The new version of Citrix Merchandising Server 1.2 (CMS) was released last week and the most important feature is Receiver for Macintosh, Download All feature, Receiver News and Receiver Forum links, Task-based video instruction, Enhanced browser support, Active Directory Server Backup and Receiver for Windows support for new languages. The Product Manager has told me that the Virtual Appliance for VMware will be available at 31th of March. Reading the eDocs today there is already a section called “Importing the Virtual Appliance into ESX“.

Upgrade Procedure :

To upgrade your CMS 1.1 logon to https://server/appliance – Configuration  - Upgrade Server and browse to the upgrade file that you have downloaded from myCitrix. See main picture.

After the CMS is upgraded and rebooted log on and select SSL Certificate Management – Export certificate signing request. Configure with your information.

Select Export and save the file. Open the cert file with WordPad and copy the content. Navigate to your certificate server or provider and paste the info.

Import the certificate back onto the CMS. The complete procedure can be found here or select “Click for example video” which is one of the new features taking you directly to Citrix TV.

Check your CMS configuration on the console to verify that you are using hostname instead of ip address and that you have added the hostname to your DNS server. Do a nslookup to test this under the Diagnostics menu.

Remember to download all the new plug-ins by selecting Plug-Ins – Get New – Download all.

After the upgrade was finished my lab Windows 7 client received this error message : ”There is an issue with the security certificate on the Citrix Receiver Merchandising Server at 10.0.10.6”.

I resolved this issue by opening https://cms.ctxlab.local and reinstalling the Citrix Receiver to get the proper certificate.

Many reports have showed that Citrix XenServer 5.5 scales better and optimizing for Citrix XenApp is done in a second. With VMware it has been, and still are more complex to tuning the guest OS. VMware claims 30% improved performance for Citrix XenApp hosted on vSphere 4. Feedback from customers and the new “Virtual Reality Check – VRC VSI and Clocks Reviewed 1.0.3” states the same.

Searching the web for Best Practices for Citrix XenApp hosted on VMware I discovered some resources I would like to share with you :

I have to admit that networking is not my strongest side, I relay on the network folks for FW rules, NAT and so on. The reason why I have installed and configured the Vyatta Virtual Router is that I need to have more control and make my own configurations.

My XenServer lab is located on our Corporate network, but all my VM’s are located on a private network. To be able to test HDX MediaStream for Flash I need Internet as well as access to XenDesktop from our corporate network.

I started of downloading & importing the Vyatta Virtual Appliance for XenServer. Then I had a look at this Getting Started with Vyatta Video.

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My private network are 10.0.10.0 and my corporate network are 10.61.102.0. It was no problem getting NAT working, but the Port forwarding was a bit harder, until I came across this excellent blog post.

So now I have internet access inside my private network and a Citrix Secure Gateway as my access point to my Citrix Demo Lab. My current Vyatta Configuration (not included what you learn in the Getting Started video ) :

set service nat rule 20 type source
set service nat rule 20 source address 10.0.10.0/24
set service nat rule 20 outbound-interface eth0
set service nat rule 20 outside-address address 10.61.102.17

set service nat rule 10 type destination
set service nat rule 10 protocol tcp
set service nat rule 10 inside-address port 444
set service nat rule 10 inside-address address 10.0.10.50
set service nat rule 10 inbound-interface eth0
set service nat rule 10 destination address 10.61.102.17
set service nat rule 10 destination port 444

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This video shows you how to install Citrix XenServer 5.5 on VMware Workstation 6.5. Though it’s not possible to run Virtual Machines inside XenServer it demonstrates how fast & easy it is to install. XenServer on VMware Workstation is also great for exam preparation & upgrade scenarios.