Transcender

Well just a quick update, Transcender have kindly sent me the login details to their product, So over the next few days I shall take it for a spin and write up my thoughts on the product.

Unfortunately I have not been able to look at it sooner as I’ve been working all weekend and sorting something out to deal with a crow thats been bothering us. (twitterers and facebookers may already know this story).

Couple of weeks ago a crow started knocking on the windows of our house (all very amusing to start with) then he started doing it at 4am every morning(not quite so funny). Now the little blighter has taken it upon himself to pimp our cars by ripping off the wipers and ruining the rubber seals (not water based animal)around the windows by scratching them. So a week or so goes by with me jumping out of bed when I hear the crow in the vicinity and shaking my fist at him through the window (gert orf my laaarrrnnnddd)! So anyway now I need to take drastic steps to stop the black peril. Hence the purchase of a suitable tool, Just need to wait for its arrival so we can “sort him out”.

Transcender and wordpress

HI all,

Here’s a quick post about the lovely people at transcender. They have offered me a 30 day trial of their online practice exam product to review. Well obviously I’m very keen on trying the product out and writing my experiences on the product. So thanks very much transcender.

Blatant Plug

Well today I’ve signed up with a wordpress account to,not to move my account you see but to use it as a backup method. I’ve never been too happy with all my content in one place. I’m sure that google isnt going to pull the plug on blogger without a good deal of notice but I was always rather uneasy that I didn’t have any backups.

So I now use wordpresses handy dandy import tool to automagically import all my posts here and poof you have a complete backup of your blog.

 

Lastly I’m working on a blog about the data collector service in Xenapp which is actually very interesting I find, so hopefully there will be alot more meat appearing in the blog shortly.

Xenapp 5 Data Collectors

Configuring the Data Collector Service

The data collector service is the hub of a citrix farm, the data collector responsibilities include but are not limited to:-

Information on published applications
Connected Users
Sessions
Licencing
Server Load
Distribution of the above Information to other data collectors in the farm.

Data collectors operate within “ZONES” inside a farm. Zones are groups of servers that are usually grouped by geographical boundaries. Zones are created to minimise WAN traffic. If for example we had offices in Iceland and one in australia, each would have a seperate zone so that users in iceland connect and lanuch published applications from the iceland zone. This would stop them connecting to the australia zone and incuring WAN costs.

In the above configuration you would still get WAN traffic however it would be minimal as only the datacollectors would be relaying information on their status to each other.

Another interesting thing about data collectors is the “election” process. This is the automated process where a data collector is elected as the primary collector and others as backups. This process is completely automated and can be explained in the following.

You have 2 zones (Iceland and Australia) each has 5 servers within their own zone (so the farm has 10 servers in total) . If all servers allowed their data collectors to chat across the WAN it would increase the amount of WAN traffic and potentially cause confusion. So within each zone the election process takes place. This allows one server to communicate the zones status/info etc to the other zome. However also elected are backup data collectors. This will then become the primary data collector should anything happen to the original primary data collector.

Although this is completely automated there are configuration settings you can change to assist the choice of the primary data collector.

MOST PREFFERED
The first choice for the data collector only assign this to ONE server in each zone. For information this is normally automatically assigned to the first xenapp server installed in a zone.

PREFERRED
The second choice for a data collector, more than one PREFFERED data collector can exist.

DEFAULT PREFERENCE
Default settings for servers, if no settings have been manually chosen for the servers then they go into this level of preference. Also in the event of a MP server failure and no manual preference settings have been configured then elections will occur at this level (simply because the PREFERRED option for a server must be manually chosen.

NOT PREFFERED
This is the runt setting for the servers. Servers in this level will only become data collectors if no others are available.

If you leave all the preference settings alone and let the farm get on with it by itself then when we installed the servers in the iceland zone the first server to come online will automatically be designated the MOST PREFFERED server, the other 4 will get the DEFAULT PREFERENCE.

Publishing an Application in Citrix Xenapp 5

Publishing an application in Citrix is the act of making an application/desktop available either through the web interface or through the programme neighborhood.

There are quite a few settings to think about when publishing an application that affects not only security but performance of an application.

Applications are published to the access management console and rather than walking through the wizard clicks I will explain the various options you could choose on the way.

So once you have opened the access management console and chosen new/publish application in the application folder you will get to choose the following:-

Name
The first tab where you need to enter information is the name tab, all this requires is a friendly name and description of the app you are publishing.

Type
This tab allows you to specify what you are publishing. You can publish an application (i.e. adobe reader) , a complete desktop (good for using with thin clients) or content (i.e. web page or document).

Location
This is the file path to the applications exe or document.

Server
This allows you to select the server(s) that the application is installed on and you want users to have access too. For example a Citrix Farm consisting of 5 servers may all have adobe reader installed but for whatever reason you may only want users accessing adobe reader on 3 of the 5 servers.

Users
This is where you can specify users/groups that will have access to the published application. You can also specify to allow anonymous access which means all users will have access to the application. In real world Citrix deployments access is controlled by groups as administering individual users access to every application you publish will quickly become a nightmare.

vmware sucess

Hi all,

Thought I would post a quick update, as some of you may have read, we had a consultant in setting up our hp servers and San at work for VMWare ESX. Anyway just a couple of days ago I P2V’d our first client facing production server. I’ve P2V’d loads of servers in the past but no production ones.

Its nice to be able to switch off a physical server thinking of all that lovely aircon and electricity you are going to be saving.

VMware and Windows Server Licensing Tip

Hi all, Came across a little tip over the weekend, im sure most of you know it but I thought I’d post it here anyway.

For those of you who purchase software licenses for your company and have some kind of virtualized infrastructure its worth considering purchasing server 2008 enterprise edition when you want a new server license. This is because the enterprise version allows you to run 4 guest OS’s (any server version from NT4 upwards) on any Host OS. So whilst this is predominately aimed at using 2008 hypervisor to runs guest OS’s if you have VMware or Citrix virtualization you could use the license for that as well.

Now at present where I purchase licenses from where we would normally purchase the server STD editions if we buy enterprise versions we would be saving approx 300 quid which is nearly buy 3 get 1 free.

New toys

Hi all,

Again sorry for the lack of posts recently but personal life is currently getting in the way, Hopefully after this week I shall be firmly back on the learning track and posting about my continuing mission.

On another note I have bought myself a new toy, its an aspire one A110 netbook. I really like the device and am very happy with it but at the moment it is suffering from a couple of hardware based issues.
Firstly the battery is not charging correctly. To start with out of the box the netbook does not power on or run on battery power alone. This is aparently quite common and can be cured by a bios update. So I updated the bios and whilst it did make a difference it didnt really cure the issue. The netbook still wont power on without the power cable plugged in but will last about a minute on battery power alone when you pull the power cable out then the laptop dies,all this time the battery charge light flashes orange.

Also another issue is that I cannot get any sound out of the devices inbuilt speakers, however plugging headphones in gets the desired results.

Its a real shame as I really like this little netbook (infact I’m writing this blog on it now), but its RMA and off it goes back to the supplier hopefully for replacement.

Unpleasant experience

 

Hi all,

 

Well today I met my first confirmed braindumper. IT was sadly enough a consultant we had in at work to roll out a new service. We were wondering off down to lunch together and my boss happened to mention that I got my MCSA recently. The consultant said he had just taken the 2008 active directory exams, and then said he downloaded them test king (spit) questions. It was at that point my opinion of the chap took a nose dive! Naturally he said he did not get a question wrong. Dunno maybe he did not know what a BD is but still is rather galling that a consultant that is obviously on a damn sight more money than me either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that he is gaining he cert soup by illegitimate methods!

Faffing About

Hi all,

Again I’m really sorry for the lack of posts recently but I’ve taken a break after finishing my MCSA and a few other things have popped up. Anyway I’ve deceided that I would like to continue on this track and go for the full MCSE. I still want to take a CCA exam as I think that would definately be a good move.

So at the moment I’ve got an exam cram book for 70-293 which I’ve read the first couple of pages of, nothing too exciting just yet. Although I am planning to write a tutorial on the first chapter and also maybe a short video (dunno see how that goes!)

I’ve also ordered the 70-284 mspress book which will go with my exam cram exchange book I got ages ago.

If that wasnt enough I also have a 70-431 book which is a SQL exam , again something else that I am interested in pursuing (but at the moment I fear it will take me a long time to get through that one).

Anyway, I think I will start off with the 293 and see how we get on with that.

The observant amongst you will also notice that I have changed the sub-heading of my blog to reflect my new direction.

Oh yes and also I noticed the people I originally hosted my tutorial content have deleted it so im gonna hunt around for the original and re-post it on my skydrive.

Anywayz laterz.