numbers mean.  The knowledge base article CTX112613 will give you this information.

Obviously once you have decided to upgrade your clients you need a way to distribute them.  To do this your standard software distribution method will be fine.  To create a silent installation download the latest client to your local drive and run the following command:

msiexec.exe /a XenAppHosted.msi

This will give you all the options you need to create a silent installation package tailored to your enterprise ready for distribution.

If you run into issues with upgrading clients and need a clean machine for install you can use the free tool from Gourami to remove all traces of the client from 2000/XP/Vista or Windows 7 machines.  If you aren’t comfortable with the tool you can use CTX325140.

So, now you have an estate of updated clients, but you need more granular control over the client behaviour.  You can get this by using a GPO, first you need to import the handy icaclient.adm administrative template. You can usually find it in “C:\Program Files\Citrix\ICA Client\Configuration”.  With this template you can control almost all aspects of the client behaviour, with the one weird exception being that you cannot manage the pnagent url.  The main topics in the template are:

• Network routing
• User Authentication
• Remoting Client Devices
• User Experience
• Client Engine

In most cases this should be enough to sort out most of your problems, if you have any niggling connectivity issues you should use the Troubleshooting ICA 32-bit and Web Client Connectivity CTX075552 article.

At the time of publishing there is a tech preview of flash remoting available on Citrix’s website, all I can say is it works superbly given the restrictions of the fact it is beta code.  Stick it in your test environment and have a go.  For more information on the future of protocols see my previous post: How games will show who is the remote protocol winner.

Finally, I have some tuning tips for your environment, I think most of these should probably be in the icaclient.adm file, but we’ll see if they make it into a future release.  If anybody has any more client side tips, please let me know in the comments and I’ll add them to the table.

Lastly, although this is not strictly a client side change, if you are accessing a XenApp Server on Windows 2008 with a client version less than 11.0 you will need to install KB949914 on the server to stop your clients crashing.

If remote protocols are almost exclusively used in regard to business applications, why are games important?  The reason is that if I try and think of what would be the hardest thing to do over a remote protocol, it would be to play games with the same quality as you would see them on your desktop.

Of course I’m not talking about web based flash games, I mean full on, high frame rate with lots of 3D and explosions, all in DirectX with HD sound games, actually lets add some kind of TeamSpeak in there too.

There are two goals in respect to remoting protocols:

• Get desktop behaviour no matter the application over the LAN
• Scale the fidelity of the connection according to the bandwidth and endpoint device

The first case is the one I want to talk about, VDI and TS vendors need to be able to prove that their remote protocol can cope with any type of application or companies are not going to be convinced that the old bugbears of bad sound and choppy video poorly synced are over.

If people are out there touting the ‘better than desktop experience’ line I want to see it and as yet the performance just isn’t quite there.

When Microsoft bought Calista back at the beginning of 2008, I had hopes that the features they were working on would have made it into RDP by now, but they just announced that their remote DirectX technology isn’t going to make it into final release.

VMware have the software Teradici stuff in the works and I have no doubt something from Citrix is out there.

The wild card as regards remote protocols go is a company called OnLive who plan to provide games over the cloud remoted to your PC.  I’ve no clue how it works, but I’m anxious to see.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to see someone get up on stage and demo a game over a remote protocol?  I wonder who’s going to be first?  I would say that in the court of public opinion, even if not quite in the technical detail (silverlight etc) then they would have ‘won’.

I’ve always had customers ask me, why can’t I just use VOIP over Citrix, when it works to talk to my niece in Oz?  Once we have good quality bi-directional audio the second device on the users desktop can disappear.  Once we have rich multimedia, users will no longer have to manage without seeing that great presentation from their CEO .

People are talking about Avistar at the moment in regards to this, but from the brief time I’ve had to look at it I think it requires some kind of broker server in the middle.  So if anyone can enlighten me a bit more about exactly what they do and how they do it, please leave me a comment.

Edit:  It seems I’m not the only one thinking about protocols

Virtualization Display Protocol Wars

Brian Madden on Calista