If you are looking to enter the world of desktop virtualization, Citrix XenDesktop is a great vehicle to take you there. It plays well with the back end technologies you need to support desktop virtualization, and it integrates smoothly with the entire Citrix suite of virtualization technologies. However, when you plan out your XenDesktop deployment, you will need to use these technologies to your greatest advantage. Here are some of the questions you will need to ask for your organization as you plan:
- Do most of your users use the same apps day in and day out, or is there more variation?
- Which apps are needed by all your users, and which are only needed by a few?
- Do any of your users need to be able to do “whatever they want” with their desktop?
A Standard Desktop
If most of your users use the same apps day in and day out, you can take advantage of XenDesktop’s pooled desktops. In this model, each user gets the same desktop every time. The only things you need to save are data files and user settings. Once these are saved off, basically any user can work on any virtual desktop. You can manage your desktops centrally from a standard image. The desktop “resets” to the standard image each time it is started up, so many desktop problems can be resolved with a simple reboot. Also, these desktops use the same base disk image, so you will use far less shared storage than you would by virtualizing desktops individually.
More Complexity – Different Apps for Different Users
OK, but what if your environment has more variation? Maybe some apps are only needed by a subset of users. You do not want to give these to everyone – most users do not need them, and maybe the licenses are expensive too. No problem – you can augment pooled desktops with application virtualization. You still have your standard desktop, but you use application virtualization to deliver these “special” apps only to the users who need them. The rest of your users won’t even see them. And you still maintain central control.
Even More Complexity – Users Who Need “Full Control”
For many IT managers, the “nightmare” users are those who need to do whatever they want to their desktop whenever they want to. A standard desktop will not meet their needs, and virtualizing every possible app would tax even the most superhuman IT staff. If you virtualize their desktops individually, you lose central management and disk space savings. What can you do?
Fortunately, XenDesktop has a solution – the personal vDisk. In addition to saving data files and user settings, personal vDisks save local application installations in a separate disk for each virtual desktop. They still use a shared base image, and personal vDisks use far less storage than dedicated virtual desktops. You maintain at least some central management, and still realize storage savings.
Putting the Pieces Together
Citrix XenDesktop has solutions for your desktop virtualization challenges. Elegrity can help you put the pieces together to make desktop virtualization work in your environment for your users, whatever their needs. We match your needs to the latest and greatest technologies, and customize the solutions so they work seamlessly in your environment. Contact us to find out more!
Microsoft values you. Microsoft cares for you as an IT professional. Microsoft is offering unlimited archive email storage in the cloud for $3 a month. The third statement is true and actually makes the first two sound slightly less crazy. It’s still somewhat of a secret for now but Microsoft’s cloud based archive for Exchange is a steal.
Whether we like it or not, email remains the lifeblood of corporate communication. Efforts to manage the sprawling growth of mailbox data are often high on an IT Manager’s list and there are a myriad of products on the market designed to safely move your Exchange data into separate indexed and searchable archives. Unfortunately, just about every vendor’s solution available for archiving said data requires a key piece of software to support it: SQL Server.
I never really understood why people would want to take perfectly good email messages, convert them to blobs with a long guid string and add them to a database. Sure you’ve removed it from Exchange and made it searchable, but now you’re managing and maintaining an entirely new database server which becomes irreversibly attached to your once standalone Exchange solution. What if you need to get your mail data out of archive? That’s the first question to ask an email archive vendor. They all give you a six lane highway into the archive but it’s often a dead end or a goat path to get out.
In comes Microsoft with its own solution with the introduction of Exchange 2010 personal archives. It’s a key feature and has given IT Managers a way to control the sprawl by moving data to cheaper storage and implementing retention policies without having to manage an entirely separate database.
But the best part is still somewhat of a secret: You can put as much data as you want in the cloud and managed by Microsoft for $3 a month per user. $3 a month. Unlimited archive storage off of your network and seamlessly managed from your existing on-premises Exchange 2010 server. This is an amazing deal.
What was once called Exchange Hosted Archive and required laborious manual seeding of mail data has been transformed in to Exchange Online Archiving under the Office365 hosted application suite. It requires federation of Active Directory for single sign-on and federation of Exchange for transferring mail which can be challenging to implement. But the benefits are enormous – just set your retention polices and mail is sent securely to the cloud yet still fully accessible from Outlook and OWA. With unlimited cloud based storage you can implement strict on premise quotas and still let your users continue to (ab)use Outlook as their personal filing cabinet. Go ahead, its in the cloud!
Interested? Contact us – we can take the hassle out of implementation, finish on time and on budget with a clear plan of action.
A “Quick and Dirty” Request
If you work in IT, at some point you have probably been asked by your boss to build a “quick and dirty” proof of concept (POC) for them. You think to yourself, this will be done in a day or so. You build it as quickly and simply as you can. You run virtualization, so the server build is quick and easy. (It's a lot harder if your infrastructure is not virtualized - then you have to scrounge up whatever hardware you can find.) You tell your boss you can have it ready by the end of the day.
You probably can’t get licenses in that time, but no big deal – you can just use evals for now. Sure, Adobe asks you to update Flash every three minutes, Windows isn’t activated yet, and you have 150 Windows Updates ready to apply at the next reboot. But you can finish the POC way before these issues become a problem.
The Cost of Victory
So what happens now? First, let’s assume your POC worked (it probably will if you have survived in IT this long). Your boss is thrilled, you get kudos, and you think life is beautiful. BE WARNED!!! You may be about to enter “The Night of the Living Proof of Concept!”
Your boss liked it SO much that he has to show it to the CIO. Suddenly it has to be perfect! It has to boot in seconds, and run faster than you can click your mouse. You can’t have any more annoying software update or activation messages displaying. By the way, that key meeting is tomorrow morning. Your boss says, spruce it up this afternoon and everything will be fine.
So you work all night, clean up the interface, and speed things up by throwing all your remaining virtual hardware at the solution. Your virtual infrastructure is on the brink of collapse, but the POC is running like a top.
You wait with bated breath for the CIO demo to finish so you can turn off the POC and get your environment back. But your boss has GREAT news! The CEO and CFO were at the CIO demo, and they LOVED it! In fact, they plan to use it every day – and some nights and weekends too!
THE NIGHTMARE HAS BEGUN!!!
An Ounce of Prevention
Not every POC will blossom into a core business critical application overnight. But you should tell your boss the limitations of your POC environment at the beginning, to cut down on the “surprise” factor. Most bosses don’t like surprises. And, if/when the CIO meeting comes up, tell your boss the limitations again – in an email! That way, your boss can decide whether to postpone the meeting to give you time to prepare the POC appropriately.
Finally, at your next budgeting cycle ask for excess capacity in your virtualization environment. Show your boss the email you sent about the CIO meeting. It may be one of the easiest budgeting cycles you will ever have!
Planning for business continuity can be a massive undertaking for the IT department as there are so many factors to consider – but there is one piece of low hanging fruit which can give even the most trench-weary IT managers some peace of mind: Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
Server virtualization has made the planning process for business continuity much easier. Whole racks of standby hardware have now been consolidated to one or less. Storage and Backup software vendors offer a mind numbing array of options for replicating your server infrastructure to a remote office, a colocation site, or even the cloud.
Often overlooked however is how people will access this infrastructure remotely when it comes online. Users will expect to have access to all of the same applications they use in the office on a daily basis –and this is where virtual desktops can be a lifesaver. With a few tweaks, the same master image that might be used to image individual workstations can be used to provision hundreds of virtual desktops – in minutes. Virtual desktops use the same hypervisor as your virtual servers so simply adding capacity to your existing servers and storage will allow all users to have the benefit of the identical experience they get in the office. Citrix XenDesktop allows for connections from just about any internet enabled device including iOS and Android devices giving users maximum flexibility when disaster strikes.
Mention business continuity aka disaster recovery to an IT manager and you’ll get a wide variety of reactions but the underlying sentiment common to all is: “Man I hope it works if we really need it.” With a healthy master image and some extra capacity in your datacenter, your users will be amazed at just how well it does work.
Does this sound familiar? You are responsible for IT in your organization, your systems appear to be humming along well and occassionally you get that nagging worry – what happens if we have a disaster? Yes, you are backing up your critical systems and you are storing your backups offsite. But sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat because you realize that if your data center suddenly disappears, you are not sure how you will get from those backups to a fully functional IT infrastructure.
Do you want to get a good night’s sleep for a change? Here are two pieces of advice for getting started:
1. Start with the Crown Jewels; and
2. Look for a Quick Win!
Crown Jewels
Crown Jewels are the most critical, valuable, business-defining systems and data that reside in your data center. You may already have a pretty good idea of what your Crown Jewels are. However, just to be sure, check with your CEO and/or Chief Technologist, and ask them for two or three IT items that the business simply cannot afford to lose. Basically, ask them to fill in the blank in the following sentence: “If we lose _______, our business cannot survive.”
Once you have this answer, think about what it would take to get the Crown Jewels back – and then think about how you can prove that you can get them back. Just like that, you are now doing Disaster Recovery planning!
Quick Win
Pick one of your Crown Jewels, retrieve your most recent backup, and try to get it running on a completely isolated system with no network connectivity. Note – resist the temptation to “just plug it into the network for a quick second,” to download a patch or a little piece of software. A name conflict could disrupt your production system, which could leave you with some explaining to do. Virtualization, and some software that can burn files to ISO images, can help a lot here.
The Quick Win has big benefits. First, in the process of trying to get your Crown Jewel running on an isolated server, you will “smoke out” the Crown Jewel’s dependencies. You find yourself saying, “Hey, I didn’t realize this thing had a web server component too!” or “What do you mean, you can’t contact a domain controller???” Although you may be taken aback by the dependencies that show up, wouldn’t you prefer to find out about them now… before the disaster occurs?
The true benefit comes if you manage to get the Crown Jewel running on its fully isolated server. Be sure to document and share your successful findings with your boss! Specifically, show him/her how you recovered a business critical system in an isolated environment, and how you can use the same process to recover the system in case of a disaster. Walk through a few screens demonstrating how the system really works. Now you can all sleep soundly for many nights to come!
High availability is only as good as its weakest link. Small businesses today have access to affordable server and storage systems that provide full hardware redundancy in case of an individual part failure. However, when it comes to the network, some IT Managers rely on the 4-hour part replacement SLAs from their service providers.
Guaranteed part replacement within 4 hours onsite 24-hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year: Ahh, now I can relax, my entire IT infrastructure is safe in case of an outage. Or is it? Time and again I’ve walked into beautifully designed server rooms with redundant power, perfect cable management and cooling. A proud IT manager shows off the high-capacity ultra-redundant storage connected to clustered VMware or Hyper-V hosts with redundant aggregated network ports.
But what about the rest of the LAN?
Too many highly talented IT managers overlook redundancy when it comes to end-user connections. It’s understandable since network path redundancy for 10s or 100s of hosts is very expensive and complex to implement. Fortunately, just about every network switch vendor offers 24x7x4x365 part replacement which is great IF:
- Your end users can afford 4 hours of downtime
- Your hardware vendor actually has the part available
If your vendor doesn’t have the part in stock within a 4-hour delivery radius, then they will source it as quickly as possible. Okay so now your end users are down until…some guy in St. Louis finds your part and puts it on the 2am FedEx flight out of Memphis.
SOLUTION: Keep an updated cold spare racked and ready!
When building out your end-user network add an identical extra switch and keep it updated. Put it in the rack and keep backup switch configs close at hand. That way, if you walk into your server room and see 48 ports solid green when they should be blinking – you’ll be 5 feverish cable-patching minutes away from hero status.
If you have spent any time supporting Microsoft Windows or Office over the last several years, you have seen Microsoft licensing evolve. Windows and Office products now verify their licenses with Microsoft shortly after installation. For corporate environments using volume licensing, Microsoft offers the Key Management Server (KMS) as an alternative. But… by design the KMS doesn’t start activating clients until it has received a certain number of requests –
the “activation threshold.” For Windows 7, this threshold is twenty-five requests.
Let’s say that you are planning a Windows 7 pilot running on XenDesktop 5. Ten users will participate. You build a KMS for licensing. When the pilot wraps up, everything looks great… except that your KMS is not activating clients yet. So you troubleshoot KMS with slmgr.vbs, and find that your KMS “current count” is not approaching the activation threshold of twenty-five. Worse, pilot users tell you that they have begun seeing licensing warnings.
You do not want to go to production before the KMS starts activating clients. You also do not want to build twenty-five unique test Windows 7 systems. How can you get the KMS to start activating clients?
It turns out that Citrix has provided a procedure that can help. If you follow this procedure carefully, each time you or your users log in and out of a pooled XenDesktop, your Windows 7 KMS current count will increase! This happens because:
- XenDesktop restarts pooled desktops after logoff
- The procedure above causes each rebooted desktop to appear “unique” to the KMS
So, with this procedure you can get your KMS to start activating Windows 7 clients simply by logging into XenDesktop twenty-five times – much less effort than building twenty-five separate systems.
For those who like the “nuts and bolts”, here is additional information from Microsoft on understanding KMS and why your KMS count may not be increasing.
XenDesktop is now more affordable with User/Device licenses but you'll want to stay on top of your total allocation. Though it’s still available for now, Citrix is moving away from concurrent licensing and steering new license deployments toward user/device licensing with price incentives. If you want to keep using concurrent licensing - go ahead – but it’ll cost you up to three times more for new licenses to access the same features. Following are two key points about user/device licensing from Citrix: 
You don’t decide which type of license is issued for any given connection; Citrix does this for you based on a behind the scenes algorithm which allocates a user or device license depending on usage. Over time, the same algorithm will convert user to device licenses and vice versa with the intention of giving you the most efficient license allocation based on your usage history. After 90 days of inactivity, previously assigned user/device licenses are returned to the available pool.
Citrix put a lot of effort into the behind-the-scenes algorithm to determine which type of license gets issued when a new session is connected. On the whole it works pretty well: users are allowed unlimited logins from any type of device, and shared devices provide an unlimited number of users a path to login. However there are exceptions to the rule and for these Citrix created a licensing management utility called UDADMIN which allows administrators to manually revoke licenses.
From a command prompt on your Citrix Licensing server (assuming 64-bit) navigate to:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\Licensing\LS>
To see a list of currently allocated licenses:
This will give you a list of all licenses currently in use. From here you can manually delete licenses using the same command with a –delete switch. License usage data is updated every 15 minutes, however restarting the license service will force an update. Don’t worry if you accidentally delete a valid license – it won’t disrupt a current session and the license will simply be reissued at the next connection.
Complete syntax for the UDADMIN utility can be found here:
http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/licensing-119/lic-admin-cmds-list-deletes-user-device-r.html
A little effort spent learning this tool will save you from getting that 2am call from a locked out user. Or at least if you do get the call you'll know how to fix it - fast.
Buy a few desktops, laptops, or upgrade your entire back-end server infrastructure - it all adds up. And the kicker is - most companies are throwing money out the window with every purchase. Think about it…
25% of the desktop CPU is being used; 50% of the SQL server's RAM; 10% of the storage on the domain controller, but your file server is strapped for storage space...you know the drill.
You pay full price - but you don't get full use (or value).
Paradigm Shift - Server and Desktop Virtualization
For the last 6-7 years server virtualization has dominated IT infrastructure discussions. Full leverage of investment; lower power consumption; less required physical space; better disaster recovery capabilities - the list of benefits goes on and on.
The fact is, though, the back-end server infrastructure represents only a fraction of most company's infrastructure. What about those desktops, laptops, iPads and other mobile devices? If you have any responsibility surrounding IT management, then you know as well as anyone just how much time is spent developing desktop images, packaging application updates, patching desktops and troubleshooting all those pesky issues.
Part of the problem is, you simply don't have the ability to control user devices like you do your back-end infrastructure. You've got that nailed - its pristine - and you make darned sure it stays that way by limiting who can touch it and what changes get introduced. User devices? Well, that's a WHOLE OTHER BALLGAME! Fact is, IT has lost its ability to control the end-user device experience and usage.
Sometimes, its best to go with the flow - if you can't beat 'em, join 'em! End users want to use iPads? Great! They want to bring their own computers to work and use those instead of the corporate-issued laptops? Awesome! They let their kids install some game that wreaks havoc on the local machine? Whatever!
Imagine the liberation...and you can have both that freedom and the control you want all at the same time. Desktop virtualization (delivery of your corporate desktop environment through on-demand provisioning of virtual environments to individual users) is more than a new technology - it’s a fundamental paradigm shift in the realm of desktop and application distribution.
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