Using Group Policy to hide and map specified drives

By Trond Eirik Haavarstein 21/07/2010 – 11:43

Do you remember the old days when we used the hide drives.adm template to hide specified drives along with some kind of hide drives calculator to get the proper value ? So if we wanted to hide drives for Domain Users but not the Domain Admins, we had to create another policy to lock it up again. Those days are long gone thanks to Group Policy Preferences, for me it’s the life before and after. Get rid of all your adm templates and 30+ page vbs logon scripts once for all. This will speed up the logon time and make your administration much easier.

To leverage Group Policy Preferences (GPP) you’ll need to administrate Group Policy’s from a Windows 2008 server (just member server) or Windows 7 with RSAT. On Windows XP and Windows 2003 machines you’ll need Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions to properly read GPP settings.

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Posted in group policy, provisioning services, terminal services, xenapp, xendesktop | 5 Comments »

XenApp 6 Tuning Group Policy for Windows 2008 R2

By Trond Eirik Haavarstein 14/07/2010 – 09:33

I have posted a new Tuning Policy for Citrix XenApp 6 available in the Download section of this blog. Most of the registry keys have been imported from the previous Terminal Server & XenApp Tuning Tips Group Policy v1.1. There are some Group Policy Best Practices templates around, but the power of mine are that they are ready to go. There are no extra configuration required.

Remember that UPHClean is natively embedded into Windows 2008 and later and it’s recommended to Disable Data Execution Prevention on Windows 2008. This can be done with this command : bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOff

Change log :

• Moved keys from HKLM\Software to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node
• Added more StubPath’s to speed up the profile creation for new users
• Added instructions on How To Import the settings in GPMC within the zip file
• Deleted “WFDontAppendUserNameToProfile“
• Deleted “NoRemoteChangeNotify“

Resources :

• CitrixTools.net – Terminal Server & XenApp Tuning Tips

Note :

Please note that these policy’s are provided “as is” and that using these is at your own risk. Please feel free to leave comments below regarding bugs & suggested improvements in future releases.

Posted in group policy, terminal services, xenapp | 3 Comments »

Interview with Pierre Marmignon – CitrixTools.Net

By Trond Eirik Haavarstein 06/07/2010 – 12:18

Pierre Marmignon is the man behind CitrixTool.net and he has recently popped onto my radar again with a new upcoming product call Virtual User Environment Manager Agent (VUEM). I’m a big fan of his products so this new VUEM tool got me curious so I hit him up today with some interview questions.

Pierre, can you give us a quick rundown of your new project and what it does for people ?

Virtual User Environment Manager has been designed to provide a first level environment management (e.g., shortcuts creation, network drives mapping, network printers, registry stuff). The tool will be architectured around a SQL Database, an Admin console and an agent, provided as a Windows Service (although the .exe can also be launched via a logon script).

How would this tool work together with Citrix User Profile Manager and Flex Profiles ?

Well I like to say that UPM and Flex are managing the profile settings save / restore while VUEM will manage the environment. Basically it has been designed to be a perfect UPM / Flex companion, taking care of the environment management part which is for now missing in these two products.

Where did you get the idea to this new tool and why ?

I’ve been a fervent user of a freeware called “BrsSuite” developed by Fabrice Cornet. It was managing shortcuts, network drives, printers and ports. The development has been stopped although the tool was really cool. I’ve started to develop a new agent for my customers (as the provided agent had some big issues), but I was then stuck in making it evolve because I was not the original developer. Then I decided to start the project again from scratch. That’s how VUEM has started.

Then as the development was running I’ve decided to add some extra features like the ability to disconnect a session as soon as the log off is detected to make the log off look faster or like creating an environment variable with the client IP…  I’m integrating very cool products like AppSense or RES ones, but I really feel that there is a real need of a free tool taking care of basics things. People that cannot afford the previously mentioned products are for now using scripts, but they are limited and not easy to manage.

As an extra, from the poll I’ve made it seems to be a real need of an intermediate solution.

When will this new VUEM tool be available for download ?

I hope to release it in September with a beta this summer (according to the time I can free up for this project).

XenApp Cloning Tool are your most popular tool. What’s the advantage of yours compared to Citrix’s own tool ?

Actually I don’t like to compete with other products / tools even Citrix one (lol). Let’s say that the philosophy behind my tools is really different. I’ve developed a set of tools that is handling all the needs I’ve faced while deploying provisioned / cloned XenApp servers, needs that were not filled by XenAppPrep (like extra tasks, XenApp configuration Management, cache disk initialization …) which ends up in I think a more complete tool handling all use cases and more suited to production environments.

Where can we get to know more about you and the work you’re doing ?

Website : www.citrixtools.net

Twitter : @pmarmignon

So here’s what I want you to do now :

1. In the comments below, please tell me what’s your favorite tool from CitrixTools.Net
2. You should follow me on Twitter here

PS : Click here to get Free Instant Access to my new 80 page eBook “Citrix XenApp 5.0 for Windows 2008 – A Hands-On Guide“ that will help you Install and Configure the main Citrix products.

Posted in xenapp | 1 Comment »

The Best Remote Desktop Manager Applications

By Trond Eirik Haavarstein 27/06/2010 – 15:50

Microsoft recently released a new free tool called Remote Desktop Connection Manager. I’m not going to cover this here, but you should take a look at this post and I highly recommend this article Dynamic Remote Desktop Connection Manager connection list. This is a super cool PowerShell script that makes sure your connection list is always up to date.

If you’re like me you’re probably daily using Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection for RDP, but wouldn’t you love to have something similar for ICA? Well those days are over thanks to tekHelix’s xConnect.

So here’s what I want you to do now :

• In the comments below, please tell me what’s your favorite Remote Desktop Manager
• If this post scratched where it itches, please share it via the retweet button

PS : Click here to get Free Instant Access to my new 80 page eBook “Citrix XenApp 5.0 for Windows 2008 – A Hands-On Guide“ that will help you Install and Configure the main Citrix products.

Posted in terminal services, xenapp | 12 Comments »

Citrix XenServer Slow Network Performance

By Trond Eirik Haavarstein 20/06/2010 – 14:17

People new to the virtualization space could get very frustrated when they find out that their Hypervisor of choice preforms much worse than a bare-metal installation. Haven’t the vendors and independent analysis like Project Virtual Reality Check stated that there is no longer any excuses for not running Citrix XenApp on a Hypervisor. The latest numbers shows that the performance are almost the same on XenServer, VMware and Hyper-V.

That being said, to get these high performances requires that you have done your homework and implemented all the Best Practices. Unfortunately there is way to many bugs out there and I’m not even going to start…but I have almost begged Citrix to pay more attention to their own Support Forum in this post.

In this post I’m going to share some important tunings related to poor network performance on Citrix XenServer 5.x family.

Disable Task Offload :

For Windows 2003 VM’s you will need to create a registry key to DisableTaskOffload – REG_DWORD = 1 under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameter. The easiest way is to create a Group Policy to push this registry key.

Disable CheckSum Offload :

The second fix you should try if you still have poor network performance is to Disable Checksum on the XenServer interfaces, both the Virtual (VIF) and the Physical (PIF). Be aware that you don’t need to restart the XenServer or the VM’s. This script will do this automatically on all you network interfaces in your XenServer Pool.

echo Setting checksum off on VIFs
VIFLIST=`xe vif-list | grep "uuid ( RO) " | awk '{print $5}'`
for VIF in $VIFLIST
do
echo Setting ethtool-tx=off and ethtool-rx=off on $VIF
xe vif-param-set uuid=$VIF other-config:ethtool-tx="off"
xe vif-param-set uuid=$VIF other-config:ethtool-rx="off"
done
echo Setting checksum off on PIFs
PIFLIST=`xe pif-list | grep "uuid ( RO) " | awk '{print $5}'`
for PIF in $PIFLIST
do
echo Setting ethtool-tx=off and ethtool-rx=off on $PIF
xe pif-param-set uuid=$PIF other-config:ethtool-tx="off"
xe pif-param-set uuid=$PIF other-config:ethtool-rx="off"
done

Note :

Please note that this script is provided “as is” and that using this is at your own risk. Please feel free to leave comments below regarding bugs & suggested improvements in future releases.

Posted in provisioning services, xenapp, xendesktop, xenserver | 9 Comments »

Citrix Provisioning Services 5.6 – What’s New

By Trond Eirik Haavarstein 13/06/2010 – 16:30

Citrix Provisioning Services 5.6 is out and I have finally had time to play around with it in my lab. There are a lot of bug fixes and great improvements when it comes to Simplicity. In this post I will show you some new GUI screenshots and in my next blog post about Provisioning Services I will show you how to successfully upgrade to Provisioning Services 5.6 from previous versions.

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Posted in provisioning services | No Comments »

HDX Monitor for XenDesktop – Better User Experience

By Trond Eirik Haavarstein 01/06/2010 – 20:21

Citrix has recently released a very helpful tool called HDX Monitor for XenDesktop to help you make sure that your users get the best user experience. The tool as you can see above is organized into sections that cover the various HDX technologies. Printers telling you about which client printers are mapped, System Information telling you about XenDesktop Agent version and best of all Network showing the latency between Client & Virtual Desktop. Citrix, please provide something similar to XenApp.

Another cool feature are links to 720 & 1020p demonstration videos on the web. Also if something is wrong, this is marked with red text and provides you with links to resources on the web on how to solve and troubleshoot.

Resources :

• SYN334 : HDX Internals : How to deliver a great user experience for every user, every time!
• HDX Internals – Knowledge Base Articles

Click here to get free eBook “Citrix XenApp 5.0 for Windows 2008 – A Hands-On Guide“

Posted in xendesktop | No Comments »

Use iPhone as a Mouse on iPad with Citrix Receiver

By Trond Eirik Haavarstein 19/05/2010 – 00:27

The Apple iPad doesn’t support a mouse, only a bluetooth keyboard. Citrix have been smart enough to include this in the Citrix Receiver for iPhone and iPad. They call it the Wireless TrackPad. I wonder why they didn’t show this at Synergy it’s super cool. Check out this Picture Tutorial on How To Set it up.

On your iPhone open Citrix Receiver and press the mouse icon in the lower right corner of the screen

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Posted in xenapp, xendesktop | No Comments »

Citrix XenClient RC – Overview

By Trond Eirik Haavarstein 17/05/2010 – 17:14

The biggest announcement at Citrix Synergy 2010 was the release of XenClient Release Candidate. This new hypervisor will change the way we do and manage computing today. In 2014 72% of corporate clients will be laptops. A new energy consumption study by Brian Madden, Shawn Bass, Rick Dehlinger and Steve Greenberg shows that the easiest way to save energy is to migrate to laptops and create power consumption Group Policy.

General requirements :

• Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel Core i5, Intel Core i7
• Intel integrated graphics GMA 4500, Intel® HD Graphics
• 4GB RAM recommended
• 160GB recommended
• Intel WiFi Link 5100/5300, Intel® Centrino® Advanced-N 6200 / Ultimate-N 6300
• Intel vPro – Highly Recommended

Hardware compatibility list :

• HP EliteBook 6930p, 2530p, 8440p*
• Dell Latitude E4300, E6400, E6410*, E6500, E6510*
• Dell Optiplex 780
• Lenovo ThinkPad X200, T400, T500
• For a complete list check online here or Citrix XenClient 1.0 RC User Guide

Supported bios versions :

Supported operating systems :

• Microsoft Windows 7 32bit
• Microsoft Windows Vista 32bit SP2
• Microsoft Windows XP 32bit SP3

Warning :

• TXT & TPM are not supported. Ensure that they are disabled in the BIOS.
• XenClient does not support the use of non-symmetric RAM DIMMs

Installation :

Download Citrix XenClient Express, burn and install from CD

Resources :

• Install Citrix XenClient from USB – Download UNetBootin
• Citrix XenClient 1.0 RC User Guide
• Citrix XenClient Support Forum

Click here to get free eBook “Citrix XenApp 5.0 for Windows 2008 – A Hands-On Guide“

Posted in xenclient | No Comments »

Get the news from Citrix Synergy 2010

By Trond Eirik Haavarstein 08/05/2010 – 12:45

Once again I’m on my way to Citrix Synergy for the first time in San Francisco. I have been going to Citrix Synergy (Summit) for the last 10 years and 8 of those have been in Orlando. This year’s event have already set a new record in number of Nordic Customer attendees. A little big strange since we now get Citrix Synergy in Berlin in October.

Anyway, to stay up to date on what’s going on please follow XenAppBlog on Facebook.

You could also use Twitter and search for #CitrixSynergy. The opening keynotes are  Wednesday 10:30 – 12:30 and Thursday 08:30 – 10:30    (GMT/UTC – 7:00). Take a look at the full agenda.

Posted in terminal services | 1 Comment »