Advanced Citrix Load Balancing Scenarios with Worker Groups
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In the article Citrix Load Balancing Policies explained I described where and how to use Citrix Load Balancing. One of the most used scenarios is redirecting user to a specific group of servers defined in a Worker Group. At some customers we were also using Citrix Load Balancing for that use case, but during those projects some additional concepts were introduced and we should get it working with the already defined Load Balancing Policies. In this article I’m going to describe the scenarios and how that can be accomplished with the defined Load Balancing policies.
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Citrix Provisioning Services PowerShell scripts
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In the article series Unattended Installation Citrix Provisioning Services I already touched the PowerShell possibilities of PVS showing how to configure farm and server settings via PowerShell. In the same project I already wrote some additional PowerShell scripts to partly automate some tasks within the PVS infrastructure, so no mistakes could be made. Although they are not rocket science I decided to share them, as some commands are not fully obvious when reading the PowerShell Guide.
PVS Advanced Settings: What do with it
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When configuring Citrix Provisioning Services you will find the Advanced button within the properties of each PVS servers. There are pretty some settings available within this advanced part and when you are going to search for documentation you will find out that not much information is available about those settings, nor about what the setting is about or which value should be configured on which circumstances. When I was writing a detailed design I talked to several people and even those who changes the default values could not really explain why did choose the specific setting. I dived into this advanced settings and what I could find about these settings are written down in this article (as promised in the presentation PVS Design Decisions and Real Life Experiences).
Unattended Installation Citrix Provisioning Services Part 4
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In the previous Unattended Installation Citrix Provisioning Services articles I explained how PVS can be installed automated via scripts. In this part I’m going to describe some of the peculiarities I have encountered with the unattended installation of Citrix Provisioning Services.
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Please tell me: What offers Persistent VDI over traditional desktops
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Currently many VDI implementations are based on the so called persistent VDI methodology. The user gets a (virtualized) desktop in the data center, which is installed and configured (mainly) via the traditional available deployment systems. When I’m talking and discussing about Persistent VDI’s my alter-ego is banging against the door again. In this opinion article I will describe my vision why my alter-ego is coming back when talking about Persistent VDI.
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The case of the magic unknown Citrix Provisioning Services feature
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On one of my projects we are using Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) for our XenApp 6.5 environment. At this project several teams are responsible for the different stages in the infrastructure (DTAP, Development, Test, Acceptance and Production).
After a while one of the guys of the test environment came to me asking me how and why we are using fixed IP addresses within the PVS image. I told me that this could not be the case as the design was written based on a DHCP based IP address and I was pretty sure that none of this colleagues in test has the knowledge available to configure fixed IP addresses within the possibilities PVS is offering. In this article I will start describing which documented options are available within PVS to use a fixes IP address within the PVS image, followed by showing the magic unknown feature in Citrix Provisioning Service the test colleague encountered accidently.
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Monitoring Citrix XenApp without installing a monitor agent
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In larger infrastructures there is already a monitor product available like HP Open View, Tivoli Monitoring and Microsoft System Operations Manager. Many Citrix administrators have a kind of love-hate relationship with such products. They provide lots of interesting information, but can be overwhelming and last but not least the required agent is not easy to install and/or stable. At one of my project the monitoring team was not confident that the agent of that product was suitable to install on the Citrix XenApp Session Host as those were provided by Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS). Logically we would like to have monitoring of these servers in place, so we needed to find a solution which can be used together with the monitor product. Finally the solution leads to a general way to monitor Citrix XenApp server without installing a monitor agent on the Citrix XenApp Session Host.
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