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Tool: Citrix PVSDataTools 1.2.2

Posted on March 25, 2013 4:17 am 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.
📂This entry was posted in Citrix Provisioning Server PVS tools
Varrow Madness Part 1: General Thoughts on Awesomeness

Posted on March 23, 2013 10:09 pm 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 W eiss 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 201 2, 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.
📂This entry was posted in Citrix Labs Madness Varrrow View VMware XenDesktop

Sharefile Releases for Windows 8 and Android

Posted on February 13, 2013 9:31 pm by

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 January 17, 2013 3:58 pm 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
📂This entry was posted in 6.1 Citrix Hotfix Provisioning Server PVS XenServer
XenTools and XenServer 6.1

Posted on December 18, 2012 2:38 pm by Phillip Jones Comment
I usually recommend that customers wait when new products are released so that other early adopters such as your Partners and the community at large can find the bugs for the Vendor to fix. This recommendation is pretty much universal whether it be Microsoft, Citrix, VMware or any vendor.

Citrix announced a forthcoming patch next month for XenServer 6.1 and XenTools that should resolve issues that many customers may be experiencing. I have seen some of these errors in my testing and wanted to let you know that a fix was coming.
Citrix understands and acknowledges that some customers are experiencing intermittent Windows issues with XenTools in the XenServer 6.1 release. We understand this is frustrating for customers and we have been working hard to analyze, understand and resolve these issues.
We are in the final stages of preparing a Hotfix (XS61E005) for all XenServer 6.1 installations. This addresses the following known issues:

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

This hotfix (XS61E005) has required a period of extensive testing to ensure that all known issues have been addressed, which has resulted in its release date being set for early January 2013.
If you are experiencing critical problems today with the tools shipped with 6.1 and you have a XenServer support contract, please raise a case with Citrix Technical Support. This will help the process of analysis and resolution for affected customers.
Further information on exact circumstances when these issues are seen and workarounds will follow shortly.
Again we apologize for the inconvenience caused to customers. We take quality very seriously in the XenServer team and understand some customers may have had their confidence in XenServer affected by these issues. We are addressing our processes to prevent any recurrence and ensure issues are raised earlier in the development process.
📂This entry was posted in Uncategorized
Cisco UCS vCenter Plug-In for vSphere 5.1 Web Client

Posted on December 15, 2012 12:16 am by Phillip Jones Comment
Cisco released a vSphere vCenter plugin for Cisco UCS

Cisco UCS vCenter Plug-in is an extension for the vSphere Web Client v5.1 or higher. It enables virtualization administrators to view, manage and monitor various aspects of Cisco UCS physical infrastructure. The result is a single pane of glass for Virtual Center users to get both physical and virtual infrastructure information for a given hypervisor.
The zip file contains
1. The actual plugin zip file (ucs-vcplugin-0.9.1.zip)
2. EULA (EULA.pdf)
3. A quick start guide (Cisco UCS vCenter Plug-in 0.9.1 Quick Start Guide.pdf)
4. Plugin registration tool (RegisterVCPlugin.exe)
5. A Readme for the installer (RegisterVCPlugin-README.txt)
New features added in VCenter plugin 0.9.1.
Cisco UCS Physical hierarchy view.

Overall health of server and other infrastructure components.

Maps UCS servers to ESX hosts.

Inventory, installed firmware, faults, power and temperature statistics for each server/ESX host.

KVM launch for all ESX and non ESX servers.

Toggle locator LED and launch UCSM GUI for each server.

Registration tool for registering the plugin with the vCenter.

Download the plugin here. (Requires Login)
📂This entry was posted in Uncategorized
Fling: VMware tools:Lctree

Posted on December 5, 2012 9:00 pm by Phillip Jones Comment
VMware Labs presents its latest Fling Lctree .

Lctree is a tool designed for the visualization of linked clone VM trees created by VMware vCloud Director. Linked clone is a feature available in vSphere that creates a clone of a VM from a snapshot point. The new VM’s disks are not full copies of the source disks, but instead, are delta disks which point back to the snapshot’s disks. This feature is widely used in vCloud Director.

Features
- Tree generation is fast compared to solutions using data fetched from vCenter/ESX server
- Hierarchical tree view
- Node properties & separate disk chain view
- Refresh & Search option
- Traditional tree view in separate tabs
- Relocate order of virtual machines in a tree
Download the Lctree Fling!
Thank you,
VMware Labs Team
📂This entry was posted in Flings Linked Clones tools vCloud Director VMware
XenServer Guest VM time issue

Posted on December 5, 2012 2:50 am 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

Windows components and services depend on time synchronization. For example, the Kerberos V5 authentication protocol on a Windows Server 2003 family domain has a default time synchronization threshold of five minutes. Computers that are more than five minutes out of synchronization on the domain will fail to authenticate using the Kerberos protocol. This time value is also configurable, allowing for greater or lesser thresholds. Failure to authenticate using the Kerberos protocol can prevent logons and access to Web sites, file shares, printers, and other resources or services within a domain.

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.
📂This entry was posted in Citrix Desktop Provisioning Server Time timeoffset Windows XenDesktop XenServer XenTools
Citrix on vSphere – User Profiles not removed at Logoff

Posted on November 29, 2012 4:02 pm by Phillip Jones Comment
Many companies out in the wild deploy their Citrix environment on VMware vSphere, its a very common configuration as they are both best of breed at what they do. These products work well together.

However many customers are now deploying vShield (which is being replaced by VMware vCloud® Networking and Security 5.1) into their environments More and more vendors are leveraging these capabilities such as Trend Micro, McAfee for their antivirus, security and application needs.

I have encountered an issue for environments that have deployed Citrix User Profile Manager and did the Full installation of VMware Tools. There is a conflict with the Shared Folder component of VMware tools that prevents the user profile from being deleted at logoff, this can lead to multiple user profiles on a server, sometimes even resulting in temp profile usage and rarely in profile corruption.

An additional profile is created on the local system for each user who logs in. The profiles folders name is first appended with the domain name and then continues to increment with 000, 001, 002, and so on. An example of this is displayed in the following screenshot:

I have seen this lead to thousands, even tens of thousands of small folders clogging up the User profile directory locally on the server.

If you have set up Profile management to delete cached local profiles when users log off from their virtual machines created with VMware (in your XenDesktop or XenApp deployment, say) but the profiles are not deleted, you can use this workaround to overcome the issue.

This issue has been shown to occur when roaming profiles are used on virtual machines created with VMware ESX 3.5 and the Profile management setting Delete locally cached profiles on logoff is enabled.

The issue occurs because the Shared Folders option in VMware Tools adds a file to the profiles, and the file is locked by a running process thereby preventing profiles being deleted at logoff. The file is C:Documents and SettingsuseridApplication DataVMwarehgfs.dat.

If you have verbose logging enabled in Profile management, the log file may detect this problem with an entry such as:
2009-06-03;11:44:31.456;ERROR;PCNAME;JohnSmith4;3;3640;DeleteDirectory: Deleting the directory <C:Documents and Settings<user name>Local SettingsApplication DataVMware> failed with: The directory is not empty.

* In PVS environments running in Standard mode vDisks, this issue is less apparent as the profiles are not accumulated through a reboot.

Resolution: The resolution is to either uninstall VMware tools or modify the installation not to include Shared Folders

More information:
- Citrix Support Article : http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX122501
- VMware KB Article : http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1317
** I suspect but have not confirmed that should apply to any roaming profile solution
📂This entry was posted in Citrix hgfs.dat User Profile Manager VMware vShield vSphere
Cyber Monday : Free VCP 5 Study Guide

Posted on November 26, 2012 4:57 pm by Phillip Jones 11 Comments

It has been a while since I have posted anything (expect more soon) but in the tradition of Cyber Monday where everyone is trying to sell things, I have decided to give something away for free. A copy of Brian Atkinson’s VCP 5 Study Guide. This is a solid book for studying for the VCP5 written by a fellow vExpert.

Rules: simple, post a comment below and next Monday I will pick a random post and mail them a copy of the book, no strings attached.

http://www.amazon.com/VMware-Certified-Professional-vSphere-Study/dp/1118181123

📂This entry was posted in 5 5.1 book Brian Atkinson Study Guide VCP5 VMware vSphere

Pin Passcode

Jail Break Detection

Issues Resolved In This Hotfix

Issues Resolved In This Hotfix

Features