• Category Archives Citrix

  • Citrix XenApp – Cannot Remove from Farm

    Posted on by Phillip Jones 2 Comments

    Occasionally when administrating or building a Citrix XenApp server farm you may find the need to to remove your server from the farm but then you cannot remove the server. You may get the following error message “Server not available”.

    Luckily there is a fairly simple registry fix that you can do to simplify things and allow the disjoin from the farm.
    Locate the following registry key and change the value from 1 to 0

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWow6432NodeCitrixIMAStatus
    “Joined“=dword:00000000

     
    Then run:

    C:Program Files (x86)CitrixXenAppServerConfigXenAppConfigConsole.exe /ExecutionMode:Leave
     

    After the registry fix and the running the command you’ll be able to remove the server from the farm and then join an existing farm or create a new one again.
     


    Citrix Oprhaned Server not available XenApp

  • Varrow Madness Part 3: The Labs (behind the scenes)

    Posted on by Phillip Jones Comment

    Varrow Madness had a heavy emphasis put on hands on labs this year. We Varrowites definitely like getting our hands dirty and we wanted to give you the chance to get your hands on the products as well. We wanted to give Madness attendees a taste of both VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop. and to see the technical pieces of the provisioning process required in order to deliver a virtual desktop to your users.

    Our overall vision for how the labs would run at Madness this year were built around our experiences with the hands on labs available at the major vendor conferences, such as VMworld, PEX as well as Citrix Synergy. Comparing our labs to these vendors set the bar pretty high and i think we achieved a very well developed lab. The Varrow Hosted labs for the EUC practice were not the only labs available at Varrow Madness either, attendees also had access to the full VMware Hands on Lab list hosted in the Cloud, the same revered labs that were available at VMware PEX to partners.

    Varrow Labs Behind the Scenes
     
    Dave Lawrence, Director of End User Computing at Varrow volunteered me to assist with putting the labs together several weeks before Madness. I was pretty excited about tackling this opportunity so I jumped at the chance.

    I wanted to provide details on the hardware and software setup that we used to accomplish delivering twenty plus isolated environments. Maybe this will inspire you on a way that you could use vCloud Director in your environment to enable your users, maybe spinning up multiple isolated or fenced vApps for your developers, testing a new product or a temporary project, the use cases are only limited to what you can imagine 🙂

    Lab Hardware 

    Compute

    • (2) – 6120XP FI
    • (2) – 2104XP IO Modules
    • UCS5108 Chassis
      • Blade 1 – B200 M1
        • (2) X5570 – 2.933GHz
        • 32GB 1333MHz RAM
        • N20-AC0002 – Cisco UCS M81KR Virtual Interface Card – Network adapter – 10 Gigabit LAN, FCoE – 10GBase-KR
      • Blade 2 – B200 M1
        • (2) X5570 – 2.933GHz
        • 32GB 1333MHz RAM
        • N20-AC0002 – Cisco UCS M81KR Virtual Interface Card – Network adapter – 10 Gigabit LAN, FCoE – 10GBase-KR
      • Blade 3 – B200 M2
        • (2) E5649 – 2.533GHz
        • 48GB 1333MHz RAM
        • N20-AC0002 – Cisco UCS M81KR Virtual Interface Card – Network adapter – 10 Gigabit LAN, FCoE – 10GBase-KR
      • Blade 4 – B200 M1
        • (2) X5570 – 2.933GHz
        • 24GB 1333MHz RAM
        • N20-AQ0002 – Cisco UCS M71KR-E Emulex Converged Network Adapter (LIMITED TO TWO 10GB NICS)
    • UCS5108 Chassis
      • Blade 1 – B200 M1
        • (2) X5570 – 2.933GHz
        • 24GB 1333MHz RAM
        • N20-AC0002 – Cisco UCS M81KR Virtual Interface Card – Network adapter – 10 Gigabit LAN, FCoE – 10GBase-KR
      • Blade 2 – B200 M2
        • (2) E5649 – 2.533GHz
        • 48GB 1333MHz RAM
        • N20-AC0002 – Cisco UCS M81KR Virtual Interface Card – Network adapter – 10 Gigabit LAN, FCoE – 10GBase-KR
      •  Blade 3 -B200 M3
        • (2) E5-2630 12 Core CPUs
        • 96GB 1600Mhz
        • MLOM VIC 
      •  Blade 4 -B200 M3
        • (2) E5-2630 12 Core CPUs
        • 96GB 1600Mhz
        • MLOM VIC

     Storage

    • VNX5300
      • (16) – 2TB 7.2K NL SAS Drives
      • (5) – 100GB SSD – Configured as Fast Cache
      • (25) – 600GB 10K SAS 2.5″ 

    Networking

    • N7K-M148GS-11L – 48 Port Gigabit Ethernet Module (SFP)
    • N7K-M108X2-12L – 8 Port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Module with XL Option
    • N7K-M132XP-12L – 32 Port 10GbE with XL Option, 80G Fabric
    • N7K-M132XP-12L – 32 Port 10GbE with XL Option, 80G Fabric
    • N7K-SUP1 – Supervisor Module
    • N7K-SUP1 – Supervisor Module
    • N7K-M108X2-12L – 8 Port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Module with XL Option
    • SG300-28 – GigE Managed Small Business Switch
    • DS-C9124-K9 – MDS 9124 Fabric Switch
    • DS-C9148-16p-K9 – MDS 9148 Fabric Switch
    • Nexus 5010
    • w/ N5K-M1008 – 4GB FC Expansion Module
    • Nexus 2148T Fabric Extender
    • Connected to 5010

    Thin Clients
    Cisco provided the thin clients that were used in the labs. The thin clients were capable of RDP, ICA as well as PCoIP connections. Each thin client station connected via Remote Desktop to a NAT IP into their assigned vCenter. The thin clients were Power over ethernet drawing very little power and may be representative in what you would deploy if you were planning a thin client deployment.

    vCloud Director
    Each UCS blade had ESXi installed all managed by a virtualized VMware vCenter 5.1. We used vCloud Director appliance to build the vApp for each lab and created Catalogs for each lab environment that we could check out for each workstation. We also had vCenter Operations Manager deployed so that we could monitor the lab environment.

    vApp Design 
    Each vApp or Pod in both the XenDesktop and the VMware View environment consisted of four virtual machines at the beginning. Each Pod or vApp was fenced off from the other to give each user their own isolated EUC environment. The networks on the vDistributed Switch for each vApp were dynamically built as each vApp was powered on.

    VMware View

    • Domain Controller
    • VirtualCenter – SQL, VC 5.1 – users remote to this workstation via a NAT IP to run through the lab
    • View Connection Server – View Composer
    • ESXi Server – hosting desktops – Virtualized ESXi

    Citrix XenDesktop

    • Domain Controller
    • VirtualCenter – SQL, VC 5.1 – users remote to this workstation via a NAT IP to run through the lab
    • Citrix Desktop Delivery Controller, Citrix Provisioning Server
    • ESXi Server – hosting desktops – Virtualized ESXi 

    The general script for both platforms would be to..

    1. Connect to vCenter from thin client via RDP
    2. Provision multiple desktops via product specific technology (View Composer for View and Provisioning Server for XenDesktop)
    3. Connect to provisioned Desktops

    And the Madness Begins

    We shipped and set up the server rack containing all the lab equipment as well as the workstations to the event the day before Madness. Getting a full rack shipped and powered at a site not built for it can have its challenges, luckily we have some really talented and knowledgeable people at Varrow that can navigate these issues. Madness was also the first chance we had to stress test the labs with a full user load. Later that evening we pulled all hands on deck and sent them all through the labs, there were a mix of technical and non technical Varrowites in the room pounding away at the labs. We were seeing workloads in excess of 10-15000 IOPs and thing were running pretty smooth….until I decided to start making changes by checking out the Citrix lab vApp from the vCloud catalog to make some necessary changes….

     This graph on the right should illustrate what happened when I kicked off the Add to Cloud task and when it ended, it crushed the storage kicking the latency to ludicrious levels. So the most important thing when running a lab was to keep Phillip away from the keyboard. You can thank Jason Nash for that screenshot and the attached commentary.

    The labs were a huge team effort, special shout out to everyone who helped us before, during and after the event, Dave Lawrence, Jason Nash, Bill Gurling, Art Harris, Tracy Wetherington, Thomas Brown, Jason Girard, Jeremy Gillow and everyone else at Varrow that helped out with the labs.

    A lot of work goes into putting together the labs and all of the labs, both Varrow Hosted EUC labs as well as the VMware hosted labs were well received and attended at Madness. I hope to be a part of the lab team next year, we were already talking about ways to expand the labs next year and how to expand the products we demonstrate and more. Can’t wait until next year, see you then at Varrow Madness 2014.


    Citrix HOL Labs Madness Varrow vCloud Director View VMware XenDesktop

  • Varrow Madness Part 2: Citrix Provisioning Server Implementation and Best Practices

    Posted on by Phillip Jones 1 Comment

    My session at Varrow Madness covered Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) Implementation and Best Practices. I have always been a big fan of this product even before Citrix purchased Ardence which would become Provisioning Services. The ability to stream the server OS over the network and the flexibility that this product gives you is amazing. Even smaller environments can benefit from the advantages of Provisioning Services.

    My session summarized many of the guides, Citrix articles as well as my own personal experiences with Citrix PVS over the years. I will also include the resources at the end of this post. I personally have installed, managed and configured PVS in environments ranging from a handful of servers up to 10000+ desktops with multiple sites including DR environments.

     

    While I have been in IT for many years and spoken in many difference situations from board rooms to conference rooms with co-workers and executives, there is something different about public speaking.Varrow Madness was a first for me in more than one way, not just my first Madness but it was also my first professional speaking role.

    I have prepared for public speaking over the years in many ways. I knew this was something I always wanted to tackle as I have considered submitting for sessions at various technical conferences. At a previous company I got involved in the public speaking organization Toastmasters which really helped me prepare for this moment. I can’t say I was completely prepared for this but I think it went well. The session ended on time but the questions continued right into the next session 🙂 Which I thought was awesome.

    I highly encourage anyone to take a chance and give public speaking or something that scares you a chance. Fear is OK, letting it control you is not.

    “Do one thing every day that scares you” – Eleanor Roosevelt

    Citrix PVS Resources


    I plan to do more posts around Provisioning Services and a few instructional videos as well. As always I welcome any questions and comments that you have below regarding this or any topic.  
     
     


    Citrix Madness Provisioning Server Public Speaking PVS Varrow

  • Tool: Citrix PVSDataTools 1.2.2

    Posted on by Phillip Jones Comment

    Citrix announced the release of a tool from the Citrix Provisioning Server Escalation team, Citrix PVSDataTools 1.2.2 This looks like it may be another solid tool for assistance with Citrix PVS troubleshooting. There are two tools included in this set. One to gather the data and one to analyze the results.

    • PVSDataCollector 
    • PVSDataParser

    PVSDataCollector
    The PVSDataCollector collects the following information from the PVS Server:

    • System Information
    • Windows Event Logs
    • TCP and UDP Port Information
    • PVS Logs (Entire Directory)
    • PVS Configuration Files
    • PVS Data (that is farm, server, collection, device, disk, site and store information)

    PVSDataParser
    The PVSDataParser is used to view the following data collected from the PVSDataCollector:

    • System Information
    • TCP and UDP Port Information
    • PVS Logs
    • Basic PVS Overview

    The PVSDataParser does not parse Windows Event Logs and dump files. Manual parsing is required for data of this type.

     
     

    Citrix Provisioning Server PVS tools

  • Varrow Madness Part 1: General Thoughts on Awesomeness

    Posted on by Phillip Jones Comment

    Varrow Madness is an annual conference put together for our customers and greater community centered around March Madness, focused on sharing ideas and knowledge, and its a free event. This was my first Madness and and I have now been with Varrow close to nine months and still loving it.  I’m amazed and stunned by this event my compatriots put together at Varrow along with the help of their partners. A lot of work goes into these conferences, more than I even imagined as a consumer of these events in the past. it really makes me appreciate the work that goes into the other events done out there, big and small, and especially the people that put them together.

    Varrow Madness is quite a show and if you get the chance next year, it’s an absolute must attend.

    I was going to write a short post following Madness but I have decided that Varrow Madness is just way too big and awesome to be contained in a single post so I will break it up into three posts.

    • Varrow Madness Part 1: General Thoughts on Awesomeness
    • Varrow Madness Part 2: Citrix Provisioning Server Implementation + Best Practices
    • Varrow Madness Part 3: Varrow Hosted EUC Labs

    Madness kicked off with Jeremiah Cook, our CEO and co-founder as well as a cultural leader at Varrow as well as our resident leader rapper. Jeremiah welcomed everyone to Varrow Madness followed by a great video about BYOB, Bring your own Bots inspired in order to introduce a great performance from iLuminate, the same group that has done performances on America‘s got Talent and other venues. I also learned that Jason Nash has Android devices and loves to look up funny cat pictures on the internet.

    Dan Weiss our Chief Operations Officer and co-founder joined Jeremiah and stage and talked about the sheer volume of events we had planned for the day and his rad dance movies. We also announced the winner of the Varrow Innovation Contest 2012, the winner recieved a free pass to the Vendor Conference of their choice. There were many submissions and I am sure it was exteremly hard to choose the finalist much less the actual winner, all of the submissions were fantastic.

    Check out each of the submissions below and congratulations to Alamance Regional Medical Center for winning the contest this year.

    Alamance Regional Medical Center

    Alamance Regional Medical Center participated in the Varrow Innovation contest and submitted their custom built Single-Sign-On solution that allows badge tap-n-go access for Citrix Xenapp. Alamance Regional was the grand prize winner of the Varrow Innovation Contest at Varrow Madness 2013. 

    American National Bank

    Varrow Customer Testimonial – American National Bank
    Finalist in 2013 Varrow Innovation Contest for their great work in running Active Active Datacenters with EMC Recoverpoint and VMware Site Recovery Manager

    Northern Hospital Surry County

    Varrow Customer Testimonial – Northern Hospital Surry County
    Finalist in 2013 Varrow Innovation Contest for their great work in running Active Active Datacenters with EMC VNX and VPLEX and Vmware vSphere

    Jesse Lipson, Citrix Sharefile VP and GM did the morning keynote. After the keynote, the day was packed with technical sessions from some of the industries greatest minds and I was there too. I believe there were 46 sessions for people to choose from broken up over four sessions, two in the morning and two in the afternoon. You can still find the agenda on our Varrow Madness microsite.

    I missed most of the afternoon keynote due to my work on the Varrow labs. The afternoon session kicked off with another performance from iLuminate and a keynote from VCE, President of VCE. I heard it was a great speech and plan to back and watch the recording when I have a free opportunity.

    Next year i hope we can record all sessions and provide those online as a learning tool. I know that I wanted to attend many sessions and was unable due to my other duties at the conference. One thing i heard from several folks (and I think its a good problem to have) is the difficulty in picking which session to pick.

    I spent most of the day in the Varrow Hosted Labs. The labs for both VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop were well received and attended, I will talk more about that in my upcoming Lab Post.

    In the next few posts, i will talk about my session on Citrix Provisioning Server and the Varrow Hosted labs. As always I welcome any comments that you may have and any questions.


    Citrix Labs Madness Varrrow View VMware XenDesktop

  • Sharefile Releases for Windows 8 and Android

    Posted on by Phillip Jones Comment

    I find myself using Citrix Sharefile more and more lately, whether it be the Outlook integration, file syncing services, web access or Receiver integration into Cloud Gateway. I now have Sharefile on my Mac, PC, Android and my iDevices (multiple).

    Citrix recently announced Sharefile 2.0 for Android and Sharefile for Windows 8

    Sharefile for Android 2.0

    New Features

    Pin Passcode

    Jail Break Detection
    Gives users easier access to their data instead of having to type their password every time they start the application. Allows administrators to prevent their users from accessing their ShareFile data from jail broken devices.

    Another security feature added to this release is local device encryption for improved security of sensitive data.

    Sharefile for Windows 8 for Windows 8 RT and Surface Pro

    I don’t have a Windows 8 mobile device to test this out myself but it is on my to do list so i can test with all of the major devices. I have tested this on my Windows 8 VM lightly and haven’t had any issues.

    From the article

    Citrix is bringing easy file sharing to the latest version of Windows. If you are one of those users looking to get a tablet running Windows 8 or if you have a laptop/desktop running Windows 8, we now have multiple ways to leverage ShareFile on Windows 8 with the introduction of the new ShareFile app in the Windows Store. This app provides a full-screen experience on Windows 8 for accessing ShareFile and integrates directly with the new Windows 8 charm bar for OS-level integration with the Search, Share, and Settings charms. Of course, we included support for the great device security features like remote wipe and users can login with their AD credentials. The app also supports these great features:

    • Browse your account
    • Download and view documents
    • Request and send files via email
    • Transfer big files
    • Add users to folders on your ShareFile account
    • Offline access to view downloaded files
    • For Enterprise accounts, users will be able to access their data using their corporate credentials
    • IT administrators will be able to control and audit access

    Android Citrix RT Pro Sharefile Surface Windows 8

  • XenServer 6.1 Hotfixes w/ PVS and Guest Blue Screen fixes

    Posted on by Phillip Jones Comment

    Recently I blogged about the XenServer 6.1 issues that Citrix announced here for customers facing blue screens and other issues such as

    • Add PVS support in XS 6.1
    • Resolve intermittent grey screen on Windows Server 2003
    • Resolve intermittent blue screen on VM migration
    • Resolve intermittent blue screen after attempting VM shutdown
    • Reinstate support for VSS shadow copy services

    Citrix has announced two hotfixes that should resolve these issues that should be applied in order to resolve the above issues.

    Hotfix XS61E009 – For XenServer 6.1.0 

    This is a hotfix for customers running XenServer 6.1.0. This is the first part of a two component fix, customers should install CTX136253 – Hotfix XS61E010 – For XenServer 6.1.0 after installing this hotfix.

    Issues Resolved In This Hotfix

    1. Virtual Machines (VMs) with out of date XenServer Tools, may not be flagged as “out of date” in XenCenter. This hotfix resolves this issue and enables customers to be notified in XenCenter when new XenServer Tools are available.
    2. Booting a Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) target device using a Boot Device Manager (BDM) image can take an extended time to complete. This hotfix resolves this issue.

    Hotfix XS61E010 – For XenServer 6.1.0 

    This is a hotfix for customers running XenServer 6.1.0. This is the second part of a two component fix, customers must install CTX136252 – Hotfix XS61E009 – For XenServer 6.1.0 before attempting to apply this hotfix.
    Important:

    • Before installing this hotfix, customers who have previously referred to CTX135099 – XenServer Tools Workarounds for XenServer 6.1.0 for workaround instructions should review it again as it contains updated content.
    • After applying this hotfix, customers should upgrade the XenServer Tools in each Windows Virtual Machine (VM). See the section, Upgrading XenServer Tools in VMs later in this article.
    • Customers should upgrade the XenServer Tools before configuring the network settings on VMs.

    Issues Resolved In This Hotfix

    This hotfix resolves the following issues:

    1. Customers using XenServer Platinum Edition to license Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) may find that one PVS license per VM is checked out, rather than one PVS license per XenServer host. This may lead to a shortage of PVS licenses and an inability to provision VMs. Installing this hotfix along with CTX135672 – Hotfix CPVS61016 (Version 6.1.16) – For Citrix Provisioning Services 6.1 – English resolves this issue.
    2. Attempts to shut down Microsoft Windows Vista and later VMs can cause intermittent blue screen errors, with a "STOP: 0x0000009f..." error message.
    3. Adding more than eight NICs to Microsoft Windows Vista and later VMs, using the xe CLI can lead to a blue screen error on reboot.
    4. Copying data to a Microsoft Windows 2003 VM can cause the VMs to hang and lead to a grey screen error.
    5. When Dynamic Memory Control (DMC) is enabled, attempts to migrate Microsoft Windows XP and later VMs using XenMotion can cause the VMs to hang and lead to blue screen error.
    6. When the Citrix Xen Guest Agent service is running, Cut and Paste will not work between a XenDesktop virtual desktop and the endpoint device.
    7. Microsoft Windows XP and later VMs may hang during the boot process and may have to be forced to reboot.
    8. Attempting to install or upgrade the XenServer Tools on Microsoft Windows Vista and later VMs, which do not have access to a paravirtualized or an emulated network device can cause the installation process to hang.
    9. Manually installing the Legacy XenServer Tools without changing the device_id to 0001 can result in a "STOP: 0x0000007B..." error when rebooting a Windows VM. After installing this hotfix, customers will not be able to manually install the Legacy XenServer Tools by running xenlegacy.exe. When customers start the XenServer Tools installation process, the installwizard.msi will be launched automatically.
    10. Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) (required for third party backup solutions) was unavailable on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 in the original version of XenServer 6.1.0. After installing this hotfix, XenServer 6.1.0 customers will be able to take quiesced snapshots on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 VMs. Note VSS is not supported for Windows Server 2008 R2.

    In addition, this hotfix also contains several usability and performance improvements


    6.1 Citrix Hotfix Provisioning Server PVS XenServer

  • XenServer Guest VM time issue

    Posted on by Phillip Jones 1 Comment

    Today I was working on an issue where a new XenDesktop Desktop Group was built and the time on all VMs provisioned was off by five hours. This led to the Desktop guest VMs not being able to talk on the domain and coming up as “Unregistered”.

    Anyone that’s worked in this industry long enough knows that Windows is very sensitive to time, the time of a Windows machine cannot be off by more than five minutes.

    From Microsoft Technet regarding time

    The Desktop Group was provisioned on XenServer using Provisioning Services So I checked all the usual culprits and found no issues so I had to dig further

    • XenServer time configuration
    • Domain Controller configuration
    • Infoblox 

    As this issue was only happening to newly provisioned desktops and no other server on the domain.A work-around was found that by changing the VM time for every VM while in standard mode after they were provisioned they would keep the correct time.

    For those of you out there running Provisioning Services, you understand that Standard mode changes do not persist by reboot so this defies a bit of logic and led me to dig deeper down in the XenServer VM XenTools time sync.

    XenServer has a parameter set per VM, timeoffset configured per VM

    For Windows guests, time is initially driven from the control domain clock, and is updated during VM lifecycle operations such as suspend, reboot and so on. Citrix highly recommends running a reliable NTP service in the control domain and all Windows VMs.
    So if you manually set a VM to be 2 hours ahead of the control domain (for example, using a time-zone offset within the VM), then it will persist. If you subsequently change the control domain time (either manually or if it is automatically corrected by NTP), the VM will shift accordingly but maintain the 2 hour offset. Note that changing the control domain time-zone does not affect VM time-zones or offset. It is only the hardware clock setting which is used by XenServer to synchronize the guests.
    When performing suspend/resume operations or live relocation using XenMotion, it is important to have up-to-date XenServer Tools installed, as they notify the Windows kernel that a time synchronization is required after resuming (potentially on a different physical host).

    To check the offset of the VM, you can run the following command from the XenServer command line.

    • xe vm-list name-label=vmName params=name-label,platform

     Example Output

    [root@xenhost01 ~]# xe vm-list name-label=vmTest-001 params=name-label,platform
    name-label ( RW)    : vmTest-001
          platform (MRW): timeoffset: -18004; nx: false; acpi: true; apic: true; pae: true; viridian: true

    [root@xenhost02 ~]# xe vm-list name-label=vmTest-002 params=name-label,platform
    name-label ( RW)    : vmTest-002
          platform (MRW): timeoffset: -2; nx: false; acpi: true; apic: true; pae: true; viridian: true

    Note the timeoffset of -18004 on vmTest-001 and -2 on vmTest-002. This value is listed in seconds so that is a five hour time difference (the difference we were seeing on boot of the VM). This is no coincidence.

    Resolution

    • In our case it was to build a new Template VM and ensure the timeoffset was set correctly
    • You can also do this on a case by case basis per VM by running the following command and substituting vm-uuid for the VM that would like to update.
      • xe-param-set platform:timeoffset=<value-in-seconds> uuid=<vm-uuid>

    Citrix Desktop Provisioning Server Time timeoffset Windows XenDesktop XenServer XenTools

  • Goodbye Cisco ACE, Hello Citrix Netscaler

    Posted on by Phillip Jones Comment

    Lately I have spent a fair amount of my time implementing and configuring Citrix Netscaler devices, the more I use these the more I am excited about this technology, apparently Cisco agrees with me.

    Cisco confirmed this week that it will not develop further generations of its ACE load-balancing products based on a review of data center trends and growth market opportunities. ACE, which is embodied in modules for Cisco 7600 routers and Catalyst 6500 switch and a standalone appliance, was not a growing product line for Cisco.

    ACE is an application delivery controller (ADC). ADCs are vital to virtualized data centers and cloud environments as more VM workloads are added and movde around within and between data centers, and within the cloud. Multiple active paths between switches need to balance traffic loads to ensure application uptime and performance, and reduce latency and congestion

    Cisco has announced a partnership with Citrix to use Netscalers as part of the solution stack. Cisco and Citrix have a long history of working together and many plans laid out for the future.

    The companies also plan to integrate Cisco’s collaboration products with Citrix’s CloudGateway and Xen Desktop virtualization offerings; and Cisco’s ONE programming environment, Unified Computing and Nexus data center switches with Citrix’s CloudPlatform orchestration engine and XenServer products.

    Ok so what does this mean to you if your an ACE customer and now your hardware is EOL, Citrix and Cisco have developed the ACE Migration Program or AMP to help you with the transition.

    In phase one of our networking partnership, Cisco sales teams will now recommend Citrix NetScaler ADC for Cisco Unified Data Center Architecture and Solutions. This will enable our mutual customers to deliver any application or service with the best possible performance, security and availability. Additionally, Citrix is developing a suite of migration tools, reference documents and services to ensure seamless integration of Citrix NetScaler into Cisco Cloud Network Services architectures.
    To fully support customers during this transition phase, Citrix is offering a new ACE Migration Program (AMP) to all global customers. The special program provides Cisco ACE customers with the industry’s most generous product discounts for next-generation ADC solutions, as well as custom NetScaler implementation services provided by world-class Citrix Consulting Services. Citrix is making it easy for ACE customers to migrate to the industry’s best ADC solution, NetScaler. Between now and December 31, 2012, qualified Cisco ACE customers will receive:

    • 20% discount on the MSRP of any NetScaler MPX and multi-tenant NetScaler SDX appliance.
    • 20% discount on the MSRP of a standard 3-day NetScaler Implementation Service provided by world-class Citrix Consulting Services.

    Note: Existing volume license programs apply to the discounted manufacturer suggested retail price (MSRP), if applicable.
    Information on the ACE Migration Program, as well as for materials and resources pertaining to the Cisco and Citrix NetScaler partnership, please visit the Citrix “Welcome to NetScaler” site at www.citrix.com/netscaler/cisco.

    More about the future relationship between Cisco and Citrix

    Cisco and Citrix believe the IT industry is on the verge of the next major architectural transition:  the mobile-cloud era. To help enterprise and service provider customers capture the market transition and transform their business models, Cisco and Citrix will collaborate to unify best-of-breed technologies into innovative solutions for the mobile-cloud era.

    The expanded partnership will include a significant investment in people and resources to drive market-leading technology innovation, solution integration and validation, customer support, and joint go-to-market investment on a global basis.

    • Cloud Networking
    • Cloud Orchestration
    • Mobile Workstyles
    • PertnerShip Momentum

     Expect a few more blogs around the Citrix Netscalers coming up soon. I hope you find this article useful, if you have any comments please leave them below.


    Ace Cisco Citrix Cloud mobility Netscaler Networking partners