Articles In Infrastructure

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Infrastructure

Windows XP end-of-life (EOL) was highly publicized. Some companies have been in the clear for awhile, others made a mad dash to the finish, while a few are still struggling (http://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/300072525/irs-misses-windows-xp-deadline-inks-extended-support-deal-with-microsoft.htm). But, I can say it has been on people's radar for awhile. Windows 2003 seems to be the sleeper. Windows 2003 will reach EOL in July 2015. Server upgrades are a different type of challenge, as they support ap... read more.

• August 21, 2014

By Chaim Landau, Posted in Infrastructure

With the release of Citrix Receiver 4.x, Citrix has done away with the Program Neighborhood Agent (PNAgent), and with it, the ability to automate the creation of shortcuts to published applications on the user’s desktop. A customer recently asked me for a solution to this problem and I was able to get around it using the method below. When using Receiver 4.x, users are able to add published applications as favorites. When a user adds an application as a favorite, a Citrix-compiled .exe gets created and p... read more.

• May 14, 2014

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Infrastructure

Citrix was able to converge the management and infrastructure for XenApp and XenDesktop into one product with the release of XenDesktop 7. There are many benefits to having a single architecture and shared infrastructure between the two products. Not advertised, but I believe the most important benefit, is a common feature set and single development thread for both products. This will drive faster innovation and improve support. The product was XenDesktop 7, and new terminology for the supported workloads c... read more.

• February 18, 2014

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Infrastructure

There are many monitoring solutions on the market, some with specific focus for Citrix environments that tout an "end-to-end" view. But, I've yet to see a single dashboard that shows a user's connection through the NetScaler, Citrix XD/XA, and backend connections to SQL, storage, and other critical components. Splunk can capture data from all of these sources, and index it to your heart's content. But, out of the box you get individual dashboards without the zoomed out view we all crave. That is where Go... read more.

• February 03, 2014

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Infrastructure

The NetScaler SDX platform is a combination of high performance hardware with a hypervisor tuned to take advantage of it. The solution offers direct mapping of specific components to virtual NetScalers, such as CPU, Memory, SSL cores, and NICs via SR-IOV. But Citrix teased us a while back that the SDX platform may also support workloads other than NetScalers. Citrix has now delivered, working with some third party vendors to offer new workloads on the SDX platform. These are the available products: We... read more.

• September 03, 2013

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure

Citrix EdgeSight is an availability and performance management solution that monitors applications, devices, sessions, licensing, and network traffic in real time. It provides IT administrators with a way to analyze, resolve, and proactively prevent problems in Windows endpoint, XenDesktop, and XenApp environments. The architecture for a Citrix EdgeSight server consists of a front-end Web Server and a back-end Database server. The EdgeSight database contains the configuration data for EdgeSight as well a... read more.

• March 29, 2013

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure

Now that Windows 8 is officially on the store shelves no doubt users will be scouring the Windows Store looking for Windows 8 applications to play with. One app users may find is the Lync application. Once installed, excited users will enter their credentials and expect to connect to Lync just as they do with their standard desktop client or Lync mobile client. Unfortunately, many users will be disappointed when they receive a “Cannot connect to server” error message. This will create a mad frenzy among use... read more.

• November 28, 2012

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure

If you are involved in an InterOrg Exchange migration, you are going to have to migrate your Public Folder infrastructure from the source Exchange organization to the destination organization. Exchange does not offer a native tool to do this. This means you will either have to invest in a third-party utility like the Quest Exchange migration tool or use a free tool from Microsoft called the InterOrg Replication tool (IORepl). As you might expect, the third-party tools are far superior to IORepl, but are als... read more.

• October 19, 2012

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Infrastructure

Lately, we’ve seen a lot of activity at Gotham clients regarding increasing the functionality their SSL VPN. Gotham has installed a lot of this technology and I was thinking about the early days of SSL VPN. When SSL VPNs first came out, Gotham was one of the first movers in evangelizing what we thought was a great way to simplify access for individual users. During the education process we would eventually find ourselves in the office of whoever was running the traditional IPSEC VPN that was currently in... read more.

• October 17, 2012

By Entrcb, Posted in Infrastructure

I recently had the opportunity to deploy Provisioning Services 6.1 to upgrade an existing client from 5.6. As there was no possibility of downtime, we decided to go with a parallel update; taking a copy of the existing vDisk and reverse-imaging it as per the Citrix documentation, and then installing the Target Device software and using XenConvert to create a new vDisk. Everything went perfectly until it actually came time to boot the target device from the vDisk. The dreaded BSOD! The 7B BSOD; which mean... read more.

• October 04, 2012