Expert Insights

EXPERT INSIGHTS

Thoughts shared by CUGC members who are recognized experts in Citrix technologies.

Introducing PowerScale! A Community Driven SmartScale Replacement by Leee Jeffries

By Jake Walsh
Introducing PowerScale! A Community Driven SmartScale Replacement by Leee Jeffries Hello All! :) Yesterday, a CUGC Webinar took place covering a new community project called PowerScale ! (Click here for the recording and slide deck.) PowerScale is a community-driven replacement for Citrix SmartScale, which went end of life in July 2019. PowerScale was created by Leee Jeffries , in response to a number of clients he works with asking for similar features. PowerScale provides the following scaling features for Virtual Machines in a XenDesktop Environment: Scaling by Virtual Machine Numbers Scaling by CPU/RAM Scaling on a scheduled basis ...

Leveraging your Citrix Current Release Investment–Director Style

By James Kindon
For customers on the Current Release path for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, one of the best features available to you is the ever-growing list of cool stuff that Director Introduces. A few features that I find have not gained enough love, given how important and awesome they are, are listed below with some real life data against them: Profile Management Drill Down . No kidding, as I was writing this post, I was working with a customer who just upgraded to 1906 from LTSR 7.15. Their profile load times (showing at 40 seconds for one user), took about 5 seconds in Director to identify the problem. Two guesses as to what was going wrong… Interactive ...

Swimming to Success with Citrix Cloud

By Gareth Carson
Swimming to Success with Citrix Cloud   Introduction As a child and young man, I was involved in swimming. Many an hour was spent within the swim lane, every week, early morning and evening. This culminated in some races/galas that I took part in and sometimes I was able to bring home a medal, a smile and some chlorinated hair. Eventually, I reached the stage where the effort vs. the reward was not worth it. In hindsight, this was a mistake, and partly brought on by misjudging the benefits and rewards I was getting from the experience. The way I was judging the success I achieved from the sport was narrow, limited, and lacked the vision for my future ...

Suggested Leading Practises for the Secure Browsing Service

By Lyndon-Jon Martin
Suggested Leading Practises for the Secure Browsing Service This wasn’t supposed to be a series, but it's now a 3-part series. The first post is available at “ Secure Internet Browsing or Surfing for Every & Anyone ." In part 3, I’ll take a closer look at the integrations into Citrix Workspace and the Citrix Endpoint Management Service, but for this post, I am going to explore some of my suggested leading practises for setting up and consuming the Citrix Secure Browsing Service from https://citrix.cloud.ccom . What are regions and which do I select? The Secure Browsing Service (SBS) supports up to 5x regions. These are West US, East US, Southeast ...

The Complete Guide: AzureAD SAML Authentication into Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops through Citrix Gateway

By Ryan Gallier
The Complete Guide: AzureAD SAML Authentication into Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops through Citrix Gateway Took me a while to get this blog post going. There is a lot of information out there. It took me looking over a bunch of other blogs to get this working. I figured I would write up everything I learned and found in this guide. Thanks to the following references.  Aaron Parker , Carl Stalhood , Jason Samuel , and Anton Van Pelt . I’m sure there were some other links I used, but these were the biggest contributors. This article assumes a couple of things: You already have a fully working Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops environment You have ...

Getting Started with NVIDIA Virtual GPU (vGPU) Software 8.0 for Citrix Hypervisor (XenServer) 8.0 with Windows Server 2019!

By Dane Young
If you've been following my blog posts over the last couple weeks, you have probably seen two major products have released to web, one shortly after the other. Here are two of my more recent posts: NVIDIA Virtual GPU Software v8.0 Just Released! Now Supporting Windows 10 1809 and Windows Server 2019! - Dated April 16th, 2019 Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer) 8.0 Just Released! Now Supporting Windows Server 2019! - Dated April 25th, 2019 As you can see from the dates on these two blog posts, XenServer 8.0 was released within two weeks of NVIDIA vGPU Software v8.0. Many of us in the Citrix/NVIDIA community were left wondering ...

A Tale of Two Servers, Part 3: The Influence of NUMA, CPUs and Sockets/Cores-per-Socket, plus Other VM Settings on Apps and GPU Performance

By Tobias Kreidl
A Tale of Two Servers, Part 3: The Influence of NUMA, CPUs and Sockets/Cores-per-Socket, plus Other VM Settings on Apps and GPU Performance The previous installment discussed some more details of the influence of BIOS settings on performance and also discussed the importance of the choice and configuration of GPUs, including some discussion of the GPU scheduler, which is specific to the NVIDIA Tesla line of GPUs. In this follow-up blog to Part 2 , the long-awaited detailed discussion of how the overall performance gains were realized over the stock configuration are presented. A number of interesting side topics are also brought into the discussion, and ...

A Tale of Two Servers, Part 2: How Not Only BIOS Settings, But Also GPU Settings Can Affect Your Apps and GPU Performance

By Tobias Kreidl
A Tale of Two Servers, Part 2: How Not Only BIOS Settings, But Also GPU Settings Can Affect Your Apps and GPU Performance Servers can only do their job well if they are optimized and tuned to perform their duties that best suit the applications they run and fulfill the expectations of those who use them. This short series of articles strives to address in particular how the increasingly more common combination of servers and embedded GPUs deserves special attention to bring out the best in both. This is a follow-up to the original article , which dealt primarily with BIOS settings and how they affect CPU and GPU performance. In that article, it was mentioned ...

Secure Internet Browsing or Surfing for Every & Anyone

By Lyndon-Jon Martin
Citrix offers a SaaS style model allowing organisations of any size, industry to enable + enjoy safe, secure internet browsing of the World Wide Web (WWW) while improving security and securing (un)sanctioned web traffic throughout the corporate network for centralised (Wi-Fi/Wired) and decentralised (VPNs) use cases and scenarios. Below are a few personal suggested views on why you should consume the Citrix Secure Browsing Service (SBS) – https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-cloud/secure-browser-service.html today within your modern workplace + workspace, including a simple (and not 100%) architectural diagram. Architectural Diagram Suggested: Why ...

Monitoring License Expiration in LogicMonitor

By Preston Gallwas
When you’re responsible for the care and feeding of your Citrix environment, it is important to keep tabs on your licensing status.   In particular, if you have a license type that expires, it is important to monitor that data point to ensure you don’t ever have a “Bad Day™.” The Citrix licensing documentation explains the different sections of the license files. Specifically, we’re interested in section 3, “INCREMENT,” with the “ CSS_expiry_date ” and “ exp_date ”.   The license counts themselves are actually available from the Citrix WMI provider, if you’re interested in monitoring those. To monitor these dates in LogicMonitor, we’re ...

Scaling and Load Balancing Session Recording

By Hal Lange
One of our favorite and most overlooked products in the Citrix line is Session Recording. It gives an ability to see what is happening with the users and not just hearsay. One of the problems is that if the wrong people have access, it becomes an HR nightmare. I am not here to discuss that issue, but to show the latest frustrations with this wonderful product. Background We have what most people would call a very large environment. With a concurrent peak utilization daily of over 20k users, I can agree. This includes XenDesktop Desktop and Shared workloads across multiple datacenters. Here are the specs used at the beginning after reading the Citrix articles: ...

The Future of Work is Today NOT Tomorrow Part 2: What's In It?

By Lyndon-Jon Martin
Hi folks, this is the second post in my blog series on “ The Future of Work is Today NOT tomorrow. ” My first post is available at: https://www.mycugc.org/blogs/lyndon-jon-martin/2019/03/17/the-future-of-work-is-today-not-tomorrow-part-1 . My first post had a significant impact (a lot more than I initially thought) and the number of folks (worldwide) asking me questions has been pretty incredible. Therefore, I’ve published a few social media posts ahead to visually show what is in my new Citrix Workspace (an example post below) to reduce the tidal, NO, tsunami wave, of questions. The picture above depicts my current Citrix Workspace, but it didn’t ...

When Two Tales Finally Come Together: AppVPN Meets MicroVPN, ADC Meets Endpoint Management

By Thorsten Rood
Ingredients for a modern workplace design with mobile devices It's been a while now that Citrix owns an ADC product that over the course of time gained superior VPN features, including a SAML-capable always-on flavor. Previously known as NetScaler, it's now labeled Citrix ADC/Gateway . It's also years ago now, that Citrix acquired a MDM vendor and made this a UEM solution (unified endpoint management). Previously known as Zenprise, and a while in between also called XenMobile, it's now called  Citrix Endpoint Management . Five years ago, Citrix entered the Smartphone/Tablet world, providing a business suite of enterprise-grade apps such as Citrix SecureMail ...

The Citrix Cloud Connector and the Network

By Bart Jacobs
Let's talk Citrix Cloud. More specifically, the Citrix Cloud Connector and its relationship with your network. So, what is the Cloud Connector? Docs.citrix.com tells us: "Citrix Cloud Connector: Provides communication between the resources in the resource location and the Citrix Cloud." In other words, it's a vital component. It's the bridge between the resources your users do their work on, and the management plane for you as an admin, in the (Citrix) cloud. Citrix recommends deploying two Cloud Connectors per resource location to provide high availability. What is a resource location you may ask? Again, docs.citrix.com tells us: "Resource locations ...

The Future of Work is Today NOT Tomorrow–Part 1

By Lyndon-Jon Martin
Hi, my name is Lyndon-Jon (L-J for short - as most folks call me). I work for Citrix and I'm also proud to be awarded Citrix Technology Advocate 2019. I recently changed focus within my current role to be geared towards customers in the field and with that change comes a different way of working, including rules of engagement, language, culture, etc. I personally don’t like carrying backpacks unnecessarily for any length of time as, on occasion, when my recurring sporting injury flares up, the tension headaches can become incredibly intensive and on a whole new level. Therefore, lugging around a backpack of any size or weight causes further inflammation ...

A Tale of Two Servers: How BIOS Settings Can Affect Your Apps and GPU Performance

By Tobias Kreidl
Introduction Charles Dickens most certainly got it right when he wrote in his quintessential novel:  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or ...

Questions From our Citrix Cloud AMA

By Marius Sandbu
I’m seeing a lot of questions around Citrix Cloud these days. What is it? How can we use it? What is supported? How to design a solution with it? There are always a lot of questions around the technology. So, a couple of weeks ago, we hosted the first (of many) AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Citrix Cloud and we got A LOT of questions during the one-hour session! This blog is just highlighting the questions with some more detailed responses, and hopefully some of this info can answer any questions you might have as well. NOTE: Most answers are from the group that was part of the AMA panel, and might not reflect official answers from Citrix. Where are the Azure ...

The Strength of the Community–Book Project: By the Community, For the Community…You can contribute too!

By Christiaan Brinkhoff
The Strength of the Community – NEW Book Project – By the Community, For the Community… You can Contribute too!   We, as contributors, know how valuable it can be to share with others what we’ve learned and picked up throughout our career, instead of keeping it to ourselves – one of the main reasons behind this initiative .   “By the Community, For the Community…” CUGC stands for Citrix User Group Community, which shares the same spirit and passion as we do within several local and global Citrix communities. Giving people from the community a podium for, and in front of, other community members and beyond. The main reason why this ...

How To: Publish the Classic Printers Folder in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops

By Marco Hofmann
Starting with Windows Server 2012 R2, Citrix Administrators have to face the problem, that the new Device And Printers view doesn’t work as expected. Connected network printers are often not visible, or to bring it on point: Invisible to the end user. There are several sources on the internet, that describe this pain, for example: https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX213540 https://discussions.citrix.com/topic/353573-printers-not-appearing-in-xenapp-75-windows-2012r2/ To face that issue, it is a valid workaround to publish the classic Printers Folder known from Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, to your end users. In this view, the problem ...
  User Created Printing Windows

Quickly Updating Persistent MCS VDAs

By David Ott
I have to maintain the VDA software on roughly 100 persistent MCS desktops. Every time Citrix came out with a new version of Virtual Apps and Desktops (XenApp/XenDesktop), I would cringe at the thought of having to "touch" every one of them. It usually took me two or more weeks to get through them all.  I finally got tired of that process and decided to script it. It has saved me a ton of time (and from pulling out all of my hair), and I hope it can help others as well. The really short version of how it works: Gets a list of computers from the DDC (or you can manually input the computer names into the script). On each computer it will create two scripts, ...