Monthly Archives: August 2010

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What is Storage Virtualization? (Part 1 of 2)

August 27, 2010 3:48 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

This is the first of two videos addressing virtual storage and its benefits. There are a number of storage solutions out there on the market but we have chosen to focus on DataCore of the purposes of this video. DataCore is an iSCSI SAN solution and you can learn more about their products here.

In part one, we address thin provisioning and virtual volumes. Watching this video will help you understand part 2 of “What is Storage Virtualization” where we talk about how multipathing relates to virtual volumes and contributes to a highly available SAN solution.

Posted in: DataCore, High Availability, Storage, Virtualization ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

Citrix Formally Announces XenClient and XenVault

August 26, 2010 2:26 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Yesterday (August 25), Citrix formally announced XenDesktop 4 Feature Pack 2. It’s expected to be available by the end of September, and, of course, will be available at no charge to existing XenDesktop customers whose Subscription Advantage is current. The big news in this Feature Pack is the incorporation of XenClient and XenVault.

We’ve talked a lot about XenClient here, but haven’t said much about XenVault. It’s high time we did, because it’s a pretty cool piece of technology in its own right.

If you’ve used Citrix products in the past, you know that we have administrative control over whether, for example, users who are running applications on a XenApp server are able to save data back to a disk drive on their client device. With the advent of Smart Access (enabled by Access Gateway Enterprise policies), we can get even more granular: we might allow a user to save data to a client drive if they’re connecting from within the protected network, or connecting from a corporate-owned laptop, but deny that same user the ability to do so if they’re connecting from a personal device or public location like a hotel business center.

Unfortunately, once the data is on a client device, you now have a security risk. It could potentially be copied to a USB drive. The corporate laptop could be lost or stolen. (For some of the more high-profile examples, check out the “laptop losers hall of shame.”) Nevertheless, it’s often viewed as a risk we have to take so that our mobile users can be productive.

XenVault, which was first previewed at the Synergy event last May, is designed to address this risk. XenVault is a new plug-in for the Citrix Receiver. As such, its deployment and configuration are controlled through the Citrix Merchandising Server. To quickly review, Merchandising Server is the preferred tool Citrix has provided for installing and configuring client software. The first time a user authenticates to the Merchandising Server (through a simple browser interface), the Citrix Receiver will be pushed down and installed on the client device, together with whatever plug-ins and configuration details the administrator has defined for that user. Subsequently, the Citrix Receiver will check back with the Merchandising Server behind the scenes, and receive any configuration updates that may be available.

The XenVault plug-in creates a secure, encrypted (256-bit AES) storage area on the client hard disk. Typically, any application that is running remotely on a XenApp server or XenDesktop virtual PC will only be able to store data in the secure, encrypted location, if it is allowed to store data on the client drive at all. Same for an application that has been streamed via XenApp for local execution on the client (regardless of whether it was packaged with the Citrix streaming tools or with App-V). While the user will be able to use Windows Explorer to look at the secure location and see what files are there, the user will not be able to copy files from the secure location to a non-secured area of the hard disk, nor open the files with applications other than those specified by the administrator. For a deeper explanation of how this works, see Joe Nord’s blog post on the subject.

If the laptop is lost or stolen, the administrator can issue a “kill pill” that will cause the secure, encrypted area to be locked or deleted the next time the Receiver checks in with the Merchandising Server. Pretty cool.

If you can’t wait until the end of September to try it out, and you have a mycitrix login, you can download the XenVault technology preview now. And keep watching this space, because I’ve got a feeling that this will be a good subject for a future video blog.

Posted in: Application Hosting, Application streaming, Application Virtualization, Citrix, Security, Virtualization, XenApp, XenClient, XenDesktop ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,

Interview With DataCore

August 20, 2010 10:05 am ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Recently Steve Parlee, Moose Logic’s Director of Engineering, sat down with Tim Warden, DataCore’s Western Region Director of Sales. Moose Logic has installed a number of DataCore solutions over the last few years and highly recommends their software to anyone looking into storage virtualization. We’ve also mentioned DataCore a number of times in our blog and newsletters. If your still not sure what DataCore does, this is a great introduction to their storage solutions. In the interview, Tim Warden explains the benefits of the DataCore software and what their solution can bring to your data center.

Posted in: DataCore, General, Storage, Virtualization

More on Provisioning Services and KMS

August 17, 2010 5:19 pm ⋅ 7 Comments ⋅

Last fall, we posted about Citrix Provisioning Services and Microsoft KMS activation. To briefly recap, here’s the issue:

  • When you convert a Windows 7 OS image to a shared image for provisioning, it breaks the Microsoft license key.
  • The way you deal with that is to use Microsoft’s Key Management Services (KMS) to auto-activate systems as they boot.
  • A KMS server must have a minimum number of systems checking in for activation before it will activate anything (5 different server systems must check in before it will begin activating servers, and an aggregate of 25 servers and/or workstations must check in before it will begin activating workstations.)
  • If your KMS server is running on Windows Server 2008 R2, both physical and virtual systems will increment the counter. If it’s running on an earlier server version, only physical systems will increment the counter.

In the comment thread of that earlier post, “Chris” stated that he was trying to use Provisioning Server to provision Windows 7 systems, but that they were not incrementing the counter on the KMS server. It turns out that he was absolutely right, and I thought this was important enough to bump the issue by writing another post rather than just going back and commenting on the older one.

It turns out that, although Provisioning Server changes the host name as systems boot, it does not change the machine ID (“CMID”). And, unfortunately, the CMID is what a KMS server looks at to determine whether a machine that’s checking in is a new one that hasn’t previously checked in. Therefore, all of your provisioned Windows 7 systems will look to the KMS server like the same system checking in over and over again, and will not continue to increment the threshold counter.

According to a blog post by Thomas Koetzing a couple of weeks ago, Citrix has told him that this will be fixed in the next release of Provisioning Services, scheduled for sometime in Q4.

Frankly, I’m pretty disappointed by this whole issue. Windows 7 has been out now for almost a year. The big push by both Citrix and Microsoft is that XenDesktop is a great way to roll out Windows 7. Provisioning Services is a must for any significant VDI deployment, because otherwise you eat up far too much of your expensive SAN storage. But yet we’re still stuck in a situation where we can’t use Provisioning Services to provision Windows 7 unless we have at least 25 physical systems checking in with our KMS server for activation. In my opinion, there is no excuse for this issue not being addressed long ago…particularly when it’s been a known issue since the release of Windows Vista.

I did find a workaround described by Kirk Kosinski in a Citrix forum post:

What I did was create a VM with VL media, sysprep and power off, convert to a template, then deploy the template 25 times and boot each VM once (a few required a reboot before contacting the KMS for whatever reason). My KMS server could then activate clients successfully, at least for a while… the activation count will decrease over time if the machine doesn’t contact the KMS server, so you will periodically need to redo this process.

The VMs don’t have to join the domain to activate so you don’t need a complicated sysprep script, just make sure to not include any license key in the script…

This strikes me as a bit of a pain, particularly when you’ve got to do it every six months or so to keep your systems alive, but it should at least work until Citrix and Microsoft get this sorted out.

Posted in: Citrix, Licensing, Microsoft, Provisioning Services, VDI, Virtualization, XenDesktop ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Overview of XenDesktop Components

August 16, 2010 10:32 am ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

We have made a number of posts on this blog discussing the value of Citrix XenDesktop and felt it was time to add a video to this topic. Sid Herron had written a previous post Minimum Requirements for XenDesktop that you might find helpful after watching this video. Between this video and Sid’s post you should have a basic idea of what you would need for a basic deployment of Citrix XenDesktop.

Take a few minutes to learn what is required and what would be optional in a XenDesktop deployment, as well as how all the pieces would interact.

Posted in: Citrix, VDI, Virtualization, XenDesktop