In the course of the last six months, I have published nine articles about performance monitoring, why it is a crucial task and how the different subsystems of the operating system. To wrap up this series, this article offers an overview of the topics covered in the individual articles as well as a summary of my recommendations.
Archive for the 'Presentation Server / XenApp' Category
When I attended BriForum 2007 in Amsterdam, Juliano Maldaner (XenApp product architect) presented features in future versions of XenApp. He also talked about a very impressive change how XenApp handles policies: the plan was to integrate them into Microsoft group policies.
Two and a half years have passed and – finally – the project Parra tech preview offers a first (public) look at the new policy engine. In this article, I’ll have a closer look at the user interface and the handling of policies.
After several articles in this series have covered Windows server in general, I’d like to return to the topic of Windows-based terminal servers. But instead of talking about the concepts, the theory and technology of performance monitoring, this article compares two competing tools for monitoring terminal server environments: Citrix Presentation Server Resource Manager and Citrix EdgeSight.
This article is not meant to compare all available monitoring solutions as both fit in the same niche on the markets. My goal is to urge everybody to drop Resource Manager in favour of EdgeSight.
Continue reading ‘Performance Monitoring Part 9 – EdgeSight vs. Resource Manager for XenApp’
Do you host your Web Interface on one or more XenApp servers? Then I recommend you heed this article before changing your setup. You may well loose your XML service when migrating the Web Interface to another server. And loosing your XML service may result in an outage of your application delivery infrastructure!
Continue reading ‘Beware of Hosting Web Interface on XenApp Servers’
In the first article of this series, I provided a short overview why performance monitoring is important, what subsystems are to be monitored and named some tools focussed on monitoring terminal servers.
Having been concerned with the performance analysis of terminal servers in many projects, I can draw some conclusions about terminal servers before diving deeper into the subject. I’d like to introduce two categories of terminal servers from a performance standpoint.
Continue reading ‘Performance Monitoring Part 2 – Terminal Servers’
After having published the XmlServiceReader, I have described how to use this tool to customize health check in XenApp Health Monitoring and Recovery (HMR). In this article I will cover health checks that to not apply to a single server but assure the operation of the farm as a service independently of individual servers.
Continue reading ‘Leveraging the XMLServiceReader for Custom Health Checks’
I have recently worked on an implementation for a customer and was concerned with a large number of group memberships. Although the solution for authenticating against the operating system are well documented by Microsoft (here, here and here), the XML service does not allow requests larger than 4KB. So if users have a large number of group memberships, authentication via the XML service can fail due to this limitation. But here’s the solution.
Continue reading ‘XML Service Chokes on Request Larger Than 4KB’
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.
Continue reading ‘Using EdgeSight in a Provisioning Server Shared Image – Properly!’
I have been involved in the rollout of EdgeSight with several customers. Sounds great so far, doesn’t it? But more than once I needed to tackle with very rigorous security standards causing the setup to take much longer than usual. These standards require installations to be executed with the minimal set of permissions. Unfortunately, most installers are not designed to work that way and vendors do not properly document the permissions expected for their setup wizard.
Continue reading ‘The EdgeSight Installation Wizard Is Seriously Flawed!’
