PVS Resource Usage Part 3
- Details
In this article series I will go into detail about resource usage of PVS servers. In the first part I described the theory values Citrix is using/advising for the components CPU, Memory, Disk and Network. The article series continued with taking a look at the real life resource usage of PVS servers. In this part we will take a look at resource usage of the PVS servers during boot(storm) scenarios.
Citrix Provisioning Services Design Part 2
- Details
In this article (series) I will describe and discuss the PVS components you should consider when creating a PVS design. In part 1 I discussed a PVS Farm, Site, Device Collection, View, Store, Database and Load Balancing. In the second part I will continue describe design consideration for PVS components.
PVS Resource Usage Part 2
- Details
In this article series I will go into detail about resource usage of PVS servers. In the first part I described the theory values Citrix is using/advising for the components CPU, Memory, Disk and Network. Also physical versus virtual is touched briefly. The article series will continue with taking a look at the real life resource usage of PVS servers. In this part we will take a look at the resource usage during daily operations.
Accessing the old environment from XenApp/XenDesktop 7.x
- Details
In almost every current XenDesktop/XenApp project for a specific period some applications are not available on the new platform, which are required by a group of users. A decision could be to let those workers do their work on the current/old platform. However most organizations don’t want that because the users don’t have access to new technologies of versions of other applications. In most cased the customer is looking for a way to offer access to those applications within the new platform. In this article I described the possible access methods to those applications running on a legacy environment, followed by the technical options to provide the access (including the advantages and disadvantages).
Read more: Accessing the old environment from XenApp/XenDesktop 7.x
XenApp 6.x Maintenance Shutdown and Start-up Scripts
- Details
At one of my customers we build a XenApp 6.5 environment, where the XenApp Session Hosts were running on local storage of the Hypervisor (VMware ESX 5.5). At this customer the hypervisor and Citrix XenApp were maintained by separate teams. The hypervisor team was used to use shared storage and the vMotion capabilities of ESX for their maintenance tasks on the ESX host during daily operations. However now the virtual machines were running local storage this technique could not be used anymore and the hypervisor team found it difficult to fulfill their maintenance tasks.
After some discussion we agreed that the process should be as easy as possible (without less inference of the XenApp team) and that it should be possible to do the maintenance during daily operations. The first step was adding additional capacity, so maintenance during the business hours was possible. Secondly I wrote a set of small simple scripts that the maintenance can be done without less interaction between the teams and user impact is minimal. In this article I would like to share those scripts with you including explaining what they are doing.
Read more: XenApp 6.x Maintenance Shutdown and Start-up Scripts
Reboot Script for XenApp/XenDesktop 7.x (for 24x7 environments)
- Details
Updated on 22 December 2015 with some small adjustments (removing old files and wait timeout to check if the server is online again)
Some years ago I already published a reboot script for XenApp 6.5. Also Citrix did a good job to make the reboot possibilities within the Citrix policies more flexible and robust. The only real disadvantage is the possibility to disable the logon possibilities 60 minutes before the real actual reboot take place. However this can be overwritten using a specific registry key, which is not well known or documented (HKLM\Software\Policies\Citrix\IMA\Restart Options\Disable Logons\RebootDisableLogonMinutes. When migrating from XenApp 6.5 to XenApp/ XenDesktop 7.x you will probably be a bit disappointed. In this article I will starting describe the reboot possibilities in XenApp/XenDesktop 7.x out of the box, followed by explaining a script that I have written to satisfy more requirements.
Read more: Reboot Script for XenApp/XenDesktop 7.x (for 24x7 environments)
PVS Resource Usage Part 1
- Details
Some people are saying that PVS is complex. I personally don’t think that PVS is complex looking from an infrastructure endpoint, but it can be complex to understand the concept of PVS and the new way of working. When people get that part, the complexity is not a bottleneck anymore. But when people understand the way of working understand new questions are often raised. How many bandwidth does this solution requires, which hardware resources requires these PVS server to serve their role. In this article series I’m diving into this topic. First I will discuss the theory of the resource usage by Citrix, followed by real life figures. The real life figures are divided in two parts: daily usage and boot (storm) usage. As just mentioned we are starting with the theory.