Virtualization Tips » Citrix

VMware ThinApp 4.6 is ready to virtualize your applications

Brian — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 02:55:11 +0000

It’s been kind of hard to keep up with all the releases from VMware lately. They have been on an absolute terror dropping updated products like crazy since vSphere 4.1 hit the streets. The latest to put smiles on the faces of VMware admins is ThinApp 4.6. One of the biggest new features in the new version is the ability to harvest IE6 from a clean Windows XP machine.

ThinApp 4.6 adds the ability to “Harvest” Internet Explorer 6 from an existing Windows XP instance.
In the past, the process for creating an IE6 package with ThinApp was complex. It required capturing the IE6 install using a clean instance of Windows 2000 with its pre-IE6 native browser IE5 and performing an upgrade. If you captured on Windows 2000 using the IE6 download from Microsoft’s download page odds are you would not get all the latest security fixes and updates provided by Microsoft. Capturing using a Windows 2000 base also made capturing IE6 applications plug-ins a bit trickier, especially if the plug-ins only installs on XP+. With so many companies migrating to Windows 7 we knew this is a popular use case, so we’ve turned the process of capturing IE6 into a few clicks. ThinApp can now automatically “harvest” IE6 from of any Windows XP instance. This means you can use an XP instance that has the latest security fixes applied, and also capture any plug-ins you want in the same go!

There is also the ability to redirect URL’s from a native browser window to a Virtual browser, read the full article here.

The need to clean up a cloned Virtual Machine

Brian — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:05:40 +0000

In working with a client recently I noticed that they are cloning virtual machines and it’s causing issues with their tool set. This really came to light when working with their XenApp servers. The Citrix team was building servers loaded with apps to create a template that could be cloned to create the other servers in a application pool. The issue with this is that the team was using existing servers already in production that already had the tools installed on them. The problem came to light with issues from the tools used to protect and monitor the virtual machines. This would not be an issue with standard OS templates already created that would have the tools added after the cloning process.

When cloning the virtual machine there are still a lot of registry entries left over with the old server name for tools like Opsware, McAfee and an asset mgmt application. These old registry entries would cause the new VM to knock the old VM out of the tools console and cause issues with reporting and management of the source server. For example Opsware would start talking to the newly cloned server thinking it was the source server and this would leave the source machine not in the patching scheduled.

To clean this up it was necessary to uninstall these tools from the new virtual machine then go back through the registry and clean up any entries that referenced the old server name. Then reboot the server and reinstall the tools. This will clean up the issues and allow everything to work without conflicting with the source server.

So for future requests of this type they have agreed to either use a base OS build and load applications on by hand or create their Citrix template with applications and clone prior to installing any monitoring applications. This will eliminate the issues that they had been experiencing.

Citrix Receiver for Apple Mac has arrived

Brian — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:32:14 +0000

You may not even know what Citrix Receiver for the Mac will do for you. But if you do then you are probably pretty happy today. So if you have a Bring your own computer program with Mac users or you would just like a more seamless process to run Windows apps on your Mac. Then this new receiver from Citrix will be worth testing.

So what does Citrix Receiver for Mac do? Well along with Citrix XenApp and Dazzle, you will be able to search for and run all of your favorite Windows apps as if they were locally installed on your Mac. You will be able to select your apps with Dazzle (kind of a iTunes looking enterprise app store), you can then launch your apps from the Applications folder. You can even drag those windows apps to the doc and run them from there.

How to optimize Windows XP for XenDesktop

Brian — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:04:50 +0000

I found a new white paper released from Citrix today that talks about steps you can take to really optimize your XP images. Sure everyone thinks about things like turning off a few unused services, screen savers and power saving features. But this paper takes a deep dive into a list of settings that you can manually change and explains others that are available in the XenConvert optimizer tool from Citrix. Head on over to Citrix and grab the doc here.

Offers a better alternative than replacing the default user profile (which isn’t supported and doesn’t help for users that already have profiles)
Makes a distinction between private mode (1:1) and standard mode (1:many) desktops
Provides the actual registry keys/values for all optimizations (to ensure that all settings can be set by Group Policy or login scripts)
Gives best practices for optimizing the user profiles (like installing UPHclean)
Excludes configurations and steps that don’t help (like defragmenting a disk before performing a volume copy)
Details what registry changes are included in the XenConvert Optimizer tool (so you know what all those checkboxes are doing)