Filtered articles: "Hands-On"

Since a few months I’m using Microsoft’s Client Hyper-V on my Windows 8 notebook for my demo and education environment. My environment consists of a few Windows servers which build a Windows Active Directory Domain called world.local. In this environment I’m trying to examine Citrix CloudGateway. Installing StoreFront was really easy to do but with AppController 2.0 I got a problem: The AppController VPX is only available for XenServer (.xva) and VMware (ova).

Performance Monitor is usually used to record performance data of one or more systems and analyze the collected data at a later point in time. As this is useful for offline performance analysis and scalability tests, real-time access to performance data is cumbersome. The graphing node of PerfMon does not offer statistical data in a useful manner. In this article, I demonstrate how to retrieve performance data for a metric and analyze it on-the-fly using PowerShell.

Migrations are a common task in corporate IT. Computers are replaced, domains are merged, physical hardware is replaced by virtual infrastructure. In an ideal world the user will not notice that the migration was performed. In reality the user is confronted with the migration in a very harsh way: Windows looks different, all of this settings are gone, sometimes even some of his files are missing.

As EdgeSight is a component that is offered by Citrix in several Platinum Editions for strategic products as well as a substitute for Resource Manager in XenApp, customers like to profit from the value-add compared to traditional system management products. EdgeSight is often used to augment the data collected by those tools. But when using EdgeSight with Provisioning Server, things get a little more complex because an agent is assigned a unique ID to match data uploads to the correct database entries. By using shared disks with Provisioning Server, such a unique ID must not be included in the golden image to avoid performance data to be assigned incorrectly - meaning that several agents may be reporting to the same device in EdgeSight. In this article, I'd like to demonstrate how the method offered by Citrix can be enhanced to use EdgeSight and make the management of shared disks with Provisioning Server feasible.