As you guys know I was experiencing all sorts of issues with XenDesktop 5.5. Most of the time, when trying to connect from a Mac OSX Lion client with the latest OSX receiver, the connection would just sit there, trying to do something. Probably 5% of the time it would succeed. From a Windows 7 endpoint it would work most of the time but still fail here and there. The only reliable client was the iPad where it would work pretty much all the time.

Given the time I had on my hands over the holidays I decided to take a look at the issue and was able to fix it. The problem is simple: do NOT use anything other than full XenDesktop 5.5 components all across the board. That means if your DDCs are 5.o or 5.0 SP1, do not BOTHER using them. Even though Citrix states you can indeed use older components, the reality is you are way better off using the latest and greatest components. The latest VDA with older DDCs may work for some but after using (trying to) this combination since 5.5 was released my findings show it is not stable and IMHO not worth following this path.

So if you are going to XenDesktop 5.5 make sure you plan to go it all the way. Every single component updated. It will save you a lot of troubles down the road. Plus as soon as you call Citrix for support, the first thing they will tell you is to upgrade all to 5.5…

Cheers.

CR

Esse é o primeiro post de uma série em Português dado o aumento no número de seguidores no Twitter que são do Brasil (para quem não sabe meu twitter é @crod).

Bem vamos lá já que o Mark Templeton acabou de entrar.

Como já esperado a palavra do dia é Cloud. Antes de falar disso, alguns tópicos sendo explicados:

- Citrix Receiver: em mais de 1.5 bilhões de dispositivos; Receiver para o iPad e iPhone, compatível com iOS 5 disponível semana passada, versão muito melhor!

- XenDesktop: solução de VDI número 1 do mundo, 75 clientes com mais de 10,000 licenças cada. 1,000 clientes com mais de 1,000 licenças.

- Citrix VDI-in-a-box: O Kaviza, oficialmente renomeado e relançado pela Citrix. Um dos tópicos do MasterClass no Brasil esse ano com toda a certeza. Simplifica em muito uma solução de VDI principalmente para empresas buscando uma solução mais simples, para um número menor de usuários.

- Aquisição da App-DNA. Ferramenta para ajudar a entender mais a respeito dos problemas que serão encontrados quando trazendo aplicações para o novo ambiente sendo criado. Sem dúvida uma boa aquisição que ajuda a entender coisas que na maioria dos casos empresas nem sabem sobre as aplicações que eles tem rodando há anos.

- Netscaler SDX: baseado no XenServer, permite rodar instâncias múltiplas do Netscaler, dentro de um dispositivo único.

- XenServer 6: SR-IOV melhorada de modo a permitir uma transferência de dados muito mais rápida. HDX 3Pro otimizado para o XenDesktop.

Agora um pouco da parceria da Cisco com a Citrix. Basicamente uma parceria de diversos anos, com foco na transição do Desktop para a Cloud. Claro que isso também abre o Citrix ICA/HDX para a Cisco o que significa um suporte muito melhor do protocolo nos dispoositivos de rede da Cisco.

Agora uma parte mais chata do evento, o Citrix Innovation Award, o prêmio dado a companhias que mais inovaram no uso de tecnologias Citrix durante o ano. Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland e Korea Telecom  concorrendo. Vídeos rolando… iPads em tudo que é vídeo. Aliás estou digitando isso ao vivo usando um iPad. Gostemos ou não do dispositivo a realidade é que todo mundo usa um. E quem não usa quer usar.

Prêmio vai para o Deutsche Bank. Mike Dituro no palco tirando foto com o Mark.

Agora falando de um conceito chamado VUCA (volatilidade, incerteza, complexidade e ambiguidade). Em Português, VICA. Analogia ao que enfrentamos hoje no dia-a-dia em mercados, empresas, etc. Basicamente um mercado volátil levando a incertezas o que tem um reflexo em complexidade e ambiguidade de negócios.

Agora falando de BYOC. Aliás aqui o Mark T. acabou de copiar o que eu criei para o BriForum 2011 em Londres onde criei o termo BYOD (traga seu próprio dispositivo, Bring Your Own Device). Copiou na cara dura. Caracas.

Agora falando de BYOCloud, criando sua própria Cloud. E claro falando dos 3 PCs, Clouds: Personal Cloud, Public Cloud, Personal Cloud. Aqui uma cópia do keynote dado no Citrix Synergy em São Francisco em Maio. Nada de novo.

Agora falando de TVO. Total Value of Ownership. Tudo aquilo que se ganha com um certo modelo de implementação que é normalmente difícil de se medir/perceber como impacto ambiental, recuperação em caso de desastre, flexibilidade, etc. Realmente faz sentido já que as análises tradicionais de TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) não levam diversas dessas em conta.

Assunto é Personal Cloud. Anunciando a introdução do ShareFile que a Citrix adquiriu no começo do mês.  Demo com o Jesse Lipson, fundador e CEO da ShareFile, agora VP e GM de Data Sharing na Citrix. Basicamente um DropBox inteligente para empresas que a Citrix vai integrar em algum produto. Aliás muito mais inteligente que o DropBox, com integração no Outlook (por exemplo arquivos anexos maiores que um certo tamanho vão parar diretamente no SharedFile ao invés de ficar ocupando espaço no Exchange).

E é claro clientes para todas as plataformas, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, etc. Realmente eles cobrem tudo. E funcionalidade é excelente, até com recursos de Remoção Remota (pode-se apagar o iPad remotamente, removendo tudo que é arquivo que estava nele).

Mudando para o GoToMeeting agora. Versões localizadas em Espanhol e Italiano. Nada de Português ainda. Mas a adoção no Brasil acredito que ainda é muito pequena.

Anunciando também a introdução do GoToMeeting Workspaces. Ontem tivemos a chance de dar uma olhada antes do anúncio e é realmente muito mais simples. Compartilhamento de arquivos para reuniões virtuais. Por exemplo se vai fazer uma conferência pode colocar todos os arquivos necessários em uma pasta compartilhada por todos que participarão da conferência. E dentro dessa mesma interface que nos conectamos à reunião. Excelente. Recomendo a todos darem uma olhada. Simplesmente procurem por GoToMeeting Workspaces no Google.

Citrix Receiver na parada. Anúncio do Citrix Receiver com Follow-Me Data. Basicamente transformando o receiver num repositório de dados, levando documentos para dentro do receiver e mantendo isso sincronizado entre todos os dispositivos sendo usados com o Citrix Receiver. Vai estar disponivel para testes em breve no site http://fmd.citrix.com.

Public Cloud agora, introduzindo o Citrix CloudGateway. Uma infrastrutura completa para acesso a aplicações e dados. O CloudGateway Express, para aplicações Windows e Desktops é de graça para clientes usando XenApp/XenDesktop. Claro que tem um upgrade para o CloudGateway Enterprise que adiciona algumas coisas a mais como o Follow-Me Data mencionado acima.

Demo do Gus Pinto que vocês viram aí no Brasil, falando junto comigo no LCS Fórum em Ribeirão Preto. Mostrando um sistema novo para controlar aplicações rodando no iPad, podendo bloquear aplicações remotamente. Também mostrando aplicações web sendo trazidas para dentro do iPad de maneira controlada. Interessante.

Rápido anúncio do XenDesktop 5.5 e XenApp 6.5. E é claro um pouco do Personal vDisk que é o resultado da aquisição da RingCube pela Citrix. Basicamente “fatia” o sistema operacional como o Parallels Virtuozzo faz e com isso cria uma camada isolada para o usuário onde por exemplo pode-se instalar aplicações que não fazem parte da imagem de base e não acabam todas no mesmo cache pessoal. Essas camadas são totalmente isoladas uma das outras.

Demo do HDX System-on-a-chip. Basicamente passando a bola para o hardware quando lidando com gráficos. Desse modo se diminui em muito o uso da CPU. E é claro que reduz o custo de dispositivos como Thin Clients. Agora é pagar para ver se isso se concretiza.

Demo do Citrix Receiver para o Windows 8 usando a interface Metro. Interessante. E mostrando a parte de touch funcionando com aplicações publicadas. Todos os gestos passados para o desktop remoto/aplicação através do ICA/HDX. Integração total o que realmente ajuda a adoção.

Acho que estamos quase no final. Citrix CloudBridge (agora é a parte de Public Cloud). Basicamente um mecanismo para conectar o seu ambiente em um provedor como a Amazon. Meio que um jeito de criar uma cópia do seu ambiente na nuvem, assim caso o seu ambiente privado vá para o saco, tem-se uma cópia exata na nuvem e com isso seu negócio não para. Claro que o Netscaler tem um papel fundamental nesse caso, fazendo o meio de campo entre a sua Cloud Privada e a sua Cloud Pública. É aqui que entra o Citrix CloudStack, totalmente integrado com tudo que é hypervisor.

Demo da parada sendo dado pelo Sameer Dholakia, VP e GM de Plataformas Cloud.

É isso galera. Um resumo gerado ao vivo durante o keynote do Mark Templeton aqui em Barcelona. Vejo vocês no Brasil dia 05 de Dezembro para o MasterClass!

CR

As most of you know, even though I run WTSLabs, I also spend quite a lot of time doing consulting work across the globe, having worked in all kinds of projects, from major App-V deployments to pure RDS Session Host setups. And that has been the case for several years and thanks to that I was blessed to be able to see all sorts of great and terrible things out there. So I decided to start a series of posts called “Tales from the Trenches” where not only myself, but other great names in the industry will share their best stories with us so we can all learn and realize there is indeed crazy people out there doing all sorts of unbelievable stuff.

So starting the series, this week, at one of my customers, very strange things started to happen with their XenApp 5 environment. Regardless of how it was architected and deployed (by the way, probably one of the worst environments I have seen in a LONG time, where pretty much every single worst practice out there was followed), the reasons and the outcome of how this whole thing happened is worth a post.

Couple weeks ago a maintenance window was scheduled due to some work on their electrical systems (generators, transformers, etc) and something went wrong. Really wrong. As far as I know one person got injured (or dead, do not remember - seriously) and power went out completely. No generators, nada. All gone.

This brought down the whole thing for a while and all Citrix servers were down. When power was restored, one of the six XenApp boxes (all Dell servers) had the hard drives toasted and it did not boot at all. They could access it remotely through the DRAC and it was indeed gone. So they let me know we had lost a Citrix server.

As I was away for that week after the power outage I told them I would check when back and to my surprise the farm was reporting the box as up and running and serving users. I checked my emails for any alerts from Resource Manager (yes, once I set it up for that, what they never did - please do not even start asking why EdgeShite is not there…) expecting to see a server unreachable message but no, nothing, nada.

So I go and RDP to that server IP address and indeed I get a session and it IS for sure a Citrix box, with the proper name, IP address and part of that farm. The funny thing once I started digging was this was no Dell server but an HP box…

At the same time most users started complaining their Outlook signature reverted back to what it was eight, nine months ago and some other very odd things…

After further investigation, here it is what happened… Someone had setup, back in July, 2010, a server for testing and as we had 5 boxes at the time on the farm, he created this sixth one and named it using the proper naming convention, just increasing the number at the end of the name so this became whatever-6. He also gave it a proper IP address and made the server part of the farm. Once he was done with his testing (what included allowing all users to use the server for a couple weeks) he simply shut it down, never removing it from the farm.

Later the need for a sixth server came up and a new Dell box was setup and given the EXACT name and IP as the now powered off HP one. When the power outage happened three to four weeks ago the guys at the data center powered on all servers that were off and as Dell #6 had a disk failure it did not boot but the HP one did and guess what? It started serving users immediately but as they keep the cached profiles on the servers, users started to get mixed things (meaning profiles started to get fucked up big time) thanks to 9 months old cached copies and the fact roaming profiles are not the most intelligent things in the world.

Thanks to great documentation and procedures in place no one knew or remembered about the HP server that was hiding somewhere in a rack. And of course due to the fact profiles were not properly handled with a decent and robust solution, hundreds of users got screwed up big time.

Next time you are done with your tests on a production environment (yes, this was production) try at least to disconnect the ethernet cables on the back.

Oh and do not forget to disable the wireless card on it, in case your company does think it is a great idea to use laptops as Citrix XenApp servers, serving users over the wireless card.

Well that is another story for another great post…

CR

This week I had some time available to give Ericom Blaze a try. For those not familiar with the product, it is basically an add-on for Remote Desktop Services that accellerates RDP performance using compression/shaping techniques. It also reduces the overall bandwidth utilization and the effects of latency. Ok, this is all they say on their marketing materials in a nutshell.

The bottom line for me, when running the tests, was to determine two things: does it work? And given its costs, is it worth? After some not extensive testing, this is what I found out.

Installation

Dead on simple. Just load a server component that does not even require a reboot on all your RDS Session Hosts (or Terminal Servers as it is compatible with 2003/2008/2008R2) and their client on all your PCs and Thin Clients. They cover all sorts of clients, from Linux/OSX to Windows XP/Vista/7 and even Windows CE. Nice. I even recorded videos to show you how simple the install really is. Here you have them:

Server
 

Client

Â
Performance

So here is the deal. No matter how good marketing is, the bottom line is if the product works. For these tests I simulated two different connection scenarios using an Apposite Linktropy Mini2 (a great device that deserves a review on its own). To determine how much bandwidth and latency I was going to use, I used the Speedtest.net website and the iOS app 10 (ten) different times and got the average numbers for each case. With these in hand I first created a baseline video where I use a plain RDP7 client on an XP SP3 box to connect to a 2008 R2 RDS SH and opened a simple PDF file and the Adobe Flash player website. Here you have the videos:

Baseline

With that out of the way I then proceeded to simulate the two scenarions: cross country connection and 3G. For the cross country, my ten tests returned a 2.5MBits down/1.9MBits up connection with 108ms latency, from Ottawa to San Francisco. For 3G, 2.2Mbits down/330kbps up, 112ms latency (using the Rogers network in Canada from a metro location like Ottawa). Again let’s watch the results:

Cross Country

3G

So what do I think of Ericom Blaze? Well the videos do not lie. It does help your RDS Session Host for sure but depending on the conditions this does not necessarily mean it is usable. IMHO Flash does get better but not to the point that makes it usable. Of course it will get down to the Flash content you have. I do expect Flash websites to work great. For video, at least on my tests, the audio was very choppy, choppier actually than with plain RDP7. But again, your mileage may vary. Bottom line is do I think it is amazing and that it greatly enhances RDP? No.

The second thing to consider, and to me the most important one, is the cost/benefit and here, again, IMHO, it fails miserably. At US$ 100-110 per USER, I cannot understand how anyone can justify such solution, considering Quest’s EOP does offer similar (if not better) capabilities in terms of RDP enhancements PLUS a lot more on the RDS SH side. And if you stretch your budget you are now in Citrix XenApp territory and its ICA protocol what does work great indeed.

Resuming: Blaze does work but it is not the silver bullet and may not be that great under certain conditions. Plus it costs. Way too much for my wallet.

CR

Today Motorola announced their new flagship phone, the Motorola Atrix. Citrix right after announced they are shipping the Citrix Receiver on this device and Chris Fleck also blogged about this phone as being the first true ‘Nirvana Phone’, a term they coined years ago for a phone that one day would be the perfect replacement for the road warriors out there.

As this info was under NDA, before the announcement I was discussing which phone this would be (as none of the CTPs had that information) and I mentioned before the announcement that I was certain it was the Atrix, what was later confirmed.

So here is my take on the Atrix and on the whole Nirvana phone concept and how I see this working one day.

First it will take more than manufacturers to make this idea work. The goal is to have a phone and from that be able to do almost everything you need during the day. Sure people have different needs and for that reason no phone will ever be the silver bullet that will work for every single person out there.

Secondly, if I need to carry ANYTHING, it defeats the purpose IMHO. For example, as of today even with the Atrix, you will need to travel with a bluetooth keyboard (and potentially a mouse), a dock, cables to hook this up to a TV/Monitor and so on. Well if that is the case I will carry my DAMN LAPTOP!

Of course if hotels for example would start offering bluetooth keyboards/mice combos even for a small rental fee per day, that would help a LOT this idea. I personally would pay US$ 4 a day for this. After all, the target market for this is probably someone that is always on the road on business so US$ 4 a day extra on expenses will not create another breakdown of the US economy. Even with the hotels jumping into this idea, unless they also provide docks and cables you would still need to carry something.

That brings us to Apple and their iOS. Not many people dug into AirPlay and what this could mean for this concept. If Apple opens up AirPlay to third parties AND work with other manufacturers to embed this into TVs, Monitors, Receivers, etc this would make an iOS device the true Nirvana thing. Just being able to walk into a hotel room and from your pocket send the video-out of the Citrix Receiver to the TV and wirelessly use a keyboard/mouse would be much better than having a dock and cables, even hotel provided ones (what I do think would help a lot this ‘Nirvana Phone’  concept). An iPad in this case would be the perfect thing to carry as it has a large enough screen for the local apps and processing power to run some very decent ones (what would mean companies writing iOS apps that tie into their backend systems/databases) when offline and when in a hotel room, use the Citrix Receiver/AirPlay to really shine as a Thin Client.

Regarding the Atrix, I still think it suffers from the same issues as any other Android device: giving the power back to the carriers. As an example, the Android device I have, bought 18 months ago from our loved carrier in Canada, Robbers (ok, it is Rogers), came with Android 1.6 and the freaking bastards over there refuse to release ANY updates for this particular phone. So once I rooted the damn thing and loaded Android 2.2, things got better. But this is NOT supported by the carrier and more than that, it is not really something you would give to most users to do. That is the main reason why I think Android sucks.

Add to that the fragmentation now created by Motorola, LG, Sony, Samsung and so on where an Android application that runs on a device like the Atrix will not work the same way on an HTC phone with their ‘Sense’ interface. In that respect, controlling the OS proved to be the right thing to do, at least from taking the power off the carriers and giving it back to the users. At the end it is up to me to decide if I do want to run the latest and greatest OS on the device I BOUGHT, not to the carrier. Their answer to that is ‘just buy the new model and get into another three year contract with us’. Sure, they want to milk the cow. Yes, you are the cow.

For the Apple bashers/haters out there, I do accept the fact my old iPhone 2G cannot run iOS 4. It is the same reason why your Pentium MMX laptop cannot run Windows 7. This market is used to that. But not intentionally preventing your Intel i5 machine from running Windows 7 just because it shipped with Windows XP.

So back to the whole Nirvana phone topic and resuming: I like the idea but I do think the Atrix is far from being the ‘One’ (hint to Motorola - name the next one Motorola ‘Neo’) and without help from other businesses like hotels, there will always be a drawback for this concept to really take off. And finally in my mind Apple is the one that can pull this off, given the traction iTunes will bring to AirPlay enabled devices like TVs and Monitors, really making things easier and better for us consumers.

I guess time to start a keyboard/mouse rental business that will partner with someone like Hilton…

CR

Two weeks ago I posted about my thoughts on the McAfee’s acquisition by Intel. If you did not have time to read it, it is here.

Resuming all that, the point made was that acquisition was probably just the tip of the iceberg and more than that, it would make a LOT of sense for Intel to acquire a company with a Type-1 Hypervisor offering like Virtual Computer, Neocleus, MokaFive and so on. I went one step further and explained on another post why Intel buying Citrix would make even more sense.

So as of this morning, you all heard the news. Intel is acquiring Neocleus, what gives them the Type-1 Hypervisor and the management solution in one package. With McAfee, that takes care of security.

The key question now is very simple. Is Intel doing all this (and again, there IS more to come, just stay tuned) to down the road build a platform that partners like VMWare, Citrix and Microsoft can continue building/improving/enhancing their virtualization solutions (mainly Hypervisors on this case) OR the plan is to come up with Intel’s own virtualization platform given the simple fact they already own the underlying HW one?

Again, the same way Microsoft leverages to its own advantage, the fact they OWN the underlying OS where everything runs, will Intel do the same from now on? A platform where everything runs faster and is way more tightly integrated to the HW layer below? Where all sorts of HW pass through work perfectly? Of course only when your virtualization platform is Intel’s. If you go down the ESXi, XenServer, Hyper-V, etc you lose all that. Is this coming?

To better understand what will happen in the next year, two little things the industry must keep an eye on: Intel buying NVidia (or a similar company in the graphics space) and how Microsoft and VMWare (Citrix as well but IMHO at a lesser extent) will react to all this in the short term (6-9 months). This will clearly give us the clues we need to determine if Intel is doing all this to make everyone else’s life easier OR to come up with its own, I-am-better-than-you-all platform that will keep everyone else out.

Time will tell if I am right or wrong.

So far I do not look that bad.

CR

Now that VMWorld is over, first of all I must thank God and Jesus Christ it is indeed over. The amount of crap I have seen posted on Twitter thanks to VMWorld was simply amazing. Of course it was not all terrible stuff. There were some nice things to be seen like the vSphere client on the iPad. Seriously, great stuff.

Also, I must, one more time, say that I have nothing against VMWare (or Teradici for that matter - some see me as the Anti-Christ for all PCoverIP related things, what I am certainly not). I still think they have some GREAT products and some GREAT technologies and more than that, I do run my company on top of their server virtualization platform for the simple fact I still think it is the best one out there as of today.

My gripe with both VMWare and Teradici is very simple. They distort certain definitions to make their products and/or technologies look good in all scenarios and as any smart person knows, especially on IT, there is no silver bullet. So there is no solution that can work perfectly in all scenarios. As I work mostly with Remote Display protocols of course that is what I am most interested about any VDI solution out there and how these perform on our new, always connected, world (remember, the WAN is the new LAN). And in this particular area Teradici and VMWare are usually full of bull (FoB). What I really dislike.

Back to the topic, Citrix as well is at fault here, not really helping the industry by throwing more shit at the fan. I do like them (and also give them shit when deserved - just read my posts about my XenDesktop issues in the past and also about the Citrix Receiver for the iPad/iPhone - gimmicky and for many customers I have, useless) and do like a lot of people that work there but I do think this week, Harry’s post was really not needed and simply stirred the shitty pot a little bit more. The same goes for Simon Crosby and his terrible YouTube video. People in this kind of position should be more classy when posting. Even when throwing shit at the fan (what can indeed be done in a classy, polite way).

Sure VMWare is no angel either. The abstract for that session they had at VMWorld (the one I posted a picture on Twitter, PA9449, was simply low. I mean very low). I have no clue what their marketing shitheads were thinking about posting things like ‘how to set RFP/POC traps for Microsoft and Citrix that will make it impossible for them to win the deal’. If they were in Canada I would definitely sue their asses big time.

The bottom line is this: both companies are wasting useful resources and time just bullshitting each other. Instead of getting together and coming up with something the whole community can benefit from (like a common framework for load/performance testing of their VDI platforms, preferably using third party tools like Login VSI, WANEmu and so on) and discuss the issues, again, with the community, so we all learn what is great and not so great with their products and technologies. One more time, please stop the BS.

I am certain not only myself but several other people are indeed getting tired of this crap. So please do something to stop this.

And for everyone else, please no fanboyism either. Be grown up enough to admit VMWare View is not perfect and in certain scenarios it may be crap and make no sense whatsoever. Same goes for XenDesktop. Each one has its own merits, benefits and drawbacks. And we all know that.

No more bull please.

CR

So I had a chance to finally get this thing working with our CAGs using two factor authentication with SecurID. Note at this stage the tests were performed on an environment where XenDesktop is NOT used and there is no ‘full desktop’ access to the XenApp backend. It is all done to published applications.

As it is today, on iOS 3.2.2 (as Apple did not release iOS 4 for the iPad), the Citrix Receiver, in this PARTICULAR environment, is lackluster. And I will explain why.

When using published apps the first problem is there is no easy way to switch between apps you are running. When you do it, the app you were on gets disconnected. So if you switch to it again, the connection needs to be reestablished.

The second major PITA is session sharing. If I logon to the web interface and use a regular PC with the Win32 XenApp Plugin and I launch two published apps like Outlook and Windows Explorer, these two run within the same exact session. Not with the Citrix Receiver. When I connect to the EXACT SAME environment, using the SAME credentials, each application runs on a separate session. Major PITA.
A simple idea to fix this crap is to have a Win32 app that grabs your credentials and retrieves from the farm which apps you have published to you that are installed on the server you are and then creates a dashboard with the application names and icons. Then by policy the admin could set something on the farm where if the Citrix Receiver is used, the ‘dashboard’ app shows up as a published app. So the user decides if he wants to launch each app individually or simply launch this ‘launching pad’ where he can see all his apps/icons. This would guarantee session sharing working AND at the same time eliminate the need to go back to the ‘Workspace’ to launch other apps, while still preserving the fact there is no full desktop access. Simple and elegant.

Printing: where the hell is printing? Gentlemen at Citrix, this is not rocket science. You can easily implement a solution that once the Citrix Receiver is detected (for mobile devices) a PDF type printer is autocreated and users then print to PDF files. At the end of the session (or at anytime if you want to) users can then choose to ‘transfer’ (over an ICA virtual channel) these PDF pages to the device and then retrieve these using whatever tool their device uses to sync stuff (HTC Sync, iTunes, etc). Simple as that. The fact there is no printing whatsoever is a show stopper for many places I have been discussing a possible Citrix Receiver + iPad implementation.

Mouse: this also baffles me, giving how simple this is and how easily it could be implemented (I assume the SDK allows that but who am I to question the Apple SDK Gods at Citrix?). If I use the VGA out on the iPad, why Citrix does not show on the iPad screen a picture of a ‘Magic Trackpad’ so the screen can be used as a trackpad? Mirroring the screen and making us click on it is plain simple dumb. Not to mention the lack of visual feedback on where my finger is on the screen when I am moving around.

Of course if you are using a full desktop or XenDesktop you will not see the published apps issue and if you also carry an iPhone you can use that as a trackpad with visual feedback on the screen (a pointer shows up on the screen). Still does not work perfectly but it is much better than clicking on the screen.

I also found some weird issues with the Apple Bluetooth keyboard like having to click on the keyboard icon on the receiver all the time to get it to work, even though it was paired and working on other apps (like Mail). Is it that hard to detect the keyboard is paired, on and use it as the default?

The bottom line for me is, the Citrix Receiver for the iPad does work and does allow me to connect to my apps but the experience is still subpar. Things get better, as mentioned, if you do XenDesktop or full desktops on XenApp but still, with no printing, not being able to use the screen as a trackpad and with no ‘visual feedback’ - a.k.a pointer or show where my finger is, experience is still half assed.

Hopefully Chris and Gus will read this and start fixing what is wrong before releasing a new Receiver WITHOUT these features.

CR

As you all have heard today, Intel bought McAfee. And will pay well for it.
So the question now, at least from my end, is how this can possibly affect or help the virtualization market, the one you and I live and breath on.
First of all, we all know for VDI to take off as a mainstream solution (what it is NOT at this day in 2010 - and will not be for a long time) it must get cheaper. By cheaper it means being able to cram more instances per server. This can be achieved in several ways like using the latest, greatest and fastest CPUs you can get and with as many cores as possible (and of course using quick ass disk subsystems like Fusion-io, caching/dedup like iLIO, using tons of RAM, etc).

The point is on the CPU space there is nothing that prevents other vendors like AMD to get to the level Intel is at. In many cases in the past AMD actually delivered better silicon than Intel. So Intel needs a way to differentiate itself from their competitors. Bringing stuff like AV closer to the HW is one way of doing this. Good for Intel.

And of course getting this OUT of the VMs will for sure increase scalability. That was the reason why McAfee and others were coming up with appliances and lightweight agents (to run on the VM) to offload all that work outside the virtual environment.

The main question now is really how Intel will pull this off by not being a software company really. How they will get McAfee going. Of course I think it is just way too soon for any analyst to say anything about this. Historically Intel has not managed acquisitions like this well but they were never on such scale and with such reach like McAfee has (good or bad, they do have customers and a name in the industry, especially since that .DAT file fiasco that screwed up more computers in a day than any virus they were trying to protect).

In the near future I do not expect to see anything embedded at the HW level. This is for sure something that will come way down the road as you need to come up with something that can be leveraged to anything running on top of that HW. This means you either change the OS that will be running to benefit from these new HW extensions (like vendors did when using the virtualization components exposed by Intel and AMD on their CPUs) or, in this particular AV case, you get an agent running on the OS/VM. Not an easy task to do considering the amount of hypervisors and OSs now available.

That leads us to a very important thing. To minimize this and make things much easier, would not make sense for Intel to grab a Hypervisor vendor now? Given the three main players on this space now, VMWare, Microsoft and Citrix, I am sure the low hanging fruit here is Citrix and I even wrote about this ages ago on the post ‘Intel buys Citrix’. 

This would give Intel a huge advantage over any other company in the Virtual Wintel echosystem. Controlling the CPU, the Hypervisor that runs on it and extra features like AV, would give you the ultimate virtualization platform, where your solution runs better or has more features than anyone else. Example? All the HW fancy features are only exposed to your own hypervisor (like Microsoft is doing with RemoteFX, only available to Hyper-V hosts) and of course your hypervisor will scale much better than the competitors as you own and know it all about the underlying HW platform. Then the next logical step would be to acquire a graphics company like NVidia (as AMD owns ATI) and leverage all that into the platform, exposing it to the virtualization layer. Then, buy a good storage vendor and a management/layering one and they are all set.

Sure such scenario could potentially bring a lot of issues to Intel from a legal perspective, as it did to Microsoft when it became what it is today. But certainly it would simplify the virtualization market a lot (and yes, I know, locking everyone into their platform - what may not be a terrible thing as Apple has shown the sceptics with their iOS echosystem).

The bottom line is this acquisition for sure will help the virtualization space in the long run (do not expect mystical benefits happening overnight with this acquisition) but I see it as just the tip of the iceberg of what is potentially coming down the road from them.

Feds, you better keep an eye on Intel.

CR

Just a preliminary and quick video showing RemoteFX performance when loss is there, with and without our IPQ protection.

We have been testing it under several conditions, with different latencies and loss and will be publishing the full results soon. We also have some data on how much bandwidth RemoteFX uses. Just as a quick example, WMV-HD playback takes close to 30MBits; running an app like Google Earth around 9MBits.

My personal take after testing it, RemoteFX CAN be used over the WAN as long as you know exactly what your apps are (meaning, WMV-HD playback is probably a no go) AND also guaranteeing loss is minimized as it does suffer from it, making certain applications unusable.

CR

As I did not have much time to test RemoteFX extensively, here are the first impressions of it and how we got it to work.

First of all, you MUST get a compatible video card. Not everything will work with Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1 with Hyper-V, so you can get your Windows 7 VMs (with SP1 of course) working with RemoteFX.

I posted about it before. You can read the list of supported video cards here.

What did we get?

- HP desktop with a six-core AMD CPU and 8GB RAM.
- FirePro 5800 Video Card (also tried the unsupported Quadro FX 580 that by the way, does work too).

Initially I simply tested the Windows 7 VM connecting from the Hyper-V host itself but later got another Windows 7 SP1 box and used that one to connect to the VM.

Performance is decent I must say. I tried playing some Windows Media HD videos (make sure you disable multimedia redirection by using videoplaybackmode:i:0 in the .RDP file (save the RDP connection to the desktop and open it using Notepad). Also very important that you set the policy for RemoteFX (as I was not sure where to set it, I set it both on the client and on the VM itself). It is described here:

To set the experience index for connections using RemoteFX

The key thing to understand here is, why you may need RemoteFX. For example, during our tests, playing the WMV-HD tests, it used up to 30MBits so as you can see it is VERY bandwidth intensive. For comparison, running Google Earth in DirectX mode used around 9MBits. So basically the bandwidth will of course depend on the application being used. The same for how intensive CPU/GPU utilization will be.

I would expect applications like AutoCad to use way less bandwidth than something like WMV-HD and what we will be testing next is actually using RemoteFX over a typical home (cable/DSL) connection, simulated in our lab. By typical I mean a 10MBits down/1MBits up with 40-50ms latency and some packet loss probably in the 1% range (or a little more due to bursty loss). Given the first results we have seen, I am confident RemoteFX can indeed work over the WAN (at least bandwidth wise) depending on the applications.

Yes, before Brian Madden sends me a tweet or leave a comment here saying ‘MS says RemoteFX is LAN only’, I still want to make the point that IMHO, anything that is LAN only has its fate determined already. DOA. See my post about this here.

And still on the performance side, what we have seen in a nutshell is this: RemoteFX does work great BUT it is NOT the same as local. Simple things like Flip3D (using Windows key + Tab) are NOT as smooth as running them locally. Even Google Earth (that works just fine by the way) is NOT as smooth. But they both work and work fine, considering you are over RDP. For a BETA release we can expect it will be tweaked and improved even more before it hits the market.

As a sidenote, keep in mind there IS a bug on SP1 that throws a message on the RemoteFX event log about CPU encoding being used for ATI cards. It is a known issue and has been fixed apparently on later builds, what of course I have no access.  But for 1 VM testing like we did (I am after experience testing and not scalability - I will leave that to people with more time and resources on their hands like Ruben and Benny ).

As soon as I have more results and some nice videos to show RemoteFX, I will post these here.

CR

Ok, we have been trying to get RemoteFX working and even though we knew not all video cards are supported, we were not able to find in a single spot a list of the supported ones with the Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta release.

After some digging around at multiple locations here you have it:

ATI:  ATI FirePro™ v5800, v7800 and v8800 Series professional graphics

NVidia: Quadro FX 3800, 4800 , 5800 and Quadroplex  S4.

That is it. You also need to disable the onboard video card on the machine you will have Hyper-V running.

Hope this saves you the time I had to spend looking for this information.

CR

As promised (I know, late) here are my thoughts on the topic.

It all started when Brian posted on twitter that he was testing RemoteFX with Gabe and I replied saying they should test it with loss. He replied pretty much implying ‘are you nuts? MS is saying RemoteFX is LAN only’ to what I replied ‘WAN is the new LAN so you should test it with loss’.

The reason I mentioned RemoteFX is simple and we must go back a couple years (maybe a decade) to understand what I mean and why I do think ‘LAN only protocols for VDI are Dead on Arrival’.

If you remember (and I clear remember this, back in 2003/2004 when I was working in Japan, accessing my machine over a dial-up connection) years ago all many people had was a dial-up connection to the internet. Things were ’slow’ at the time and everyone wished they had a much faster connection one day. The idea of having a 1MBit connection, only for you and at home or in a hotel was simply a dream. Everyone though when that day came, all our needs would be solved.

So fast forward a couple years and now, if you are cheap, you are probably using some ‘high-speed lite’ plan from your ISP that is almost certain, at least 1Mbit down/256kbps up. Considering all you had years ago, this should be great, more than you need.

As we both know, this is not the case. Your 1MBit connection is slow. Freaking slow. How come? Well as we can easily see, with more available bandwidth comes all sorts of new technologies like movie streaming, P2P file sharing, rich multimedia experience (from websites, from VDI hosted desktops and so on), etc. The list goes on.

That shows us clearly, no matter how much bandwidth you get in the next couple years, technology will find a way to use it. Either because you will be downloading BluRay2 movies (at 500GB each) or because you need your USB 4.0 WebCam running at 3840×2160 resolution, when connected to your XenDesktop 7.0 hosted desktop (running Windows 9 with 64GB RAM and 32 vCPUs - note it will still boot Office 2015 as fast as a Windows 98 with Office 97 - see Claudio’s Law).

And as we get more and more connected I can only see ‘remote’ workers growing. People that want to work from home, from anywhere and also companies that will start to reduce their office space (that is costly if you do not realize) by giving users what they need at home or anywhere they decide to work from.

That leads us to what I posted on Twitter. The WAN will become the new LAN.

If that is the case if more and more work is shifted to the outside (your home, your cottage, a hotel, etc) are LAN only protocols for SBC/VDI dead?

I do understand that as of today the ratio of users working in a LAN connected desktop and on a WAN connected one is probably 20:1 if not more. But again, is this what the future holds? Will we ever see a shift on this that may bring this down to 2:1 maybe? And if that happens, what future a LAN only protocol has? Type-1/Type-2 hypervisor solutions may alleviate this but again, there may be cases where I do want to work ‘connected’ to my hosted desktop and not from a locally cached copy (i.e. what if I can assign 64GB RAM/32vCPUs to my hosted one instead of using 8GB/2vCPUs for my locally cached one? It will for sure be MUCH faster for several tasks and a reason for me not to use the cached one).

My take on this is, for now, RemoteFX and any other LAN only solutions will do it and will of course help the adoption of a VDI model on the LAN. But as we shift towards an always connected model, if anyone tries to sell their stuff as ‘Good on LAN only’, that will become an issue.

So Microsoft and Citrix, make sure you keep in mind WAN is the new LAN and that whatever crap you develop or acquire in the future has a future on the WAN.

WAN is king.

CR

So here I am sitting at BriForum watching the PCoIP session (20 Common Myths and Useful Facts about the PCoIP Protocol). Before you decide to stop reading this, let me clarify what I think about PCoIP and what I was able to see first hand about it when doing all the tests we did with both ICA and PCoIP (and RDP for that matter).

First of all in certain cases and scenarios I do think the end-user experience is better with PCoIP. Yes, I said it. There may be some caveats though like more CPU utilization, more bandwidth (not really the 10X one that Citrix mentions on that Miercom report). But as we know from the old SBC days, how many times we deployed faster, better servers and loaded less users per box to improve the user experience? The bottom line is no matter what your project is, VDI, SBC, etc if the user experience suffers and you know you can improve it, you will do it. You may load less users per link to guarantee more bandwidth as an example. And then, does bandwidth (assuming you can increase at a reasonable cost) is really an issue? If there is more load on the servers, if I use faster, more powerful ones or even more servers, that issue is addressed. Sure, at a higher cost, lower density per box. But again, my point is how far are you willing to go to give your users that ‘almost local’ experience, especially on VDI that many people are praising as a desktop replacement solution in the long run? Some companies will do whatever they can to provide the best experience possible, no matter the resources/costs required. Others may not go that far. Really gets down to what you want to do.

Then we have what we have seen in the real world. Connections made from anywhere over the Internet or your off-the-mill WAN card. Again, if the conditions are right and depending where you are in the world, the experience will probably be good or even great to be honest. I do think the statement that PCoIP does not work on the WAN is not accurate (what I have never said). What I said on my previous posts is very clear. When things like packet loss come to the picture, PCoIP does suffer and suffers way more than the other ones. If you do not believe me, simply stop at our booth at BriForum. We have it connected live to a VMWare ESX environment hosting both XenDesktop 4 and VMWare View 4 environments. Over a real connection provided by Hilton to all exhibitors. Loss is there. Period. And all protocols suffer. PCoIP suffers more. Once we reduce the loss to 0.5% or less (and we have seen spikes over 8% here at BriForum), I do think PCoIP shines. My ‘visual’ feedback says it looks better than ICA in that case. Smoother experience.

I guess the main problem is the use of the word WAN. For some this means a highly controlled environment provided under a very restrict SLA. For others, like me, it can be a connection that I will have available from anywhere I am like a hotel connection, a rented 3G card, etc, over the Internet.

Considering that please do not try to tell me that the packet loss in the real world is between 0.01% and 0.1%. Again, for sure in a controlled environment, with a very tight SLA (that usually comes with a high sticker price) that is indeed the case. The reality is there are several companies trying to provide a way for their employees to work from home over the Internet or for that matter, trying to work from anywhere, from a train over a WAN card and so on. These connections do not have the same SLAs and quality as a high price MPLS. Simple as that. And more than that, differently from what people in Europe tend to think, the world is bigger than Europe and not every single part of the world has access to the high quality connections they have access to. Have you ever tried connecting from a not so remote location in Brazil back to your datacenter somewhere in the US? Have you tried to work off Tanzania or Kenya over an Internet connection? I tried and can tell you exactly what the experience is. If you agree with Teradici that there is no loss on the internet you probably never did any of that.

If Teradici really thinks the packet loss over the Internet is that low, sorry, they are ignoring the reality, living in an unicorn world.

Ignoring what is right in front of you with several researches showing you are wrong, just to make you look good is not only stupid but giant, mega bullshit.

So Teradici, let’s get together and run some tests from South America, Africa and Asia using PCoIP over the Internet and publish the findings together. I can guarantee you your magical mystical number of 0.1% packet loss is highly inaccurate.

CR

This week as you guys know, I spent quite a lot of time at Citrix Synergy 2010 in San Francisco and during that time we were able to extensively test how all major remote display protocols work over the real world WAN and in a certain way, what we saw simply validated what I was expecting to see.

First of all, let me define real world WAN and explain how we actually know what this is. If you are not familiar with our technology, IPQ, it is a packet loss reduction mechanism that works between two end points. As we adapt according to the network conditions, we must know at any given time what these are. That is the reason why our endpoints exchange a beacon at all times. This gives us over 25 stats that we use to determine the most effective way to deal with packet loss in real time.

Of course all that information gets stored and we can plot what we are seeing right within our web interface. And guess what? During this week we spent in San Francisco, doing our demos from a hotel room using the provided internet connection - the exact same one all of you had in your rooms - we have seen packet loss at all times. How much? From 1% all the way to 15% (burst loss). The bottom line here is simple: loss is guaranteed out there and it is MUCH higher than the 0.5% loss that Brian and Gabe used on their WAN simulator during the VDI Geek Week shootout. That is the reason why ICA, RDP and PCoIP performed relatively well on their ‘WAN’. In the real world, with unpredictable conditions, performance is not really like that. I am not saying that loss will be high and will be there at all times. I am just saying loss will get you several times during the day. When and how much that will be no one knows. But it will be there. For sure.

So back to the topic, how well does PCoIP perform over the real world WAN? Not that well as expected. And here is the living proof of that. Notice how much better PCoIP gets when IPQ is brought to the picture. It gets almost as good as ICA (in case you did not see our tests with ICA, go here).

No matter what VMWare and Teradici tells you, TCP with its retransmission techniques, in this particular type of connection (PPTP VPN), DOES perform much, MUCH better than PCoIP. Just watch the two videos for yourself (the PCoIP is also available in high definition 720p). At 3% loss ICA simply smokes PCoIP (that without our technology is virtually unusable - again, over PPTP. LT2P may change things, making PCoIP closer to ICA over the WAN). The game changes completely when IPQ is on. ICA improves for sure (again, watch the videos) but PCoIP at that point really shines. The improvement is brutal, huge. At the end we turn something that is really unusable over the lossy WAN into something people can actually use. It is that much of an improvement.

In case you want the direct YouTube links, here you have them:

ICA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw5lBk-bdv8
PCoIP: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXpbawlg90Y

The bottom line is simple. All current implementations for remote display technologies do suffer over the real world WAN. The idea of our technology is to work as ‘Network Insurance’ for your connection. If the conditions are good we know that thanks to our beacon exchange and at that stage we simply turn ourselves off. But when loss comes, we are there to protect you. Exactly like your insurance company. You have it and hope not to use it. Ever. But when you need it, you know it is there and that you can count on it.

That is what we are. Network Insurance for you and your users.

CR

I guess a picture is worth a thousand words. So what about a video?

Yesterday here at Citrix Synergy 2010 I had the time to record a quick video that shows how ICA, normally a very robust protocol for the WAN, suffers from packet loss. Before you go ahead and say the conditions of the test are not really ‘real world’ all I can tell you (and I can show it in person if you want) is the loss I have seen yesterday over the connection provided by the Marriot Hotel in San Francisco spiked during certain moments to more than 15-20%. So on the real world you will face packet loss at one degree or another. Guaranteed it WILL be there.

This quick test (runs for 6 minutes) shows a XenApp 6 server running on Windows Server 2008 R2 with no load whatsoever. We injected a 3% loss but again, were able to see huge spikes on it (remember, our solution, hardware or software based, sends a beacon between both ends all the time to determine how network conditions are at any given time and adjusts how mildly/heavily we do our magic and with all this data we can plot what is going on over the link in real time).

The results? Well see for yourself. My take on this is XenDesktop/XenApp do suffer. Period. In certain cases your users would experience serious lags when typing, very choppy video/audio and so on. Unusable? I would not go that far. Fixable? Yes as the video clearly shows. And also keep in mind this was all done over a hotel internet connection (the type you get on your room) in a conference where probably every single person IS using the hotel link AND this was done on a XenApp 6 box running in Ottawa, Canada, a couple miles from San Francisco (probably around 3,000 miles).

If you want to understand how we do this (remember, we are a layer 2 solution so we fix ICA, RDP, PCoIP, etc - we do not care what you run; we fix it) feel free to stop me at Citrix Synergy for a chat or just follow me on Twitter (crod).

Bottom line: even though these protocols do have their mechanisms to cope with packet loss, ICA, the king of the kings in the VDI world IMHO, does suffer. If it does, I can only imagine PCoIP will suffer even more (and RDP too). Oh we have tested them.

Yes, they suck.

Sorry Brian and Gabe but I must disagree about this. In the past two weeks we have been working on getting our demo environment up and running (so you can all see what exactly packet loss does with VDI/SBC) and we will be showing it live at Synergy to interested parties, in our suite at the Marriot.

As I still think overcommitment when properly used is a powerful feature to have and the fact that XenServer 5.6 is in beta, we setup our virtualization backend with VMWare ESXi and I still must say I really like it. I did not have much exposure to XenServer and Hyper-V so I cannot comment how they compare to ESXi but again, for what we need ESXi does the job beautifully and it is indeed pretty straight forward to get going.

So back to the VDI part, we asked one of our technical guys to setup XenDesktop and VMWare View, based on the ‘instructions’ I gave him (basically download the ISOs and follow the guides) and off he went.

As I do have my own XenDesktop environment at home (on ESXi as you remember from the saga I reported here) I was very familiar with it and do remember having no issues installing it and more than that, being extremely easy and simple to do. Keep in mind this is the free 10-user version so there is no Provisioning Server, etc.

Today I sat down with Matt (our techie) to go through the environment and to wrap it up by setting up a 2008 R2 RDS SH with XenApp 6. As we have been exchanging emails to get VMWare View going, I knew it was not being that breeze Gabe/Brian mentioned. So after checking what we had to go through, I have no idea why they mentioned VMWare View being ‘easier’ to setup. IMHO (and in Matt’s opinion as well) XenDesktop 4 is much, we mean, MUCH easier to setup. VMWare View is confusing to say the least, even for someone very used to a single ESXi server environment.

How are they affected by packet loss? Well that is what I am working on right now. The same way Ruben wrote the ‘VDI Storage Deep Impact’  I am working on getting the real facts on how latency/loss affect ICA, RDP and PCoIP. No marketing BS, just straight facts. As soon as the whitepaper is ready it will be posted here for sure.

Resuming this post: we found XenDesktop 4 much easier to setup for SMALL ENVIRONMENTS (what means Provisioning Services/View Composer are NOT in use, that you do not have a VMWare Guru/Employee sitting on your side, etc). Does it mean Brian/Gabe are wrong and we are right? No. It means you should take any comments, from anyone, Brian and myself included, with a grain of salt. Do not trust us gentlemen. Go try them for yourself and let us know what you think.

As you can see I do like VMWare and do think they have a great virtualization platform (main reason to have ESX/ESXi all over the companies I manage/own/work for) but View is far from being a breeze to setup.

CR

As you guys do remember, a while ago I posted about my experience on trying to get Citrix XenDesktop 4 working on my VMWare ESXi environment. You can read the post that started this soap opera here and an update on what happened next here.

First of all I must say that post started quite a discussion and more than that, it is the #1 search that is now leading readers to my blog, especially because most people think that as a Citrix CTP, I am not supposed to post things like that.

It is quite the opposite actually. Of course when I started that thread, Citrix immediately contacted me but not really because I did it. They contacted me to understand how they failed on not supporting me or not getting me answers for all the issues I had at the time and promptly started working with me very closely to get that environment up and running. And in the end I must say, it DOES work and DOES work as expected.

The outcome from this post that started it all is this: Citrix today announced they are OFFICIALLYsupporting VMWare ESXi as a host solution for their Citrix XenDesktop product! You can read their official statement here: CTX124952.

Of course there are certain features regarding the integration with the Hypervisor that will not work (Pool and Power Management ones). For a small environment, with let’s say 5 to 10 users in a company, this is in my opinion, great news. It is an easy way to dip your toes into the VDI world at pretty much no cost. Build a small server running ESXi (free, or use the paid version that is on sale at $495 until June, 15th I think) and create your XP/Windows 7 VMs on it for your users. Again, for a small shop I do see this as a great solution. Pretty much all you need is there, including a Web Interface, Gateway, etc. Unbelievable value at no cost. And if down the road you do feel you need the features available on the paid versions, it is not hard at all to upgrade.

And technically, what fixed the issues I was having is all that is described on the second post on this thread ANDa ‘power’ setting on Windows 7. Apparently by default it will go into ‘Standby’ after a couple minutes. Once I changed all power settings not to turn anything off at all ever, the problem was resolved. I can now consistently logon to the Web Interface and get to my XenDesktop 4 Desktop.

So resuming: XenDesktop 4 DOESwork with VMWare ESXi ANDit is now fully supported by Citrix, thanks to your friendly neighbor CTP here.

By the way, it works beautifully.

CR

Now that our BETA program is open (please join it by emailing us at BETA at IPeakNetworks dot com) of course I keep getting questions on how our solution works, what is required and so on. So here you have it, right from the source.

First of all, as mentioned before we are completely protocol agnostic. We do not care if you are PCoIP, ICA, RDP, RDP with RemoteFX or even if you are doing video conferencing only. Our solution works in all cases as we are at a lower level.

Secondly, the solution exists in two forms: a software driver (for Windows XP/Vista/7, Windows Server 2003/2008 and Linux at this stage - yes, no Mac OS X until the market shows us it makes sense) and a hardware appliance (in this case it can be physical or a VM - we are working on having it ready for ALL major virtualization platforms, ESX, XenServer and Hyper-V). The two ends being protected must of course run our solution.

So let’s see a couple examples. One would be a field worker with his laptop running our driver, connecting back to the main office where our appliance sits. Anything going from his PC to the appliance will have the packet loss reduction in place. So if he hits a XenDesktop, XenApp, video conferencing, whatever solution that is now behind our appliance (that is really a bridge, not routing anything), he gets protected. Another example would be a remote office to main office connection with two appliances, one on each end. Easy enough?

Now, the main question everyone is asking is “How the hell do you do it?”. Here is the quick explanation (well not so quick).

Basically it works by first monitoring network flows. Then, when it detects a flow that can benefit from protection against packet loss, it adds a non-disruptive beacon to the flow. This beacon has no impact on end-devices but is detected by other IPQ systems. When our system detects a beacon from a far end system, it knows that it can communicate directly with that the IPQ peer.

All communications between IPQ pairs including control and data messages are inserted directly into the existing network flow in a manner that is entirely friendly to NAT and firewall systems. With both peers of the IPQ ‘pair’ connected and communicating, there is a negotiation session to determine the best way to protect the network flow based on the following analysis:

• Current Network Conditions. How good or bad is the network at this moment?
• Application Sensitivity to Loss. How much loss can the network application tolerate before the quality of experience is impacted?
• Packet Size. What size are the packets in this flow?

Using the results of the analysis, IPQ divides each packet, one packet at a time, into the optimum number of segments. An extra segment is also generated to provide protection for the other segments. Should an original segment fall victim to packet loss, the extra segment is used to recreate it.

One more thing worth mentioning is our Real Time Optimization techniques.

The IPQ peer on the receiving end of the pair is able to recreate the original packets as long as enough of the segments are received. By comparing the number of segments received to the number transmitted, the receiving IPQ peer is able to detect changes in network conditions. Those changes are communicated to the transmitting peer as they occur and the level of protection applied to the network flow is adjusted and optimized in real time. This critical monitoring function is ‘always on’ but when network conditions are excellent, IPQ suspends the protection function and no extra segments are created. Monitoring continues, however, and IPQ is ready to apply optimum protection when network conditions deteriorate.

And again, this is all truly Plug ‘N’ Play. If you are coming to Synergy, PLEASE I ask you to join our BETA and stop by to see the demos we will have ready to go! I am sure you will be impressed.

CR

Last week as you all know Microsoft announced RemoteFX, the name for all the work/technologies they acquired from Calista a couple years ago (amazing how long it took them to get here. Subject for another post). All nice and great for VDI and I am certain, with the licensing changes announced as well, it will help the industry moving forward towards the adoption of such model in a larger scale.

The main problem now is simple. As Shawn Bass mentioned on Twitter, ‘WAN is King’. And that is definitely true. With the rise of mobility, either on mobile devices like the iPhone/iPad or on full blown PCs connected through 3G cards, several companies do rely on these to connect back to corporate and more than that, are willing to expand such option for an ‘always connected’ solution. The problem is, once you hit the 3G/EVDO data network, latency and packet loss will be there. Guaranteed.

The end result is a much worse experience over the WAN, no matter what kind of magic Citrix, Microsoft or VMWare have as of today. Throw Riverbed and all other products like that to the mix too. They do help. But again, once packet loss/latency is there, they are also in bad shape.

That is where we come to the picture.

After years of development, we now have a hardware (appliance) or software solution (driver) that you can mix (HW-HW or HW-SW or of course, SW-SW) that drastically reduces packet loss (typically to 1/10 of what you had before using us - so to 0.5% if you had 5% loss before) and makes life on the WAN much easier for all the things mentioned on the title of this post.

The good news is this is a mature technology that we developed and that has been in use by some large people out there (no names at this point) for other things (video conferencing mostly) with impressive results. But once we realized how much we could do for SBC/VDI, after testing it internally, we decided to take it to the public, to validate and prove the results we have seen with RDP, ICA, PCoIP and other things. So our BETA program is officially open as of today.

If you are interested on testing our solution, all I ask is you to email us at BETA at IPeakNetworks dot com and of course let us know about your environment so we can assist you on how to get the most out of it. And yes, I do ask you to provide honest feedback. What you have seen before and after. Good or bad. We are here to listen.

For now we do not have our SW solution ready for all platforms but it is in the works (it is Win32/Linux for now) and the HW one we should have available as virtual appliances for all major virtualization solutions (VMWare ESX, XenServer and Hyper-V) shortly.

I do think the VDI battle will be decided on the WAN. Vendors, no matter which one, do realize that but may not want to say it, especially if whatever protocol they have sucks on the WAN. Again, with high speed wireless available everywhere it is just natural that more and more employees will be indeed connected to their desktop/session over a wireless connection. So the WAN is the battle ground. Period. 

We are the ammunition.

CR

So yesterday I got an email from Gabe letting me know that all the sessions I submitted to BriForum 2010 were selected. Great news and always a pleasure to be part of BriForum, an event I have been presenting since its inception and the only one I missed was the one in Germany. Other than that, I have been to every single one and it has always been a great conference.

What I like the most is the interaction you can get with the presenters and the complete no bullshit approach. If a presenter does think some product is a piece of shit, he can (and will) openly say it. That is great because it gives you an honest view of all the vendors/products that are relevant in this space and that alone is simply priceless.

Back to my sessions, what will I be presenting? Three sessions (probably some people will join me - Steve Greenberg is confirmed as far as I know and others are welcome as mentioned before):

- “The top 10 mistakes why VDI projects fail”.
- “The top 10 mistakes why TS/Citrix projects fail”.
- “Citrix EdgeSight for Load Testing Best Practices”.

The first two are pretty much self explanatory. I had the opportunity over the years to work on environments ranging from 2 to 50,000 concurrent users, government and private sector and trust me, I saw everything you can imagine. So now it is time to put this on paper and let other people learn with the mistakes we have seen in the past. I do think these will be great sessions, especially now that everyone is talking about VDI and thanks to that, TS is also booming (well once you see the price tag some people actually go for TS ). Jokes aside, honest view of both technologies and how to avoid screwing yourself up when deploying these.

The EdgeSight for Load Testing will be a great one too. I have been using it since it was known as TLoad (before ThinGenius was acquired by Citrix, making some Scottish people very, filthy, rich ). All I can say is the tool works but is tricky to get it working reliably and sometimes a PITA to work with. And I think tons of people are not really using these tools properly (even Login VSI is not used properly IMO) and that is why the results they are getting do not really match what they see in production. I am not saying I will show you how to magically do that. But I will try to make sure you understand how to get as close as possible to real world results by using ESLT.

Wrapping up, I am very honoured to be part of BriForum again, my 7th one!

If you are looking for the best no bullshit Virtualization/SBC conference out there, BriForum is the one.

See you in Chicago.

CR

I think I owe you, readers, an update on what is going on with my XenDesktop 4 environment and where we stand at.

First of all, after reading the article Bridget Botelho wrote today, I do have a couple comments. I did have (and still have some) issues with my XenDesktop 4 deployment on VMWare ESXi. After discussing the issues with Citrix, note this is not a supported solution so now I do have a formal answer from them and again it is: ESXi is NOT supported. This does not mean it does not work. It just means they have not tested it or gave the same level of attention as for the full blown ESX or Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

My feedback on ESXi is, it does work and I do think this would be an awesome solution for small companies and a great way for Citrix to introduce XenDesktop to these small VMWare customers (for the small shops, I said many times memory overcommitment is indeed a great feature to have and as of today XenServer does not support it - I am all for testing XenServer once that is supported and recommending it to the small guys).

The issues I pointed out on my previous post, I have discussed with Citrix this week and they have been very helpful on determining the culprit. The first one, the video driver issue, is documented on CTX123952 as Calvin Hsu from Citrix pointed out and that was exactly what shanekleinert sent my way. That fixed it. My suggestion to Citrix is let’s leverage the power of Twitter and Blogging tools and make sure something this big that has the potential to affect tons of users gets posted everywhere ASAP, especially considering it has a very simple fix.

In terms of complexity to get a XenDesktop 4 environment going I must disagree with the feedback given on Bridget’s article. If you are used to Citrix products, it is very straight forward and actually extremely simple to get it up and running. If you are not familiar well then it is like any other unfamiliar technology/product: there is a learning curve for sure. Big or small I cannot comment as again, I am very versed on Citrix. But honestly, for a newcomer, I cannot see XenDesktop 4 as rocket science. It is WAY simpler than Microsoft’s VDI offering.

Back to the issues and where we stand at:
- The video one is fixed as per my comments above.
- There was some weird ‘hanging’ issue (the VM would seem locked up) and another one where I had to click multiple times on the ‘connect’ button to get to the VM. Once I upgraded the Mac OS X client to 11.1 (I was on 11.0) these issues are gone. So make sure you are on the latest client (tested with Windows 7 PCs as well and it is working good).
- The only one remaining is the major one and again, Citrix is on top of that trying to find the culprit. The problem, in case you are not aware, is the connection to the VM fails once I login to the Web Interface. If I then go to the vSphere client and launch the VM console and move the mouse around to somehow ‘wake up’ the VM, the connection then works just fine from the Web Interface. If I use it and logoff and try to login again, it works. But if I logoff and do not touch the VM for a while, it goes into this ’standby’ mode. The vSphere console shows the VM barely using any resources when that happens. I played a little bit with the Power options on Windows 7 (as that could be the issue) but so far it seems the same. The one test I need to do is to try RDP first to see if it connects. If it does there is probably something going on between the VM and the DDC. To be determined.

So after using it for a couple weeks now, testing all sorts of apps and streaming video, on a heavily used ESXi host, this is what I have to say about XenDesktop 4: yes, I do have now one single issue that I am sure will be solved (I do appreciate Citrix’s help considering I am using an unsupported platform) and that issue aside, it works extremely well on both LAN and WAN and as Shawn Bass mentioned in one of his tweets, WAN is king for sure and to me that is the main reason why I think XenDesktop, as of today, is ahead of VMWare View.

Once my final issue is solved I will be a happy camper and for sure will be posting here the final chapter of this soap opera.

Stay tuned.

CR

As you know Windows Server 2008 R2 has been around for some time now but as several of our customers are still on 2003 or 2008, I did not have a change to get deep into it.

Of course most of the new features (i.e. two-way audio, virtual IP addressing, etc) I had a chance to play a long time ago and even presented about 2008 R2 at BriForum.

Now as I am working on updating the guide I wrote (”Terminal Services A to Z”, available here), I had to go through all the stuff Microsoft blessed us with on 2008 R2: RDS Web Access, RDS Session Broker, RDS Gateway and so on. What did I find?

If I had to define in a single word, the experience of setting up a load balanced solution with a web interface and a gateway using only 2008 R2, that would be the word: frustration.

To understand the reason for that, you may need a little bit more information and history about me. Back in the days when Citrix was the only solution, with Provision Networks still in its infancy, I envisioned and designed a solution that was not only modular but dead simple to setup and use. This idea, or dream,  turned into real products that many here will remember: WTSPortal, WTSGateway Pro and so on. People all over the world used our solutions and everyone seemed to agree at the time that we did it in such a way that we had pretty much NO support calls whatsoever. It simply worked and worked in a way that even your grandma could set it up and manage it. The Library of Congress used our products. So did the Jet Propulsion Lab and NASA. Warner. Disney. Hilton and so on. All these people trusted a three men shop.

So years ago (2003/2004) we had all that sorted out: RDP over HTTPS, Published Applications, Resource Based Load Balancing and so on and no kidding, it would not take you more than 30 minutes to get all going.

Simple and elegant design. More than that, I would say, smart design.

Today after going through all the stuff required to get RDS Web Access, RDS Gateway and RDS Session Broker up and running I am simply baffled. Stunned. This is for sure the epitome of bad design. I am still banging my head in the wall just thinking about how the setup of all this makes no sense and more than that, what a steep learning curve this will be for anyone that is now on Windows Server 2003 TS.

In laymen terms, Microsoft simply made it difficult and hard. Add to that a bad design to start with and you have a solution that, even though it works at the end, is simply stupid. To put in perspective how bad it is, it makes Citrix and its 12,000 consoles look great.

What amazes me the most is Microsoft had YEARS to watch what others did and learn with their mistakes and then come up with something clean. Smart. Unfortunately that was not the case. Not even Jesus Christ can set this thing up without reading AND reading AND without banging his head somewhere. And trust me, at one point he will call his dad for help.

The weird part is I know most of the developers or the people involved with RDS in Redmond and they are indeed good, smart and hard working people. This creates a paradox in my mind. How such great resources could create such a piece of junk. Junkware.

Again, I am not debating if the solution at the end works. It does. I am discussing how easy it is to setup, how smart the design is and so on. And in that respect, they simply failed to deliver. I am telling you that based on 15+ years of experience doing nothing else other than TS/RDS/Citrix deployments and starting companies focused on TS/RDS development. I may look stupid indeed but I know some shit about these things.

Simplicity and clean design are key elements on any good piece of software, what someone in Redmond seems to disagree.

Light up a candle, hold hands and pray for changes in Windows Server 2010 RDS. They are needed.

CR

I know tons of people will email me or comment saying I am a prick, an idiot and things along these lines. But after using Citrix XenDesktop 4 for a while, I have to give some feedback to tons of people that are probably trying the product the same way I am. That means the small shop willing to go for the free 10 licenses for XenDesktop 4.

First of all some background information here. I have been working with Citrix products for at least 15 years now. Yes, that long. I have seen it all. The good, the bad, the ugly. Citrix is indeed a company capable of great feats and at the same time, bottom crap shit. So I can safely say I am pretty versed on Citrix and its product line up.

On the virtualization frontend, even though I am no VMWare vExpert I have been using their stuff since VMWare Workstation 1.0. Used GSX, ESX, VMWare Server, VMWare Fusion, VMWare Player and so on. Deployed some decent size virtualization environments too (200+ servers). Pretty versed on it and decent knowledge on the underlying components.

Resuming: I am not as stupid as it looks like.

So what have I been trying to achieve? Very simple (and cheap). At home I have a Dell PowerEdge T105 box with 8GB RAM and 2×500GB disks (RAID 1) with dual NICs, connected to a Dell PowerConnect 2824 switch. The T105 runs ESXi 4.X (free version) and has always worked fine. Great product for sure. And yes, I do use memory overcommitment and for my needs it is simply perfect, with no performance issues whatsoever. Before you ask, yes, that is the main reason why a Citrix CTP decided to use VMWare ESXi instead of XenServer. The lack of overcommitment, for ME, is a show stopper. I wrote more about the topic here.

Back to the topic, as we are indeed a small shop, this little guy runs all for us. 2008 DC, 2008 Web, 2008 with Exchange 2007 plus two XP VMs. Actually this post you are reading is hosted on my 2008 Web Server, running under this ESXi box.

So I decided to test something very simple. As I got a freebie last year at BriForum (remember, I am the current champion of the Geek Out show that happens every BriForum) from Wyse (a Windows XPe terminal, notebook form factor) I decided to give it a try as a thin client for a XenDesktop 4 solution (by the way I had SEVERAL issues with the stupid Wyse X90 - probably will post about these later, so buyer, BE AWARE).

Got the free XenDesktop 4 license (good for 10 users) and followed the whole installation guide. Setup another VM on my ESXi (2003 Server with IIS, etc, part of my 2008 AD) and also setup a Windows 7 VM (1GB RAM). The setup could be easier and certain things make no sense whatsoever. But I somehow expected that to be the case coming from Citrix (they are a bunch of smart people that sometimes find some very weird and cumbersome ways of doing things).

Once I had all up and running I faced the first problem: the Windows 7 VM would simply hang after logging in from the DDC Web Interface. Looking at the ESXi console I could see the VM there, up and running but I would not be able to login (when it was shown as available - more on that later). After ranting a little bit on Twitter someone facing the same issue mentioned a problem with the video driver and a possible workaround. Tried that and indeed that issue was fixed.

Great so I thought.

Not too fast there fellas. Once that was fixed now I had to deal with a more serious issue. When I login to the DDC WI, it tries to start my Windows 7 VM but fails and throws an error. I then go to the vSphere console and I can see the VM all good there and I can even logon to it. Once I do that, almost like waking it up from some sort of ’standby’ then the web interface/DDC works!

I discussed the issue with several other people running a similar setup (small shop with free ESXi) and they all face some sort of issue with XenDesktop 4. Apparently if you use Windows XP, what I have not tried, it works. But that I refuse to do as I left XP for good and more than that, as my customers are all considering a similar Windows 7 approach I must stay with the latest and greatest technology. So I do not care if it works with XP. Citrix does say Windows 7 is supported and I cannot see anywhere saying the free ESXi is not supported as Mr. Joe Shonk mentioned (so I assume it is for this unmanaged desktops case).

The bottom line for me is simple. When it works, XenDesktop 4 is a great product. But there are still issues not only at the core but on other components from what I hear (Provisioning Server issues, XenServer reliability problems and so on) and what amazes me is some of these, like the first one I had, apparently are known issues. If that is the case why not adding a readme file that explains these and the workarounds? Or why not fixing that crap?

I do see the power of XenDesktop and where it can take VDI once it is integrated with XenClient. But for now, Citrix, please let me know what needs to get done to make this work. I am sure several small businesses would jump into the VDI bandwagon with the free 10 licenses everyone can get for XenDesktop 4 but it must work.

If I find a solution or if Citrix decides to take a look at my problem I will let you guys know.

If I disappear after this post you know Citrix got me. For good.

CR

When Apple announced the iPhone three years ago, I was excited. It was truly a revolutionary product, way ahead of everything else at the time (sidenote: sorry but I do not see the iPad on the same league - it is just a ‘bigger’ thing that has a three year old OS/Interface on it). I told myself that day, January, 9th that I would be buying one (even though I live in Canada and things do move very slowly up here when compared to the US) when released. And once I managed to find my way to the Microsoft MVP Summit in the following year I got one.

Great device. At the time. Three years ago.

Fast forward three years and the latest and greatest iPhone is indeed VERY similar to the one released that year. In many ways the platform became stagnant. Sure there are tons of apps on the AppStore. But that does not mean the platform itself is evolving.

Looking at the iPhone today, now the ‘reality distortion field’ effect worn out, I can clearly see all the flaws on the iPhone, after using it for over three years. In many ways, it is a PAIN IN THE ASS phone.

First of all the thing is totally tied to Apple (and I do not like Apple for several reasons, even though I do have four Apple machines at home) what means ‘you, peasant, use what we Apple want you to use’. It is almost like a ‘Porschesque’ experience. When I got my Porsche, at the time there was no way to hook up an iPod to the vehicle due to a proprietary fiber optic bus. No bluetooth either. When I asked Porsche why, they told me in a Porsche all you want to hear is the engine, not music from your iPod. Great. Same approach applies to Apple and their products. If you ever wondered why you cannot arrange your music library into ease-to-follow folders, it is because you do NOT need it. Trust Apple on that. They know what you need/want better than you or your mommy.

Adding to that, the freaking phone, three years later has no Flash support. Exchange sync is simply mediocre (did you notice when you have rules to move emails to folders and get a new email in one of these, the iPhone mail app does not show that?). The whole app sync with iTunes is another major PITA. The list goes on.

So yesterday when I saw the announcement of Windows Phone 7 I was impressed. The same way when I saw the iPhone announcement. Beautiful interface (and logical), Zune/Xbox Live integration, several manufacturers to choose your phone from and perfect Exchange/Office support out-of-the-box. So long iPhone. I am dumping you as soon as Windows Phone 7 is out.

Add to that: Flash will almost certain be there once the phones start shipping and Microsoft does allow you to develop/add things like bluetooth keyboard/mouse support, what the iPhone does NOT support officially - three years LATER - making it a piece of shit thin client, no matter what Gus Pinto or Chris Fleck, with their own reality distortion fields, say. I am not saying the Windows Phone 7 devices will be better thin clients but for sure companies like Celio will be able to release accessories that support Windows Phone 7 out-of-the-box making it a much more viable thin client at the end.

Finally, a critical thing Microsoft has in its advantage is the three years the iPhone has been out. If they are smart, by now they understand everything the iPhone has NOT delivered and its shortcomings, having learned with Apple’s mistakes in this space (and successes as well).

This will allow Microsoft to deliver not the Jesus phone.

But God’s one.

Let’s pray.

CR

No matter how much I try not to write about the iPad, there are several crazy things I have been reading lately about the Jesus Tablet and many have the word Citrix cruising along.

For some people, for unknown reasons, the iPad is seen as the tablet God himself handed out to Moses, or Steve Jobs for that matter. The solution for all our problems and the device that will bring VDI to the masses.

Bullcrap.

And I will explain why and complain about Citrix later.

- Screen. It is awesome to see a bigger screen in a device that can be potentially used as some sort of thin client. There are a couple issues there. The resolution is fixed at 1024×768 and some apps, in this day and age, refuse to work on less than higher resolutions. Two options: you either keep moving around the screen (painful) or you scale the resolution down to match the native display one (what technically is bad and if you know anything about video you know the reasons why). So, yes, better than the iPhone but still not that incredible. But I could live with that.

- Keyboard. Here is where the big problems start. The on-screen keyboard may be great for a quick ‘checking my email’ thing but to use that to reply to long emails or to write a document, that is just unbearable. Fanboys will say go and get an external keyboard! Yes, great idea. Now I need to carry a freaking iPad PLUS a keyboard. Awesome.

- Mouse. No word so far if a bluetooth one is supported. As of today, based on what we know, no support. Even if it is added at a later date, great, another device to carry with the iPad and the keyboard above.

- Ports. Where are the USB ports so I can plug headsets, webcams, scanners, etc (remember, this is the Moses’s tablet that will bring VDI to the masses as per God’s predictions)? Yes, there are none but for sure you will be able to get a cable that costs $40 that will give you USB ports. Yay, another thing to carry with the keyboard, the mouse and the iPad itself.

- Local OS. Sure the iPhone OS was revolutionary. For a phone. For a tablet, are you kidding me you are putting an OS that cannot even multitask on that? Not to mention that several things that make XenDesktop a decent thing, are NOT supported as the local OS cannot do shit about them. Examples? What about Flash redirection? Oh, did I mention that 9.7″ screen cannot even run Flash movies or access Flash websites? Not that I love Flash(it). But the reality is a huge percentage of the web relies on that (Citrix included - have you tried Citrix.com/tv on your iPhone/iPad? Yes, it does not work).

As I mentioned to Chris Fleck, who called me a Nay-Sayer on his blog, sure I can see certain vertical markets using it for several reasons. One is healthcare, where for doctors, using a Win32 app that has an interface designed for touch input, it would be perfect. Small, light, relatively cheap and able to run their Win32 apps that require no flash, no decent video performance and no physical keyboard/mouse. It could be the same case for insurance companies (although the lack of a camera is potentially a big show stopper), warehouses and so on.

The thing is all the above use cases mentioned above are NOT the ones that will bring VDI to the masses. So how can such device do that as several people in the industry are bragging now I have no crazy idea.

As a final note, what really pisses me off is to see Citrix spending all this time twittering/blogging/working on the iPhone/iPad receivers while IGNORING the bugs still there on BOTH Win32 and OS X clients, MUCH bigger markets when compared to all the iCrap stuff above (at least I think that is the case; correct me if I am wrong).

So Citrix, before you keep promoting all these savior, God sent devices, please fix what we, the lower class citizens, use every single day: the Windows and Mac OS X clients. Once you get that going, go nuts with your iPad plans to take over the VDI world.

Riding the ‘what is cool/on the spot’ wave for marketing purposes is not cool. VMWare at least is not doing that.

CR

Yes, you read it right.

As the VDI debate continues, now heated up thanks to the iPad (piece of crap IMHO, subject to another post), I decided to write this post that has been sitting here, waiting for me for at least 6 weeks. It goes to the heart of VDI: Windows.

As of today when we talk about a hosted desktop solution, we like it or not, Windows is the OS of choice (the desktop versions is what we are discussing here like XP, Vista, 7). And the reason why I think VDI has a long, really long way to go, unless Microsoft takes action, is this same OS indeed. Windows.

Let me start by saying this. There are several posts and information on the web that clearly show that Windows was optimized over the years to run on, guess what, real, physical hardware. Why? By the simple fact until people started talking about VDI (circa 200X), all Windows deployments were 100% done on physical hardware! That is why the OS was tweaked/optimized to run on real hardware. Kind of makes sense huh?

Now if you look at a post by Ruben on storage  this is clearly shown and stated. And we are just talking about the disk subsystem here. There are for sure several other things/components that were changed/tweaked to get the best performance out of real hardware.

Add to that a very simple thing: Windows was never designed with things like application layering (explained on this post by Gabe), sharing a master image with differential vDisks and so on, in mind. These changes, required to make VDI an affordable, scalable and stable reality, introduce several issues. The main one for any serious, large deployment, will be what? Support. The next one, the simple fact that no single vendor offers all that is needed for a scalable, stable VDI solution. This means you will probably end up with VMWare on your virtual backend, Citrix XenDesktop as your VDI solution and several other pieces from several other vendors like Atlantis, MokaFive, McDonalds, you name it. Yes, McDonalds is jumping into the VDI bandwagon (what leads us to my post about VDI and Patchworking  - worth reading - bringing several issues to the table).

Back to the topic, even though some vendors may say their mechanisms are not that intrusive (like my discussion with John Whalen from Mokafive last night on Twitter), the bottom line is not 100% of your apps may work and more than that, if they apparently work and you find issues down the road and call Microsoft or any other vendor, chances are they will simply tell you to go ____ yourself. You can fill in the blanks.

Some may say that was the case with Terminal Services/Citrix years ago. Yes, in a way that is true. The difference is TS/Citrix was in several ways, way, WAY less ‘destructive’/'intrusive’ on its approach to make things work, than VDI is. VDI has to deal with sharing disk images, dealing with deltas for each user. Dealing with layers. And so on. If you know the internals of any OS you can see right there what sets VDI and traditional SBC apart.

As soon as Microsoft brought TS under its umbrella, making it an OS (NT4 TSE) or a service on Windows Server OSs (since it introduced Windows 2000 Server), things changed. All the sudden Microsoft had to support its own solution and products running on it. Vendors could no more ignore the fact people were actually using TS/Citrix to run their apps. And if you look at Windows Server 2008 R2 you can see how Microsoft changed the OS to make RDS (formerly known as TS) a better solution for hosting applications. Not to mention the release of tools like the RDS Application Compatibility Analyzer.

So at the end, Microsoft changed Windows Server to make it the ideal SBC platform (I will not go into discussing if they succeeded or not - I do think they have done, with Citrix, an excellent job over the years; still room for improvement, like anything else in life).

VDI is no different. The problem is we now have much deeper issues related to the OS than before. And the only ones that can actually fix these is Microsoft. Period.

Windows may need a big redesign to accomodate VDI needs/requirements. I am sure there are several things that could be changed on Windows to make it the perfect OS for VDI (what I do think most of you will agree with me, Windows is NOT perfect for VDI; for God’s sake, even on physical hardware it has its own issues). Once these changes are done (some may be fundamental changes on the OS) I am sure we will be able to scale a VDI solution without all the storage hassles, disk image sharing, disk deduplication and so on. And it will be supported and (knock on wood), stable.

Of course I assume you want VDI to be scalable, stable and supported. If you do not need all three, for sure you can deploy a VDI solution today. It will be scalable and stable but unsupported. Or scalable and supported but unstable. Pick your two options.

If you think I am nuts, go ahead and leave your comment or email me directly. The bottom line, at least for me, is simple: Windows was never designed with VDI in mind AND VDI has deeper ties than TS/Traditional SBC had at lower level OS components and these two little things introduce several issues.

And that is why, as mentioned several times, thanks to these issues that companies like MokaFive and Atlantis exist and the reason why VDI as a solution keeps moving forward (honestly, I think we all owe a lot to these guys, the ones trying hard to make the virtual world less virtual, more real).

This is simply put, people taking matters into their own hands, while we wait for the day Microsoft will release Windows-V, the first release tailored for virtualization.

Windows-V? You heard about it here first.

CR

I actually started writing this post a couple weeks ago but got sidetracked with other things and it just sat here on this blog with a title. So after reading Brian’s posts on why use and not use VDI, I decided to finalize this post. So here we go.

 A word on the title of this post, Patchworking, if you have no idea what it means (take a look at the formal definition on Wikipedia), is putting together small pieces of different fabrics into a larger design. Awesome stuff. For quilts and bed sheets.

Not for IT.

I remember another thread at Brian’s website where I posted a comment exactly about this issue that IMHO plagues VDI as of today. In order to get it working properly you need to rely on pieces (solutions) from several different vendors and that is where the problem begins. You may end up with a solution that runs Citrix XenDesktop that requires Windows Server 2003/2008 for its components, all these running on top of VMWare vSphere running on top of HP Blades connected to a Brocade SAN, all that tied into ILIO, vScaler and vDeDupe from Atlantis Computing. Sounds great and reliable, doesn’t it?

I see this type of solution as a house of cards. As soon as the first one falls, you are in for a great ride. Downhill. Spiraling. Imagine calling Microsoft to report an issue you are having with your virtualized Windows 7 that is using a virtual profile solution from RTOSoft (you can buy me a beer later Kevin) and that the actual VM image is based on a master clone and deltas handled by another product from vendor VDI-MILFs. I am almost certain Microsoft will hang up on your face. Right there at the spot.

Not to put you down on your VDI thoughts; in a way this is what happened in the TS/Citrix world 10 years ago. Remember the experience of calling vendor A and telling them you had their masterpieshit installed on Citrix? They would tell you nice things along the lines of ‘go screw yourself ok?’.

The point is, it took TS/Citrix almost a DECADE for God’s sake to become something we can consider ’stable’. Note I am not using the words ‘rock solid’. TS and Citrix were not and probably will never be 100% reliable (or 95% for that matter). Remember people, we are talking Microsoft and Citrix here. Using Microsoft, Citrix and rock solid stability on the same phrase creates a paradox. Always keep that in mind.

So why would this be different with VDI? Brian thinks (I hope by now, he realizes his prophecy about VDI will fail) 2010 is the year VDI will take off and become the #1 priority for all IT departments. TS/Citrix took 10+ damn years to get to what it is today. Why VDI will be able to become an easy to deploy, cheap and stable solution in 2 years is beyond my comprehension. Call me dumb, stupid or anything else similar but I fail to see this happening now.

Will it get there? Sure it will. In 2010? No. More like 2020.

And as Jeroen nailed with his comment on the ‘Why use VDI’ thread, deploying the whole thing is complex to start with, even when using a single vendor (i.e. Citrix all the way or Microsoft all the way). After you start you realize several components are not there so you need to start sewing together all these pieces from other vendors. Now you got your patchwork.

I am not saying there is no place for VDI and that you guys all are nuts. No. I am just saying, like I have been doing with the whole UIA (User Installed Apps)/BYOPS (yes, I coined the term Bring Your Own Piece of Shit), that there are several hurdles and issues not only to get VDI going but to support it and many people in the industry, inebriated by the chance of putting their hands/making a career on a new, exciting technology, are simply not mentioning and/or ignoring them.

Not the case at this end. I see both sides of the coin. One is pretty and shiny. The other one…

So before you try to convince your boss to spend ten times more on a VDI solution (when compared to a real desktop one or to a 10+ year old mature solution like TS) just because you do need iTunes to run in a hosted environment and figured out it does not work on TS, hold on your horses. There is more to VDI than most vendors are willing to tell you.

You will thank me later.

CR

Or any other mobile device around the same size for that matter.

I decided to write this post for the simple reason I cannot stand anymore tweets and more tweets about how great the Citrix Receiver 2.0 for the iPhone is. Sure Gus Pinto did an excellent job on it and from what I hear, it works well (I have not tested the latest release even though it is on my iPhone).

Now let me explain why I am fed up with the whole world thinking “this-is-the-greatest-piece-of-software-ever-developed-and-why-this-will-change-the-world”. In three words: “Form Factor Sucks”. Period.

Yes, I said it. The iPhone form factor sucks. Let me finish the phrase please. The iPhone form factor sucks AS A THIN CLIENT DEVICE. Now I am done.

The problems with the iPhone as a Citrix client are very simple to understand:

1. The lack of keyboard.For some quick browsing/reading emails etc that is no big deal. But to type for a while on that thing is a major pain in the ass. No matter what you say regarding this I will not agree. I use my iPhone all the time at home on my wireless to read/post on Twitter, read some of my emails and the usual web browsing. But when I need to post a lenghty reply or write something decent I go to my computer. Even a small Netbook (I tried a Gateway one with AMD CPU and 11″ screen and it was superb) provides a MUCH better experience.

2. Screen Size.Yep, great screen for watching porn and movies on a plane. But Jesus Christ, it sucks balls to read Excel spreadsheets, any decent Word/PDF document and so on. Yes, it is better than nothing but again, try reading a word document on it over a Citrix session for one hour. Sucks. Pinching/rotating is neat but becomes a major PITA after 20 minutes. Am I the only one that can see this?

3. Battery. Yes, the thing drains the battery like nuts if you are on Wi-Fi or 3G plus it gets warm. At least mine does.

Even if someone like RedFly comes out with a dock for the iPhone with video out and the iPhone takes a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, I still think it will suck but now for a different reason. If I have to drag with me a mouse, keyboard and dock, why not bring a netbook and will probably be smaller than all above and will give me the full blown experience? Plus the ICA Client for Win32 has way more features that the one for the iPhone in case I need to access anything over ICA.

Unless hotels start to rent something like an iPhone docking package that includes all above for $10 a day, I cannot see this idea taking off at all. I mean, being used for the masses. For sure for niche markets (i.e. insurance companies using the iPhone to take pictures and then send these directly to their Win32 frontend software running on Citrix with geotag information stamped by the iPhone GPS) will see this as a great solution and money wise, may justify the money Citrix is spending developing the bloody beast (it is way more than you imagine as Gus salary is way over $500,000 a year). But again, I cannot see this becoming the greatest/most popular ICA device ever. It will be a niche. For sure, great to have for a quick and dirty connection to the office but as a business tool to replace a laptop? No way.

Unless someone wants to join me and start a business to get the LCD/Keyboard/Mouse/Dock rented at major hotels in the US. I am all ears. If this happens then for sure I can see myself carrying the iPhone only. If I could plug it somewhere in the hotel room and have access to my desktop using a full blown keyboard, mouse and screen, I would do it in a heartbeat. But as it is today it is just impracticle.

And Citrix, as a final rant, please try to put the same level of effort you guys put on the iPhone receiver on the fuc***g damn ICA Client for OS X. It is still bug hell. Not to mention it is WAY more useful than the freaking iPhone one.

Cheers.

CR

I guess it is the perfect day for such topic. Most of you may not be aware that I live in Ottawa, Canada and to celebrate the upcoming winter, today we got blessed with a nice, 12″ (30 cm) snow storm. As I will have plenty of time until I get back home and clean up the driveway, I decided to put in words something I have been thinking for a long time, since this wave of craziness started with people like Brian Madden, Michael Keen and Harry Labana. Yes, I am talking about User Installed applications and I will explain why this may be the worst idea to ever be considered in IT land.

First of all I do understand that users do have needs and I am cool with that. And that sometimes they may need a tool that is not readily available for them. But to stretch that and say that user installed apps is the solution is asking for HUGE problems down the road and here is the reason: legal issues.

As you all know, there are several companies that on their EULA will explicitly mention their application must NOT run on Terminal Services. If you do it, you are violating the EULA. Now, between you and me, how many of you IT people actually read the freaking EULA for an application before deploying it on your TSs AND (note the word AND here) consulted your legal department to clarify the EULA (do not try to tell me you, an IT person, understood 100% all the legal bullshit written in an EULA and the legal implications/ramifications - that is why lawyers exist)? Answer: none I am almost certain.

So if you leave the decision on what to run on his desktop to the user, are you guys thinking they will read and understand the EULA? For God’s sake these people do not even read the user guides that come with their brand new HDTVs. Do you think all of the sudden they will start reading EULAs? For sure you can get a lawyer to help the user do that what will drive that Winzip license from $20 to $20,000 as soon as the lawyer finishes his work and gives you a report if there are any legal issues on running WinZip on a hosted VM under XenDesktop 4 running under vSphere 4 running under HP C-class blades in a datacenter in Oregon. Yes, the lawyer will consider all this.

The real issue here goes deeper than that and is really tied into how IT is seen or works in most companies. IT is seen as a team of firefighters, always fighting some fire inside the company. Logon times that are way too slow, applications that refuse to work, machines that crash, printers that do not print and so on. And that is exactly where the problem is.

If your IT team spends 80%, 90% of their time doing what I described above, there is something wrong with your IT infrastructure and/or planning/directions. Sorry to rain on your parade but that is the truth. IT should be way more than that. A group of people that understand the business needs, the user needs and comes up with the right tools to deliver these requirements. If users do have all the tools they need (note that ‘need’ does not mean ‘want’) why do they need to install anything else on their machines to do their work? They do not need it. Please do not tell me that fucking iTunes is a requirement. It is not and we both know that.

That brings us to the fact that IT and Technical Support are seen as synonymous. They are not. Another group must exist and this is the one that will find the real needs and come up with the real tools. Some could say this is the CIO/CTO and that could be the case but putting all this weight in one shoulder is not smart. A single person, you and me included, will make mistakes. Guaranteed. A CTO/CIO title does not mean “Technical/Business God/Jesus Christ”. Actually in several large companies I worked with, that was exactly the opposite. This person had really no deep understanding of the business and/or the technologies. Another recipe for a disaster. That is why I think these decisions should be handled by a group, something like ‘IT Architects’ and these guys would be of course connected to the ‘Technical Support’ so they understand what is coming and prepare themselves to support the users and the expected issues. Yes, there are issues, no matter how well you plan/deliver your dream environment.

Another thing that came to my mind this week is the whole BYOPC idea that is closely tied to the whole user installed crap idea. I like it and I can see the benefits. But again, I am sure there are legal issues with that approach. Legally I would love to hear what a lawyer has to say. For example if a user brings in his own machine to the office (company property) and somehow that machine that is not owned by the corporation happens to do something like burning down the office, having a bomb inside, steal files, whatever where there is financial damage that an insurance company has to step up and pay the bill, will they actually do it or will they say in court that as that machine was not part of the corporation and the whole damage was caused by a third party (the user with his own PC), would they have legal grounds to give the corporation the finger? Or even sue the user and make him pay for all the crap in damages? Has anyone consulted their legal department/lawyer/insurance company to clarify this? Again, almost certain no one did it.

The legal issues such approach brings are huge, especially considering that you can interpret the law in several different ways. Plus, as all I wrote above, I think this hides under the rug a bigger issue that is not having an IT group that is actually working as they should: looking for ways to make the business more efficient, by clearly understanding user AND business needs. If this is all working as it should, user installed apps are not required. Sorry.

Users/companies should be able to work efficiently with a common toolset as per my post here.

If you cannot deliver that, look under your rug. I am sure you will find a load of crap there.

Thanks to the heated discussion started by Brian Madden on the Sun Rays we could see people I assumed dead writing again and several comments regarding SunRays and how they work, their technology and so on.

Before moving forward note I am no SunRay expert and barely worked with them on some of my customers. Given that, I want to ask people that know these devices a couple questions:

1. Zero Admin client. From what I know these devices talk to a server (the SunRay server) that provides them with a session. If new features are added, for example 5.1 audio, I assume a new firmware is needed on these devices. So how can they be ‘Zero Admin’ if I do need to manage these to deploy a new firmware? And let’s say I deployed the new firmware and found a show stopper bug? I will have to roll back, again, ‘managing’ these. So what do they mean exactly by ‘Zero Admin’? If they mean since 1999 they only released 3 firmwares, awesome to know but this is not ‘Zero Admin’. Could be ‘Almost Zero Admin’ but not zero. And I assume ‘Zero’ has the same meaning here in Canada, in the US, Europe or Mars for that matter. Given that, are they truly ‘Zero Admin’? I do not think so and I do not think such device actually exists as at one point there may be a feature that may require something to be changed on the actual hardware, what would mean changing something on the device or replacing it completely. Plus if a firmware upgrade is needed, this breaks the definition of ‘Zero Administration’. My toaster is ‘Zero Administration’ for sure.

2. Stateless. Sun claims their device has a unique feature that no other vendor offers that is having nothing on their devices once they are powered off. From their own blog, “Sure RDP and Citrix connections are stateless, but the client used to access them is not.  Review Letters of Volatility (LoV) and see what registers get zeroed out on a power reset.  If any information about the network, servers, or users is left over the device is not stateless”. I disagree with this as I think I have the same at home and I do not use SunRays. If a device (in my case, thin client hardware with no moving parts and more than that, NO local OS or even a local device where an OS could be loaded and/or saved) is remote booting a very lean, small OS with the client they need to connect to a backend, once these devices are off, everything is gone. There is no trace on them about the network, servers or users. How is the Sun offering different?

3. Hot Swapping. This means a user on a SunRay removes his smartcard and goes to another device, inserts it back and is working again exactly where he left off. Well this is exactly what Citrix Session Roaming is, correct me if I am wrong. And I was actually working on an environment, 45 days ago, where I did exactly that, with SmartCards and XenApp 5.0 FP2. No SunRays needed. So again, what is unique here about the SunRays?

Please note this post is in no way meant to ‘bash’ the SunRays and their technology. I just want to understand more about them and that is the reason why I am asking these questions. Hopefull someone from Sun will email me answers.

My final question is probably what several people are asking themselves. So even if they really have such a cool, unique product, what is the price tag for it? From what I have found, for example their 17″ all-in-one model (Sun Ray 270) lists at $799.00. Their cheapest offer is the Sun Ray 2 at $349.00. Add to that the software required (and its own licenses at US$ 100.00 per concurrent user, perpetual license) and my guess is this brings us to around at least US$ 500.00 per user to deploy their cheapest thin client offering, not accounting for the costs to have two servers running their software (two for redundancy AND assuming you are not running these as VMs). And as mentioned on the thread at Brian’s site, if you are indeed a Windows shop you will have to deal with at least 2 machines running Linux or Solaris.

Is it worth? As Steve Greenberg pointed out I am sure it is in certain cases and in certain environments it may fit as a glove (again, use the right tool for the job). Would I say it is ‘mainstream’ worth? Considering their market share and penetration after 10 years on the market, at this stage, not. But as we are in a very fast changing landscape, better marketing from Oracle could potentially change that.

Or not?

CR

Today Brian posted about Sun and their Sun Rays and thanks to that and to some comments from crazy people (yes, me), it caused quite a reaction within the Sun community.

First of all, it was simply a post, not a review of anything. And my comment there was specifically tailored to Craig Bender, a guy that I had great conversations in the past and for some reason (not sure if I pissed him off, if I said something not to be said, etc) he simply vanished. I knew if I mentioned anything like ‘SunRays suck’ or ‘SunRays are the reason why Sun had net losses of US$ 1.677 Billion in the first quarter of 2009′, I would be able to check if he was still alive. So minutes after my comment, BINGO. The fish got the bait.

So history and jokes aside, here is the deal. I know some people think that heterogeneous environments are the norm out there these days but in a way I disagree. At least based on my work on the field doing consulting services, most of my clients are indeed a Windows shop. Some do still have Novell (surprised?) but in most cases getting rid of it. And some do have some Unix but usually only for very specific back end requirements.

This brings us to this: for the user, even though there may be Novell, Solaris, HP-UX, etc behind the curtains, he has a Windows desktop and/or accesses one hosted either on TS/Citrix or as a VDI offering. His apps, even if they access data on a database running on Solaris, still has a Windows or web front end (running on a browser on top of Windows). So for all the user cares, this is a Windows environment. Does not matter you tell him all the databases are on Solaris running Oracle X. He does not give a crap and does not know it. I guess it is from this perspective that Brian made the comment he was a Windows guy.

For sure on the backend it is another story. It can be a mixed environment and probably is, considering Linux is free and I think even Solaris is free now. But even in this case what I see is usually the ‘Unix guys’ are not the same ones managing ‘Windows’. Same for the ‘Oracle’ people and so on. So still, you may be indeed a ‘Windows’ guy in a place where all the databases are hosted on Solaris servers running Oracle. You simply do not touch/see them at all, even as an administrator on the ‘Windows’ side.

Back to the title, after seeing all the losses Sun posted, no matter what they say they were probably not doing good. My accountant tells me if you are doing great you usually do not post a US$ 2.234 Billion net loss for the year with total net revenues reduced by US$ 2.4 Billion (compared to 2008 revenues).

Now with the Oracle acquisition, what can Sun really do? I have always seen their Sun Ray products as a big niche but there are no numbers out there to compare them to other thin client vendors (again, I am just trying to compare units moved and not really if they are better than the competition for reasons A, B or C). May be Craig will jump in and provide us with some numbers for comparison so I can prove (or proved wrong) they are a niche, on a niche market.

The bigger question I have is, is there anything Sun can really do to make an impact on this market (SBC/VDI) or is their fate to always be ‘another minor player’, ‘niche solution’ and so on forever? Maybe Craig is correct in all they may need is good marketing. Their Appliance Link Protocol is indeed cool and lightweight but is that enough to make SunRays widespread? So far, in 10 years since their introduction that is not what I could see. But again, if it has been a commercial success or failure it depends who you ask. Not sure how much money they invested over the years to get to what they have today and what was their revenue with such product line since 1999. This kind of number they usually do not post…

Technically I would love to spend a lot of time with their stuff, if Craig is willing to help me on that end. In exchange I would write an ‘Honest Opinions’ article, like my presentations at BriForum. An unbiased, no bullshit review of whatever I see, pointing out the strengths and the weaknesses. Or even present a session about my findings on the next BriForum! Why not?

If anyone has links to the products I will need to download to try their stuff, please go ahead and post them. For the hardware, again, I will need help from Sun to make it happen, assuming they want to make it happen.

And Sun people, my apologies if I pissed you off with my comment on Brian’s website. It was just really a joke to grab Craig’s attention.

CR

Yesterday I wrote about my experience with the Citrix Profiler and some people got a little pissed about my comments. After thinking about what some of the guys said, I do realize I was probably too harsh but more than that, the fact I have been using App-V/Softgrid for so many years made me ‘blind’ to how weird that tool is sometimes.

So I decided to go down the memory lane and try to remember as much as I could about my experience with all the tools I worked with to determine which one would be the best.

The problem with that is to define ‘best’. For example, for the users they want a fast, completely seamless experience that even has shell integration working. From a packager perspective (the guys creating the ’sequences’, ‘profiles’, etc) they want the tool to be as simple as possible to package apps and to work with anything. From an admin perspective ideally the tool would have no client, built-in security to allow/deny access to the app, very few, possibly none, backend requirements and so on. From a CIO perspective it must work great (perfectly), be 100% supported, be adopted pretty much anywhere and ideally, cheap or free.

So which tool offers all that as of today? Sorry but none. They all have something that pisses me off and that amazes me.

For example, thinking about App-V, I got so used to it, the fact I needed a ‘Q:’ drive, a policy to hide that on my TSs, a somehow cryptic .OSD file, no easy way to add scripts, etc, was simply ignored on my mind. Looking back at it, yes, it does indeed have some weird things/procedures associated with it.

In that respect Citrix Profiler is way simpler and in a way, much better. The same can be said for ThinApp or any other tool for that matter, XenoCode included. They all have their PROs and CONs at the end and in an ideal world I would love to see a tool that works as well as App-V, is simple to use as Citrix Profiler, has no client like ThinApp/XenoCode and so on. But we all know this does not exist as of today so we need to pick one I guess.

The message here is simple: based on your needs/requirements and on what you are already familiar with, pick the tool that seems the best for your particular job.

Keep in mind that Application Virtualization is here to stay and will be a major component in the future for desktops, hosted or not. So if you did not start playing with such cool technology, you better start. Go. Now.

Cheers.

CR

Sorry Joe. You tried. Hard. But I am not convinced Citrix Streaming is “the” best solution out there and I will explain why. Note that I will not even get into the technical limitations (i.e. virtualizing services). Does it mean I do not like it or that it does not work? Nope. Certain things I like and it does work. But…

First of all, some background information here. I have been doing application virtualization for several years now, way before Microsoft acquired Softricity and I was directly involved with the first large scale deployment of such thing within the Canadian Government and later on, bringing such technology to several other places in Canada. And as most of my techie friends (the Microsoft MVPs, the Citrix CTPs, etc) as we are early adopters of anything (yes, at least 10 people I know reformatted their PCs back in the 90s to load Microsoft Bob) this means we usually have to do everything and in this case that meant installing all the backend infrastructure, clients AND actually creating the packages for the virtualized applications. Add to that I used pretty much all of them over the years (SoftGrid/App-V, Thinstall, Altiris SVS, VirtualShite, etc), Citrix being the exception here.

After using the latest and greatest offering from Citrix, I am happy to see it works BUT in a nutshell, it is one of the biggest PAIN IN THE ARSE application I have ever used. Why?

1. Creating the application packages. In many places, once I leave, the application people will be the ones responsible for creating these as they were the ones packaging regular applications using products like Wise Installer, InstallShield and so on. So they are used to see certain things and they expect a certain behavior on all these apps. They see the ‘packager’ on any virtualization solution (i.e. Citrix Profiler, Microsoft App-V Sequencer, etc) as what the name implies, a packager. In all these tools when I install application A to C:\AppA, I can open My Computer and under the C: drive I will see the AppA folder. Not with the Citrix Profiler. I understand why not, the logic behind that decision and so on. And I still think this is a major PITA. If all the tools these guys are used to, work in a certain way, all the competitors one’s work in a certain way, WHY REINVENT THE WHEEL? No idea.

2. Package deployment. As of today once you finish ‘profiling’ the app, the Citrix Profiler asks you for the share where you want to save it. Once you did it, anyone with access to that share will be able to launch the app, unless you then assign NTFS/Sharing permissions to the folder where you saved the app. Once that is done you need to use another tool to ‘publish’ that app to the users. So you need to select THE SAME GROUPS/USERS AGAIN (the ones you assigned NTFS/Sharing permissions). Why is this bad? Well in many (and I mean MANY) companies groups may have names like ‘Finance - Applications - Microsoft Project’, ‘Finance - Applications - Microsoft Publisher’, etc. So it would be very easy for the person assigning the permissions to the folder to select the ‘Finance - Applications - Microsoft Project’ group and later, when doing the publishing, selecting ‘Finance - Applications - Microsoft Publisher’ as the names may look very similar. What will be the end result? Users will not be able to launch the app. How to fix this? Very simple. The Citrix Profiler could ask if the person saving would like the tool to try assigning permissions to the folder and would allow that person to select the group they want to allow access to the app. Once selected, the tool could set the permissions and store that information on the .rad file so when the application is published, it would already know to which group it must be published and would not ask for that again. End result? The app works for the right group AND you cut down one step in the whole process. The more you can automate, the less human errors may be introduced. Keep that in mind Citrix.

3. I wonder if the guys behind the Citrix Profiler know that environment variables and things like PATH exist for a reason and are actually still used in the year 2009. And yes, you guessed it. The Profiler does NOT seem to capture changes on them. Why? AskJoeNord.com?

4. Why, again, WHY the tool cannot simply disappear, let me do whatever I want to install my app (creating shortcuts by hand, copying files using Explorer, etc) and then capture what I did is another great question. I would say in the same league of ‘Is the Yeti Canadian or American?’ and ‘Where do they keep the Aliens captured in Roswell?’. One of these mystical unanswered questions.

I could keep going on with this list but I will stop here as I am still in Ft. Lauderdale and Joe and his Citrix buddies know where I am staying…

And before Joe leaves a comment saying ‘Oh the tool may not have rights to do that, the person doing it may not have rights, the machine may not be on the domain, bla bla bla’, he knows there are workarounds and solutions for all these cases. So why are these still not there today? Not sure. The only thing I am sure is I will give Joe hell until all this is fixed.

Seriously I do think this is a typical case where Citrix completely skipped ‘Usability Testing’ and actually ‘Testing’. How come a 5.2 release of anything still ignores PATH being changed? AskJoeNord.com.

On a positive note, the tool, once you get used to it (I mean, once you are forced to accept certain things), works and works pretty well. And with almost no backend requirements what I think is cool.

So Citrix, keep this one thing in mind. The next time, before releasing something like that, give me a shout. I will test it for you.

CR

Ok, last week Microsoft released to the public their RD Load Simulation Toolset. Before you ask, I will explain what it does (remember not everyone reading this blog knows everything about TS/SBC).

The tool allows you to simulate load on your Terminal Servers so you can check things like ‘How many sessions can my server handle with acceptable performance?’ and so on. Sounds cool right?

Well there are a couple problems with the tool but depending on your requirements/needs it may do the trick.

First of all, it does not run on 2003. You must have a 2008 TS. Secondly, there is no way to record a script what means you must manually create one that will look like this:

‘// global settings
VK_RETURN   = 13
VK_LWIN     = 91
WINDOW_EVENT   = 1
MENU_EVENT     = 2
OBJECTSHOW_EVENT = 3
OBJECTFOCUS_EVENT = 4
VKeyFlag = 1
AltFlag = 2
CtrlFlag = 4
ShiftFlag = 8
Server = “TestServer”
User = “smc001″
Password = “Password123″
Domain = “TestServer”

‘// instantiate the RUIDCOM object
Set RUIDCOM = CreateObject (”RUIDCOM.RUI”)

‘// set connection properties
RUIDCOM.DesktopWidth = 800
RUIDCOM.DesktopHeight = 600
RUIDCOM.DesktopBpp = 16
RUIDCOM.TypingRate = 300

‘// Connect to Server
RUIDCOM.TSConnect Server, User, Password, Domain
WScript.Sleep (5000)

‘// open and wait for run dialog
RUIDCOM.VKeyDown VK_LWIN
RUIDCOM.PressKeyAndWaitForEvent “Open Run Dialog”, asc(”r”), 0, “Run”, OBJECTSHOW_EVENT
RUIDCOM.VKeyUp VK_LWIN
WScript.Sleep (2000)

‘// start notepad
RUIDCOM.SendKey “notepad.exe”
RUIDCOM.PressKeyAndWaitForEvent “Open Notepad”, VK_RETURN, VKeyFlag, “Untitled - Notepad”, WINDOW_EVENT
WScript.Sleep (2000)

RUIDCOM.SendKey “some text”

WScript.Sleep (2000)

‘// save file
RUIDCOM.PressKeyAndWaitForEvent “Open File Menu”, asc(”f”), AltFlag, “File”, MENU_EVENT
WScript.Sleep (2000)
RUIDCOM.PressKeyAndWaitForEvent “Open Save As Dialog”, asc(”s”), 0, “Save as”, OBJECTSHOW_EVENT
WScript.Sleep (2000)
RUIDCOM.SendKey “sample.txt”
RUIDCOM.PressKeyAndWaitForEvent “Confirm Save as”, VK_RETURN, VKeyFlag, “Confirm Save”, OBJECTSHOW_EVENT
WScript.Sleep (2000)
RUIDCOM.SendKey “y”

This is no show stopper and I am not going to say you cannot learn how to script but IMHO this is far from user friendly. I will probably write a nice GUI to record whatever you are doing and then save as a script to save people time (what Microsoft could have done for sure). But I guess you get what you paid for.

So if you are in a hurry and do not want to learn all above or if you have 2003 TSs, what are your options? Simple.

Go to the Citrix website and download XenApp 5.0 Platinum and set it up on the hardware you want to test. You can get a 90 day license that will allow up to 100 users. This may not give you all the users you need but with a 100 user load you will probably have a decent baseline on how many users the TS will probably be able to handle. XenApp Platinum has EdgeSight for Load Testing and that tool allows you to record your scripts and much more, way easier than the Microsoft one. And again, this will be free for 90 days.

If you do need to simulate three, four hundred users you may need to wait for a decent GUI for the Microsoft tool and if you are on 2003 you are out of luck if sticking to it. Another option is to contact a Citrix reseller and try to get a 300 user license that is good for a week or two for example and in that case your problems are solved.

Regardless I think this is a great start from Microsoft and something we can easily improve on.

Cheers.

CR

Oh boy, no matter how much I try to avoid it, the whole thin client subject keeps coming back and the pro arguments do not change. Jeroen wrote about the  flaws on Thin Clients last week and I wrote something about them as well a couple weeks ago, that you can read here.

Let me explain again what is wrong with Thin Clients and why the arguments most vendors have about them is completely bogus in my opinion.

First of all, in times of $200 PCs at Walmart, there is no justification why a Thin Client should cost twice or three times as much as a full blown PC. Unless these thin clients are coming with Quad Core Xeons and Dual GPU ATI Radeons on them and not one told me. I still think that is not the case and more than that, most of these come with non-Intel CPUs and crappy, subpar video cards. So why they cost the same or much more I have no idea. Add to that the fact I personally worked on building thin clients and dealing with suppliers in China, I do know exactly how low you can go on pricing these things.

Arguments like ‘no moving parts’ add an extra cost are also not 100% accurate. You can get some very reasonable, small system boards that will take IDE Flash Drives (Disk on Module). These days a 1GB one costs less than $20 and we are not talking about large quantities here. Years ago I was able to build one of these systems for less than $80 and proved it would be possible to bring them to the market for $99. That included a centralized management tool that we developed at the time, to manage all these from a single location.

I guess my main complain is really regarding what you get for what you pay, when compared to a full blown PC. Vendors will say it is all about management (and that is valid - and more than that, it is the same in the PC world; managing PCs or any other asset for that matter is key) but the price that carries from the vendors I think is simply too much. Again, it can be done for much less.

I think at the end my main complain is the same as everyone out there. If these things would be selling for $99, many people I know would buy way more of these than they do today. But when you have small boxes with way less power for more than a PC, it becomes a tough sell, especially on times when companies are trying to save as much as you can.

One thing I must say is in part this is not all their fault (the thin client vendors). The fact all the greatest and latest features on the connecting clients (ICA or RDP) are only available on Windows (and I mean full blown Windows - Windows CE in many cases does NOT support all the features) for sure has an impact as you need bigger flash drives and Microsoft licenses what adds up for sure.

That brings me to one question. Why you Citrix, cannot deliver a decent ICA client that has pretty much all the functionality you have on Windows? You can AND you know that. The same question applies to Microsoft but in that case we all know the answer. And unfortunately that same answer may apply to Citrix.

And on ICA, things get worse as unlike RDP, ICA is closed and the specs are NOT available what prevents anyone from writing a decent ICA client for Linux (what can be done at least for RDP - and please we all know the ICA Client for Linux sucks balls big time). Should Citrix open the specs on ICA? Not sure, especially considering how ahead of the game they are when compared to VMWare View offerings…

The point here is simple. Hardware wise thin clients could cost the same as PCs (or less for sure) but the software layer may add something to the price and if not adding (meaning using Open Source OSs) may not deliver the experience you need/want for your users.

Resuming. You are screwed and should use locked down PCs. Or contact me and we will build a decent thin client.

And I promise I will try not to talk about thin clients anymore until the end of the year.

CR

On my last post on the subject, VMWare lovers/fanboys/users bashed me because I complained about the vSphincter vSphere 4 client not working on Windows 7.

The main argument used was ‘Oh you are bitching about support for an OS that is not even released so shut up” and I could live with that at the time.

So now Windows 7 is out. Note this is not Ubuntu 9.10, YourMommaLinux or any other small player OS. This is a MAJOR OS coming from a vendor that dominates more than 90% of the desktop OS market and more than that, made earlier releases of such OS available to ANYONE, VMWare included.

Is the vSphere 4 client working on Windows 7 out of the box? Not yet.

I have heard VMWare is waiting for Windows 8 to come out to then support Windows 7.

Thanks VMWare.

CR

As you guys know, on top of managing WTSLabs, I also spend a lot of my time working in the consulting and training business. Thanks to that, I am always dealing with C-level executives (in order to get the business as these guys are usually the decision makers when money needs to be approved) and I noticed one common trend.

With such a fast paced IT landscape these days and with changes and new technologies happening overnight, it became very hard for these guys to keep up, to keep themselves up to date and more than that, to come up with an informed, accurate decision when dealing with IT related projects.

Many of them would love to know more but do not have the time for that or do not know exactly how to do that. After discussing the issue with several of these guys I realized we could help them if we had some sort of crash course, boot camp for C-level executives.

That is how “IT-for-Cs” was born. We are now offering a one-week, crash course, only for C-level executives. This is an on-site training (yes, we go to your office) and do it on a one-to-one basis. For them this is perfect as they do not need to leave their companies (so in case something urgent happens they are there to deal with), do not need to travel and do not feel like being embarassed in front of other people (as it is one-to-one training).

The course outline will be posted under our Training offerings very soon and the schedule is of course totally flexible. I will be the one coaching these C-level guys and we will cover pretty much everything that is relevant in the IT industry these days (OS virtualization, application virtualization, VDI, SBC, etc), focused on their particular business industry or on a particular topic they want to learn more.

All technical but passed in terms they can easily understand and correlate. Again, this is not a deep, technical course. For that we have other options. Just check them out!

CR

I promise this is the last post on the subject. As you, I cannot stand talking about this anymore but I think I owe an explanation to the two readers of this lonely blog.

After all the comments and conversations I had with other CTPs, here is what I think about the licensing and to get there I will start with a real world example.

If you are a company now deploying 1,000 PCs to your users (let’s assume you have no PCs or that you are upgrading all these with new hardware), you are paying Microsoft, directly or indirectly, a license of Windows Whatever for each device you got, in this case, 1,000 PCs.

If you later enable RDP and allow your users to connect from home you pay nothing else. And if you have 3,000 users in three shifts (1,000 users working 8 hours shift for example), you are still buying 1,000 PCs that come with 1,000 OS licenses. So it is clear that on a physical desktop world the licensing is per device.

Considering that Citrix is really willing to compete head to head with the physical desktop world, why are they licensing XenDesktop on a per user basis if the real physical desktop world is licensed on a per device basis?

Yep, very good question. Let’s hope someone from Citrix reads this blog and is kind enough to give us an answer.

This would fix all the problems created for companies that were relying on the Concurrent User licensing model. Would that hurt their expected revenue? Maybe.

So Citrix people, where are you? We need answers. And fast ones.

CR

So after the storm announced yesterday, people all over the world started complaining about the new licensing that came out with XenDesktop 4. This also prompted a heated discussion within the CTP community, with some explaining why they were frustrated with such licensing changes.

For sure I can understand the issue for certain customers. For example, for some educational institutions with 25,000+ users but willing to deploy a VDI solution using XenDesktop 4 for only 1,000 people, what do they do? If it is licensed per user, how does this work now? Do they need to pay for 25,000+ licenses?

Using the old Concurrent User licensing, all they needed was 1,000 licenses. And that is where the discussion with the others CTP started from my standpoint.

I am posting here exactly what I told all the other CTPs. First of all I think Citrix wants to change the idea that XenDesktop is a remote access solution. They want to make the market aware XenDesktop is actually a desktop replacement solution, going head-to-head with what we call today ‘physical desktop’. In that sense, if you have 1000 PCs in your office and you want to go VDI you need 1000 hosted desktops. So if we do see XenDesktop as a replacement for the physical desktop, 1:1 licensing makes sense. And again, from a marketing perspective it makes sense if you want to get rid of the old stigma of being a ‘Remote Access’ solution.

If you have 10,000 users and you want to have only 100 connecting remotely to your hosted solution, it is clear to me you are really trying to deploy a remote access solution and for that, there is XenApp. Many, including my friend and fellow CTP Joe Shonk, argued XenDesktop brings simplicity to the table as you do not have to worry about your apps, what you do when using XenApp. Well my take on this is simple and I ask you to provide me feedback on this in the comments area.

As of today, at least for my customers (note I have been doing TS/Citrix since they were born as products, so at least 10 years), in 99% of the cases we were able to make the applications work. Sure, some we had to tweak but the bottom line is they worked. And as of today, with application virtualization, there is a chance you will get the ones that did not work, working. So the whole “XenDesktop is app friendly and XenApp is app hater” does not cut for me. Add to that the fact that several XenDesktop customers are using Citrix own app virtualization/streaming solution to package and deploy the apps so in this case, that exact same app could be used on XenApp, making it not better or worse than XenDesktop.

Even though using XenDesktop as a remote access solution works and works properly, I see this as using the wrong tool for the job in most cases. I do know I can load a web server on my iPhone but should I use it to then host my website? You get the idea.

I am aware in some very special cases XenApp may indeed not work and XenDesktop or similar alternatives would be the only way to go. If you are on that boat, good for you.

But for most cases, nope. XenApp delivers it. And it has concurrent licensing.

The good news is Citrix is listening and is dealing with such cases, people that are trying to use XenDesktop in weird ways (sorry I could not resist), on a case-by-case basis.

I also heard on the CTP program they are releasing a new version called XenRAS that is pretty much XenDesktop but tweaked to work as a RAS solution, only accepting dial-up connections and with concurrent licensing. Official announcement should come soon from Citrix.

Oh crap. That was under NDA.

CR

So today here I am sitting in a CTP only webinar about XenDesktop 4. It will be officially announced in 12 minutes so by the time you read this we are not under NDA anymore.

The major changes, many that I see as REALLY welcome are:

- Now licensed per user, not per concurrent user anymore.
- Trade up program with savings up to 80% for customers running XenApp. Valid until June, 2010.
- Reduced costs per user (starting at $75, then going to $225 and $350).
- Now you can run XenApp served apps not only on XenDesktop hosted desktops but anywhere. This is indeed a great move.

XenApp licensing does not change, still remaining as Concurrent User. The reason for XenDesktop moving to per user is reasonable I think. Citrix says when accessing XenDesktop it means the user will have access to his desktop 24/7 while on XenApp he accesses the apps on a needed basis, not necessarily 24/7 so concurrent user makes sense for XenApp but not XenDesktop.

On the HDX side, some of the new stuff:

- Support for VoIP and Webcams. On the Audio side several enhancements. Broad support for SoftPhones and a much better audio codec (three settings - high definition, Optimized for Speech and Low bandwith - amazingly, high definition uses only 96kps, way way less than the high setting we had on Presentation Server, remember that???). Webcams, for now on LAN (2 to 7 MBits used and latency is for sure killer).
- 3D Graphics support (some specific hardware/hosting requirements do apply - meaning you need a blade PC with specific requirements like CUDA enabled GPU, not working on a VM). The Client that supports the 3D stuff is still not combined with the other one so a specific client is required.
- Enhanced MultiMon support so you can now have that Mickey Mouse monitor arrangement working just fine on your hosted Desktop. Awesome.
- Enhanced Plug-and-Play. I heard about the ‘Bloomberg’ keyboard. First time for me. Living and learning I guess.
- Up to 30fps on server side rendering! Default is 24fps but a registry change allows you to bump it up.
- MediaFoundation support, now used on Windows Media Player on Windows Vista/7.
- HDX MediaStream for Flash. Animations, HD video, all the goodies. Access to local webcam/audio/microphone is supported.
- HDX IntelliCache with Branch Repeater Integration. In certain cases, where the content ends up on the client side, of course there is quite a reduction on bandwitdth (up to 25x). Nice improvement for sure in several cases but remember this does not mean everything will be greatly improved in terms of bandwidth. According to what Citrix showed us, much better than the PCoIP solution from Teradici.

It is great to see Citrix moving on this space and if XenClient comes to the picture (as you saw on Project Independence), this is really how I see the future for sure. Being able to run my Desktop, locally or hosted, from anywhere, anything.

For the first time in years I am excited about what Citrix has up on their sleeve. Impressive.

Cannot wait to download it and give it a try! And if I were VMWare I would be concerned as right now VMWare View seems VERY outdated, at least in my opinion. Others may not agree with me…

CR

If you read my blog you noticed my post yesterday regarding my MVP status, not being renewed on the renewal cycle that happens October, 1st. As I mentioned in the comments, there is a lot of work we do in background (like replying to direct emails) that are simply ignored by the folks in Redmond. And no matter what they say, they have no grounds for an argument for the simple fact they never ask you questions like:

- How many direct emails did you reply in the past year helping people in the community with problems in your area of expertise?
- How many people downloaded the guides/articles you wrote?
- How many people watched videos of your presentations in the past year?
- How many people read the posts in your Blog in the past year?

Without all this information it is very easy to simply say ‘You have not done enough’.

But as not two companies are the same, the folks at Citrix, with a much better understanding on the dynamics between people like myself and many others and the community, decided I was good enough to receive their CTP award!

So as of today I am one of the Citrix CTPs, something I am very proud and honored to be! I join a group with people like Brian Madden, Shawn Bass, Ron Oglesby, Doug Brown, Rick Dehlinger, Benny Tritsch and a couple others!

The only thing is I now feel lonely as I became the only person in Canada to receive this award.

So Canadians, step up to the challenge and join me in the future!

CR

Well before you go ahead and read this post, please note this is not a rant about it. It is just what I honestly think about how Microsoft is evaluating the work people like myself have been doing on the Terminal Services communities over the past year (that is all that counts when Microsoft comes up to a decision if they will or not re-award you).

So what have I been doing in the community this past year? Some may say a lot, some may say not too much. So here you have my take on that.

- I wrote and made available at no cost an 80-page guide about Terminal Services. It describes everything you need to understand what it does, how it does and how to properly set it up from start to finish. It is based on Windows Server 2003 (and I am now updating it to Windows Server 2008 R2). You can download it here.

- I posted about the industry in general here on my blog and on other places several times.

- I presented a session again at BriForum regarding Windows Server 2008 R2 RDS (as I have been doing since BriForum’s inception).

- Helped people through my website (direct emails) and on the Microsoft public newsgroups.

Apparently, this is not enough for Microsoft. I just wish they had a more palpable, clear policy on what is indeed required to get your MVP status renewed. Several other MVPs did probably way less than above and are still MVPs.

Will I be back next year? Assuming all I have been doing means nothing (as it is the case as I have not been renewed), then no, I am not coming back (as I see no need to do more than I am actually doing and more than that, I do think I have done a lot for the TS community over the past year AND over the years).

See you guys!

CR

Today we can find several vendors that claim they are ‘platform agnostic’. One typical example in the SBC/VDI space is Quest’s vWorkspace that can deliver applications coming from terminal servers or hosted desktops regardless of the virtualization solution being used.

This means your hosted desktops can be running on any hypervisor, VMWare, Citrix, Microsoft and a bunch of other ones I am sure. On paper, this sounds great.

But when talking to some large enterprise customers I realized the fact you are now relying on multiple vendors to run your solution on, support may become a big problem.

For example if your XenServer environment is not performing as expected, where is the issue exactly? On your SAN from HP? On your trunking between you IBM Blade Chassis and your Cisco core switches? On XenServer itself? On some specific VM running under XenServer?

To find where the issue is you may have to call 10 different vendors. On top of that once you find the problem that does not mean it is solved. One vendor may say the problem exists because the other vendor is not implementing the specification for a certain protocol/standard properly and blame them for the issue. The bottom line is you may have a support nightmare on your hands.

If you can have everything (or most things) under one roof, that means one single place to call and to blame. No more saying to your boss ‘it is vendor X fault according to vendor Y but vendor X says it is vendor Y fault’.

Reminds me of the early days of Citrix when Microsoft would blame Citrix and Citrix would blame Microsoft for an application not working as expected. Great times indeed.

Back to the topic, is this the reason that brought Cisco to the blade world with their Unified Computing initiative? At the end do single vendor solutions bring value to the table?

I guess there is no simple answer to this question. I can see the value of having all under one roof and not having to deal with multiple vendors. But not being tied to a single vendor also brings flexibility to the table and kind of avoids a monopoly.

As I am not flexible…

CR

In my humble opinion, yes, it does. Now let me explain why.

As a real world example, you guys have us, WTSLabs. When we decided to move to a virtual world, I personally looked at most of the offerings available: Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2, Citrix XenServer and VMWare ESXi (considering our size, free would do the trick for us for sure). The deciding factor that took us down the VMWare ESXi route was the simple fact it can overcommit memory.

Once you look at how our VMs were performing, most of the time these were sitting idle, consuming few resources (that was the case with our environment - your environment may be completely different and in that case overcommitment may not be for you).

No matter what anyone else says, if you all remember, years ago one of the main driving factors (or sales pitch if you will) towards virtualization was to consolidate your X physical servers into a bunch of physical hosts. I remember seeing several times Sales/Pre-sales guys going to offices explaining that most of the time the customers servers were there doing nothing and thanks to that, bringing all these ‘idle’ servers under one single host was possible.

I am not saying that is the case with any server and/or any environment. For sure there are several SQL, Exchange boxes out there that are always being hammered, working hard. But for tons of companies out there, especially in the SMB market, it is almost guaranteed that is not the case.

Back to our own scenario here, we now run 6 VMs. The resource hog one is our Exchange 2007 SP2 box (what a surprise…) setup with 4GB. Then we have one domain controller, web server, TS (running Windows Server 2008 R2) and two XP VMs. By monitoring these up and running on a regular day they are indeed idle most of the time, not using many resources. I do not remember all the numbers but I know we are overcommiting memory but not by a lot (probably one to two gigs - our Dell Server has 8GB).

Like WTSLabs there are many other companies out there on the same boat. And for these, if you cannot overcommit this may mean buying another server. For large enterprises another box may be just a drop in the ocean. Not for us.

Performance wise, nothing to complain so far; everything works great and seems responsive. To me, the reality is there will be cases where overcommitment is indeed not a good idea and there could be performance issues if used. But on the other hand, there will be way more cases where overcommitment will not be an issue and everything will work great, saving companies money.

The reason why Microsoft and Citrix as of today downplay memory overcommitment and all the technologies behind it (you can read more here) in my mind is simple: they do not have it.

Will they add that? I am pretty sure they will and if they do there will be two possible reasons for that:

1. They added a feature they consider useless just because they are right and the world is wrong.
2. Added it because it is really important and useful.

I will go with the second option. And once they do it I may take a look at Hyper-V and XenServer again for our needs.

CR

If you have been around the SBC space for a couple of years, you are probably aware if you had a Terminal Services/Citrix solution in place at your company you were treated in a different way. Not necessarily a good one.

In most cases the ‘Citrix’ solution was left on its own by the ‘Server’ guys. The ‘Citrix’ guys were the ones responsible for setting it up, making sure it was up and running, that performance was good (at least from their end - you cannot do much regarding Outlook performance when your ‘Server’ guys decide to run a 1000 maiboxes Exchange 2007 Server using VMWare Player) and so on.

That of course caused some interesting issues. When you had a performance problem the ‘Server’ guys almost automatically would blame ‘Citrix’. As the tools available evolved, it became much easier to prove to these douche bags the issue was actually on the way they setup their SQL servers (all in one single disk!), their Exchange boxes, their AD and even their switches/routers. And not on Citrix.

Fast forward to today’s world, where VDI is the next big thing (well, funny pause here: years ago, when everyone started talking about VDI, the CEO of a very large company that is a MAJOR player in the SBC space told me during BriForum that for him ‘VDI was one of the dumbest ideas ever but as everyone is talking about it we are now supporting this…’), and now people are all concerned about how to treat the ‘VDI’ guys at the datacenter. Read Gabe’s post on the subject here.

My point here is simple. Why all this now? ‘Citrix’ people have been used to this for years and in most cases, the guys pushing VDI forward are the EXACT same guys that had to push ‘Citrix’ forward years ago.

These people are used to that and learned how to deal with that separation at the datacenter at the time. In the past the user’s desktop was hosted on a server at the datacenter (that ran Windows Whatever with TS enabled and Citrix WinMetaXen or QuestProvisonvWhat) running on server grade (hopefully) hardware and users would access it over RDP/ICA. Today’s hotcake, VDI, has the user desktop hosted in a datacenter, running on server grade hardware and they access it over RDP/ICA. So where is the difference?

There is no difference. The ‘Citrix’ guy is now the ‘VDI’ dude (as guy is really ‘out’ - dude is ‘in’). And the same way the ‘Citrix’ guy had to fight his battles with the ‘Server’ guys and had to find his way to manage his loved puppy, all the ‘VDI’ dudes need to do is basically the same.

With a huge advantage: they have all the history, everything we, ‘Citrix’ guys, had to go through, discussed/documented/explained all over the web.

If these ‘dudes’ can learn with our past mistakes/battles/history, they will see this is not rocket science and that in several ways they are no different than what we were 5, 10 years ago.

Grow up guys. VDI is not that different from TS.

Before you thank me for this post, You are Welcome.

CR

This time I will be quick. Over the weekend I upgraded my VMWare ESXi environment at home and from that end, everything worked smoothly (yes I know most of the time upgrading VMWare stuff is not really that easy). But as with anything that usually comes out from 3401 Hillview Ave, Palo Alto, CA, something wrong had to happen.

VMWare had MONTHS to fix the freaking issue with their VSphere Infrastructure Client or whatever that is called now (as they now copy everything Citrix does, they started changing names - word on the street is VMWare ESXi will be renamed VMWare SEXi and VSphere will become VOval) when on Windows 7.

Of course I am running Windows 7. Windows XP, according to my daughter, is “so last year” so I moved everything I have to Windows 7. Once you are in Windows 7 land the VIC (Virtual Infrastructure Client Crap) does not work anymore and when you try to logon it throws one of these really useful, easy to understand error messages. Why not show a simple window that says “You are screwed. Thanks for using VMWare.”?  

Thank Lord there is a fix for what lazy VMWare screwed up. You need to grab a DLL from somewhere and change a config file to get that crap working again. All explained here.

Once I did that, everything is now up and running again. And on Windows 7.

Please do not tell me you need Windows XP Mode on Windows 7 to fix this crap VMWare.

Virtualization is cool and great. But using it to fix shit you created in the first place, is not cool.

Really.

CR

As I am always reading, today I saw this post at the Citrix Community Blogs regarding the Citrix Receiver for the iPhone. As you can see over there I made some comments and the guys at Citrix replied.

My main question regarding this post is, does the iPhone really matter in this context? Is it a game changer device that will help the adoption of Server Centric solutions (VDI or TS, does not matter)?

I ask because as of today, several Windows Mobile phones not only have video outputs (so you can hook them up to a monitor/Projector/TV) but also have support for Bluetooth keyboards, features that are NOT supported (at least officially AND using the SDK available to us, simple mortals) on the iPhone.

So today, if you want to, you can go out and buy a phone that you can hook up to a monitor and using a small, foldable Bluetooth keyboard, use it as a thin client (an RDP client is indeed available for Windows Mobile; I am sure that is the case for VNC, LogMeIn and as per the post I mentioned above, a Citrix Receiver for Windows Mobile will be out soon). As far as I know that did not really cause a huge commotion on the market. Plus to be honest, I do not know anyone actually doing this. And finally, yes, I think it is somehow a little cumbersome…

If we expand on that idea, you could simply go out and buy something like the RedFly from Celio, that is basically a netbook type device that connects to your Windows Mobile (and other phones like BlackBerries) and gives you a 7″ or 8″ screen and a reasonably sized keyboard. Same as the failed Palm Foleo if you remember that. That would be a killer solution I think, ONLY if the price was in the $50 to $99 range. At $199 (starts at that), you are now in Netbook territory. So if I will be carrying an extra device, why would I go for the RedFly? Yes, I know it is hard to justify…

Back to the iPhone, if all the above is available today, why the iPhone is seen as the ‘Jesus Phone’ (love that term, coined at Gizmodo!) for accessing Citrix?

Not sure to be honest. I do think the iPhone is a great device but to become a really useful thin client, a lot more is needed. The small form factor is indeed great for quickly accessing your servers and doing something… quickly. But for long term use, the form factor does not help at all. And for quick access I can do the same from Windows Mobile or even from the CrapBerry (yes, I do think it is crap. But that I will save for another post).

The netbook like form factor I do think is the way to go but carrying another device is not really a solution. If hotels were willing to rent devices like the RedFly out for $5 a day, THEN I see the potential, big time. They would have these paid off in a couple weeks and would provide a real option for Windows Mobile/CrapBerry users to access Citrix backends! Of course support for the iPhone could be easily added, assuming Apple blesses this type of usage for its iPhone (oh yes, you cannot use the iPhone the way you want; you use it the way Apple wants you to - funny thing is you do not even notice Apple is actually manipulating you all the time).

Is the fate of all this really in the hands of a mobile device like the iPhone at the end? Or in the hands of someone that sees the potential for renting RedFlys at hotels, eliminating the need for us carrying another device?

Time will tell.

Cheers.

CR

With so many changes happening in the Virtualization/Server Based Computing space these days I noticed most of the technical people, especially IT staff, are having a very hard time trying to catch up on everything that is going on out there. From simple things like VMWare Studio 2.0, Citrix WorkFlow 2.0 all the way to Citrix XenApp 5.0 Feature Pack 2.

And just for your records, in the middle you may have all the application virtualization stuff (Thinstall, App-V, Altiris SVS, etc), the OS virtualization (ESX, Hyper-V, XenServer, VirtualBox, etc) and things like Windows Server 2008 R2 with all its new TS/VDI features, Quest vWorkspace and so on!

How can you make intelligent decisions about all this when the landscape is changing at such fast pace? After some internal discussions and giving my passion for speaking and training people, I decided to create what I called a ‘Crash Course’ on Server Centric technologies.

On this 5-day training we are covering all these. Sounds crazy heh? Yep. But I am sure it will be a great course for everyone out there that wants to get to the bottom and save a ton of time reading what all these things do, how they compare and what they can do for them.

As you can imagine the idea here is not to give you a deep dive on any of these things so you become a guru overnight. Instead, as mentioned we will give you the no-BS, real world view of all these, based on all the work we have been doing with all these technologies and products for years.

If you are interested, please check our training section at http://www.wtslabs.com/training.asp.

And as always feel free to email me directly with suggestions, opinions and so on!

CR

This morning I was checking my Twitter and got a post regarding (yes, try to guess) VDI. Again. This time with a different twist. Using the increase (possible one) in productity to justify going VDI. You can read the original post here.

If we were all reading/writing these 20 years ago, I would agree with the article. But today, sorry, I cannot. And I will explain the reasons why.

As per the original article, when typewriters were replaced by computers, even if you are not on IT, you can clearly see how much more a computer can do compared to a typewriter. So at the time we had what I call a fundamental change in technology, something major that will clearly allow for a tenfold productivity increase or more. And that is something any CFO/CEO can clearly see and the reason why typewriters were gone quickly. I compare this kind of event in technology to the asteroid that got rid of the dinosaurs. Something major, abrupt, that has the power to bring major changes to something.

Fast forward to today’s IT landscape and the reality is WAY different. First of all, as I wrote several times, if VDI will indeed replace what we know as a desktop today it will have to introduce one of these fundamental changes. And as you can read on this blog, I do not think this will happen unless hardware changes (major ones) are brought to the table.

So back to the topic, in the past couple years there was nothing huge (another IT asteroid if you will) that would bring a tenfold increase in productivity. Sure, application virtualization, OS virtualization, SBC, VDI, type 1 hypervisors and so on helped in many areas but it was not like what happened with the typewriters.

Plus, as of today, measuring user productivity, is something extremely hard. If, as of today, with the current tools and WITHOUT VDI you cannot give your users what they need to work, there is something wrong with you and/or your company. With current, proven technologies you can probably give way more than what your users need to work. Just remember the Office paradigm where “80% of all users use 20% of all features”.

Add to that the fact if you can indeed give users something they will be able to cut 30 minutes a day from their workload, do you really think they will use these now free 30 extra minutes a day to work more? I do not think so. I can guarantee you these 30 minutes will be spread accross two coffee breaks and a lunch so he gets some extra time to himself. At the end of the day he will be doing the same workload but with 30 extra minutes for himself.

And oh boy, how can you measure that considering users are all different? I can bet in your company there are users that completely understand your IT environment and the tools they have at their disposal. Others probably still do not understand how such mysterious, almost magical device, the mouse, works. This is the reality. Not to mention that with any change it comes user training and not all users, again, are the same. Some may take days to adapt. Others, months. And some will never adapt and will curse you and your changes forever.

The point here is simple. I get the fact that an increase in productivity can indeed be used to justify changes like it did for the extinction of the typewriters. But when the introduction of a new technology brings minor increases (and that is the case in my opinion for VDI - users will still be doing pretty much the same, pretty much the same way) it gets very hard to justify, especially these days when C-level executives are trying to trim all the fat they have been carrying for several years.

In a way it is like trying to justify to your wife why you should get rid of your working, 20,000:1 CR 720p native triple LCD projector in your home theater to buy the 25,000:1 CR, 1080p native one. As a videophile I know the difference and I can see it. But for my wife and most of the people that watch movies at my place, the difference will be minimal (assuming they can see it). Same goes for IT these days.

Unless someone can bring way more to the table, another IT asteroid, I cannot be convinced, as of today, to deploy VDI in 90% of the cases or my customers. I can see it as a solution for maybe 10% of these. But sorry, it is no game changer as a lot of people have been bragging all over the Internet, from Twitter to Blogs. Again, unless some major shift, technological advancement is done on the HW level.

VDI people out there, you need way more to convince me.

Show me what you got.

Cheers.

CR