Monthly Archives: April 2010

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Citrix Branch Repeater VPX Licensing Tutorial

April 29, 2010 2:57 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

I recently implemented both the new Citrix Access Gateway (CAG) VPX and the Branch Repeater VPX within our development lab. Both are “virtual appliances” designed to run directly on a XenServer host. Both are impressive products and work great - in fact, we can use “live motion” to move the CAG between XenServers while running video in a XenDesktop session with not even a pause in the video playback. The CAG moves with no interruption in service. NONE!

But this isn’t just a post to sing the praises of the virtual appliances. Rather, it’s about LICENSING!!! Specifically, licensing the Branch Repeater VPX.

As with many Citrix products, obtaining the license and getting it properly installed is not necessarily easy and intuitive…and in many cases (particularly with new products), we’ve found that the Citrix licensing support team does not know all the ins and outs of licensing a specific product either. That is not intended as a slam on this team. They do the best they can – but Citrix is a big company now, and sometimes it takes a while for information on new products to filter down to the front-line troops. In this case they worked with me for quite some time until we got this figured out (so there is at least one guy on the Citrix support team who now knows how this works).

So…now that I’ve gone through the pain, I thought I’d try to spare you from it if I can. (You’re welcome.)

One complication you’ll encounter is that, depending upon what you’re attempting to accomplish, these appliances may require one license or two. For example, with the CAG, if you are only going to use it for running secured sessions to a web interface (the equivalent of the legacy Citrix Secure Gateway) then you only need a “platform license.” However, if you also plan to run SSL VPN sessions though the CAG, you will need Access Gateway Universal licenses for your users, which will be rolled into a second license file.

Access Gateway licensing isn’t new and it’s pretty well understood. But what about the Branch Repeater? Just as with the CAG, the Branch Repeater may require one license or two, depending upon the functionality you need. If you are going to use the Branch Repeater VPX to connect to another (physical or virtual) Branch Repeater then you only need a platform license. However, if you want to take advantage of its ability to support client PCs that use the Branch Repeater Plug-in, you will need a second license to enable that feature. So we finally come to the topic of this post: how do you get the license file(s) onto your new Branch Repeater VPX?

First, you must log onto the “MyCitrix” web site with your account credentials, and access the Licensing Tool Box to activate and allocate the license. That part of the process is well documented, and if you’re a Citrix customer, you’ve probably done it at least once. The tricky part is what you have to do to download the VPX license file, what you need to enter in the Repeater itself, where to put it, and what you should see.

Here’s what we learned (NOTE: Click on any graphic to view full-sized):

  1. On the Branch Repeater VPX Web-based management interface, access the “Manage Licenses” screen, and in the right panel, choose “local” as shown below, and click the “Apply” button.

    License Server Configuration

  2. Then click on the “License Information” tab and you will see something similar to this next image. What you will need from this screen is the “Local License Server Host Id:” Write down this information - you will need it in the next step.

    Information Used for License Management

  3. Now you can download the license file from your “MyCitrix” portal. Save it to your PC, and make a note of where you saved it. As part of the process of downloading the license, you must enter the license server ID. Traditionally, you would enter the name of the Citrix license server in this field (and it was case-sensitive, which tripped up a lot of users). But in this case, the system is expecting the MAC address of the Branch Repeater VPX itself…which is what you just copied in Step 2. Another difference is that in the past the License Server Host Type was always set to “HostName.” However, there is now a drop down box with a second choice, “ETHERNET.” For the Branch Repeater VPX, you want to select “ETHERNET,” and then enter the host id that you wrote down in Step 2:

    Downloading the License File from MyCitrix


    In case you’re wondering, the MAC address we’re using is the address of the first interface on the Branch Repeater VPX, as displayed in XenCenter. If you want to find it in XenCenter click on the VM in the left column and then select the Network tab in the right window and you should see it there:

    XenCenter Display

  4. Now that you have your license downloaded to your local PC, you need to add it to your Branch Repeater. Access the “Local Licenses” tab and click the Add button (note that you will not see all the content in the window as shown here until you’ve added your license):

    Local Licenses Display


    After you click Add, this screen will appear and you will need to browse to the location where you saved your license file, and click the “Install” button:

    Add License


    Now the “Local Licenses” tab should be populated with content:

    Local Licenses Display


    Next, go to the “Licensed Features” tab. You should see your features listed as shown below:

    Licensed Features

  5. As mentioned earlier, if you plan to support client PCs that have the Branch Repeater Plug-in, you will need another license to enable this feature. Once again you will need to go to your MyCitrix portal and follow the same procedure as you did for your platform license to obtain the Plug-in license. Once you have the Plug-in license you will need to add it to the Virtual Appliance in the same manner as you added the platform license. Once that’s done, if you click the down arrow under “Local Licenses” you will see both licenses:

    Manage Licenses Screen


    Finally, if you click the “Licensed Features” tab, both licenses should show up with the number of licenses available:

    Licensed Features

This should be all you need to get the Branch Repeater VPX licensed. Now you just need to get it configured correctly… but that’s another blog post.

Posted in: Branch Repeater, Citrix, Licensing ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Looking For the Citrix Acceleration Client for Win 7?

April 22, 2010 1:41 pm ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

We’ve been working with the new Branch Repeater VPX virtual appliance, which supports the Branch Repeater client plug-in (unlike the hardware Branch Repeater appliances).

Since Moose Logic is a Microsoft Gold Partner, and we like to keep up with the latest releases, most of us have been running Windows 7 for a while now. But when we went looking for a Win7-compatible Branch Repeater plug-in for the Citrix Receiver, we had a tough time finding it.

It does exist, though, and now that we’ve tracked it down, we though we’d share with you just where it’s hiding in case you’ve been searching too.

The first thing to note is that, when you go to the Citrix download site, and search for downloads by product, you will see that the “Citrix Branch Repeater” and the “Citrix Repeater (formerly WANScaler)” are listed separately - and, since products are listed in alphabetical order, they’re quite a ways apart in the list (click on graphic to view full-size):

Downloads by Product


If you choose “Citrix Branch Repeater,” which is what we initially did, since we were working with the Branch Repeater VPX, the latest plug-in you will see listed is v5.0.34, which is not Win7-compatible:

v5.0.34


So the secret is to choose “Citrix Repeater (formerly WANScaler)” from the product selection drop-down. Then you’ll see several later versions of the plug-in, including v5.5.2, which is Win7-compatible:

v5.5.2


Oh, and if anyone from Citrix is reading this: Please - just get rid of the plug-ins listed under “Citrix Branch Repeater,” or, better yet, either have a redirect, or a line that says “Please see ‘Citrix Repeater (formerly WANScaler)’ for Branch Repeater plug-ins.” It will make life much simpler for everyone. Thank you.

Posted in: Branch Repeater, Citrix ⋅ Tagged: , ,

XenServer Host Is In Emergency Mode

April 15, 2010 3:49 pm ⋅ 8 Comments ⋅

It’s 8 pm on a Sunday evening, and I get a panicked call from a customer because he cannot connect to his XenServersTM via the XenCenterTM management tool. However, as near as he could tell, all of the hosted virtual machines were up and running and in a healthy state. He had unsuccessfully tried to point the XenCenter management tool at another member of the XenServer pool but was unsuccessful.

So what happened and how do you fix it?

This situation can happen for several reasons but generally it happens when there are only two servers in the XenServer pool, and the pool master suddenly fails. In essence, what happens is the surviving server (let’s just call it the “slave”) can no longer see its peer, the pool master, so it assumes it has been stranded and goes into emergency mode to protect its own VMs. There are other ways this can happen (an incorrectly configured pool with HA turned on for example), but this is the most common reason that I have personally experienced.

Depending upon the situation, you may not be able to ping the master server because it is actually down, or you may be able to ping the server but it is in an inconsistent, “locked up”, state such that it cannot answer requests to it. If you are able to connect to the console of the master server either directly with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse (the old fashioned way) or through a remote management interface (DRAC, ILO, ILOM, etc) the server may appear to be running, but you may not be able to do anything with it.

At this point you may be thinking, “This is no big deal - just reboot the machine and it will be fine.” If you are lucky that may actually solve the problem, but in many cases it will not. What you might see is that after the master reboots you will be able to connect to the master but you will not see the slave. Or it may be that your master is truly broken and you are not able to simply reboot it due to a system or hardware failure. But, of course, you’ve still got to get your pool online and working again regardless.

During this period of time, if you try to use a tool such as Putty to connect to the slave via its management interface, you may not be able to connect to it either. If you try to ping the slave on the management interface you may not get any replies. But if you connect to the console of the slave (again, either the physical console or via a remote management interface) you will probably see that the machine is running, but if you look at XSconsole it will appear that the management interface is gone because there will be no IP address showing. By now you’ll probably be scratching your head because the strange thing is all the VMs are running.

So at this point your master appears to be down, or at least impaired, you’ve got no management interface on the slave, your pool is broken and you cannot manage the VMs. So what do you do?

Well, if this happens to you and your VMs are still up and running the first thing you should do is take a deep breath, because more than likely it is not as bad as you might think. XenServer is a robust platform and if the infrastructure is built correctly (and I’m going to quote a customer), “you can really slam the things around and they still work”.

After you take a deep breath and let it out slowly, from the console of the slave server, you will need to access the command line and start by typing:

xe host-is-in-emergency-mode

If the server returns an answer of “True” then you’ve confirmed that the server has gone into emergency mode in order to protect itself and the VMs running on it. (If the server returns an answer of “False” then you can stop reading, because the rest of this post isn’t going to help you.)

Assuming you receive the answer of “True” the slave server is in emergency mode because it cannot see a master – either because the master is actually down, or because the management interface(s) is(are) not working. Therefore, the next step is to promote the slave to master to get it out of emergency mode. We do this by typing:

xe pool-emergency-transition-to-master

At this point the slave server should take over as the pool master and the management interface should be available again. Now if you type the xe host-is-in-emergency-mode command again you should get an answer of “False”.

Now, open XenCenter again. It will first try to connect to the server that was the master, but after it times out it will then attempt to connect to the new master server. Be patient, because eventually it will connect (it may take several seconds) and you will again see your pool and be able to manage your VM’s. If some of the VMs are down because they were on the server that failed you’ll be able to start them on the remaining server (assuming you have shared backend storage and sufficient processor and memory resources).

Now what about the master if it has totally failed? What do I do after I’ve fixed, say, a hardware problem in order to return it to my pool?

If the following two conditions are true:

  1. You are using shared storage so that your VMs are not stored on the XenServer local drives, and
  2. You have built your XenServers with HBAs (fiber or iSCSI) rather than using Open iSCSI, which means the connectivity information to your backend SAN will be stored within the HBA,

…then it may be much simpler and quicker just to reload the XenServer operating system. (If you do not have shared backend storage, which means your VMs are on local storage, DO NOT DO THIS). I can rebuild my XenServers from scratch in about 20 - 30 minutes and have them back in the pool and running.

If either of those two conditions is not true then, depending upon your situation, recovery may be significantly more difficult. It could be as simple as resetting your Open iSCSI settings and connecting back to your SAN (still easy but takes more time to accomplish) or it could be as painful as rebuilding your VMs because you lost your server drives. (OUCH!)

Real world example: I recently had a NIC fail on the motherboard of my master server. Of course since the NIC was on the motherboard it meant the whole motherboard had to be replaced which significantly modified the hardware configuration for that server.

In this case, when I brought that XenServer back online it still had all the information about the old NICs showing in XenCenter, plus it had all the new NICs from the new hardware. Yes I could have used some PIF forget commands to remove the NICs that no longer existed and reconfigure everything but that would have taken me a bit of time to straighten out. Since I had iSCSI HBAs attached to a Datacore SAN (great product, by the way) for shared storage, all I did was reload XenServer on that machine, modify the multipath-enabled.conf file (that is a different blog topic for another day), and rejoin the server to the pool. Because the HBAs already had all the iSCSI information saved in the card, the storage automatically reconnected all the LUNs, the network interfaces took the configuration of the pool, and I was back online and running in less than 30 minutes.

After you repair the machine that failed and get it back online, you may want it to once again be the master server. To do this type:

xe host-list

You will get a list of available servers with their UUID’s. Record the UUID of the server that you want to designate as the new master and then type:

xe pool-designate-new-master host-uuid=[the uuid of the host you want]

After you type this your pool will again disappear from XenCenter, but after about 20 – 30 seconds (be patient) it will reappear with the new server as the master. Your pool should now be healthy, and you should again be able to manage servers as normal.

Posted in: Citrix, Troubleshooting and How-Tos, Virtualization, XenServer ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

Scareware, Ransomware, and How to Avoid It

April 14, 2010 12:02 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

There’s a new piece of malware going around that falls into the “ransomware” category. This one locks down the user’s desktop, and displays a message warning that copyrighted content has been detected on the PC. It then attempts to extort $400 from the user as a “copyright holder’s fine,” while emphasizing that “the maximum penalties can be five years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines.” You can read more about this particular piece of malware in Dancho Danchev’s blog post over on ZDnet.

According to an earlier post by the same author last September, “scareware” and “ransomware,” have emerged as “the single most profitable monetization strategy for cybercriminals to take advantage of.” In general terms, scareware usually takes the form of fake security software – like the infamous “Antivirus 2008.” It is spread almost entirely through “social engineering” tactics that attempt to entice you to visit a compromised Web site. It attempts to trick you into believing that your computer is already infected with malware (or has some other problem, like the fake copyright violation angle), and that purchasing the fake security application or otherwise giving them money will solve the problem.

Some of this malware will prevent your legitimate security software from loading, and from being updated. Some will also attempt to prevent you from running system tools or third-party security applications, which makes it even more difficult to get rid of. Some even encrypt your files and attempt to extort money from you in order to decrypt them.

Needless to say, this is an extremely dangerous, and insidious, form of malware, and one that you want to avoid at all costs. To that end, I highly recommend Danchev’s September post, entitled “The ultimate guide to scareware protection.” It will help you understand what it is, how to recognize it, how it attempts to reach you, and how to avoid it, and provides a helpful gallery of images of many of the variants so you can spot them if they happen to pop up.

Posted in: Computer Basics, Storage ⋅ Tagged: ,

Blog Authoring tool Verdict

April 13, 2010 7:16 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

This is my second test of a Blog Authoring tool or as this one is called a “Blog Entry Poster” for the Linux Gnome Desktop Environment. This post is uploaded to our WordPress blog site using Gnome Blog Entry Poster on a Sabayon Linux machine.

I have only tried two Blog Authoring tools, and so far I like them both. Windows Live Writer is a fine product with a nice array of features and Gnome Blog Entry Writer is a simple app that lives in the Panel on my Sabayon Linux desktop. It’s spartan (or better yet it “has a simple elegance!”), but it does at least have a spell checker, the single most important feature I would say! Both of these applications make it easy to send off a blog post from my desktop and are a breeze to use!

Posted in: Computer Basics, General