In a couple of days I’m off to my second home, Fortaleza in Brazil on a 3 weeks well deserved vacation. Actually not just vacation, but time away from my normal day time job. I tend to get a lot more done when I’m away and the last time I was over there I created the free eBook “Citrix XenApp 5.0 for Windows 2008 – A Hands-On Guide“.

So I need some help from you guys to further improve this blog and create some awesome training material. So please take the survey below, it will take you less than a minute to complete. Thanks, this blog is a success because of you and your support.

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This is a follow up post for Why Internet Explorer will kill your memory – Part Ithat I published in March this year. A lot of people have been requesting this and I’m sorry for keeping you waiting so long. I think the reason why this post have been delayed is that I’ve been putting to much into it. I wanted it to cover everything; Internet Explorer 8 tuning, Citrix HDX MediaStream for Flash and so on. Well I just figured out let’s take the IE8 tuning in Part II and then the rest of the stuff can come in some other series.

The setting I’m about to reveal for you will save you a big chunk of memory and money, in both XenApp and XenDesktop environments. By default,  IE8 will start with two instances of iexplore.exe (one for the Frame, one for the tab) and grows the number of tab processes as needed based on the amount of available RAM, the number of tabs, the integrity levels for tabs, and the number of distinct IE sessions. Let’s take a look at some examples :

1 tab – msn.com

2 tabs – msn.com | facebook.com/xenappblog

3 tabs – msn.com | facebook.com/xenappblog | twitter.com/xenappblog

In total memory per user this would be in the correct order : 71mb / 111mb / 154mb

So with only one simple registry setting we can limit Internet Explorer to only run one instance of iexplore.exe for the frame and one for the tabs. This is a REG_DWORD key located under HKCU. For full details check out this MSDN blog post : Opening a New Tab may launch a New Process with Internet Explorer 8.0.

The numbers speak for themselves : 52mb / 62mb / 80mb. I encourage you to check it out right away, and yes it would also work on you personal computer with IE8.

Some other things to keep in mind in terms of Internet Explorer 8 :

• Add-ons add load times every time you open a new browser window or tab
• Keep restriced or trusted site zone list to a minimum
• Keep add-ons and plug-ins up to date. e.g older versions of Adobe Flash may result in browser crashes or hang

PS : Click here to get Free Instant Accessto my new 80 page eBook “Citrix XenApp 5.0 for Windows 2008 – A Hands-On Guide“ and the new 7 Day Mini Course with tips & tricks not shared on the blog.

I have posted a new Tuning Policy for XenDesktop x64 available in the Download section of this blog. Most of the registry keys have been imported from the previous XenDesktop Tuning Tips Group Policy v1.0.

This new policy have been updated to support x64 and some new settings have been added based on a recent blog post by Citrix’s Lead Architect Daniel Feller. Check out the post here : Windows 7 Registry Optimizations for Virtual Desktops.

Many registry settings are automatically set when you run the Citrix Optimizer Tool. I cannot stress this enough, always remember to run this tool whenever you update your vDisk images. To make it easier for the people maintaining and supporting my Provisioning Services Solutions I’ve created a nice script that takes care of all this. Check out these two previous articles that do apply to XenDesktop environments as well : Prepare a Provisioning Services Private vDisk for Shared vDisk and Citrix Provisioning Services for Citrix XenApp Best Practice.

Recommended XenDesktop Resources :

• XenDesktopMaster – Dedicated XenDesktop Blog
• Jarian Gibson’s blog – The Provisioning Server Export
• CitrixTools.net – XenDesktop Tuning Tips

Note :

Please note that these policy’s are provided “as is” and that using these is at your own risk. Please feel free to leave comments below regarding bugs & suggested improvements in future releases.

PS : Click here to get Free Instant Access to my new 80 page eBook “Citrix XenApp 5.0 for Windows 2008 – A Hands-On Guide“ that will help you Install and Configure the main Citrix products.

Do you remember the old days when we used the hide drives.adm template to hide specified drives along with some kind of hide drives calculator to get the proper value ? So if we wanted to hide drives for Domain Users but not the Domain Admins, we had to create another policy to lock it up again. Those days are long gone thanks to Group Policy Preferences, for me it’s the life before and after. Get rid of all your adm templates and 30+ page vbs logon scripts once for all. This will speed up the logon time and make your administration much easier.

To leverage Group Policy Preferences (GPP) you’ll need to administrate Group Policy’s from a Windows 2008 server (just member server) or Windows 7 with RSAT. On Windows XP and Windows 2003 machines you’ll need Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions to properly read GPP settings.

Map network drives :

Open Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) and create a new policy. Browse to User Configuration – Preferences – Windows Settings – Drive Maps

In this example we map K: to the Accounting folder for all users member of the Accounting group. It’s possible to create many rules, if member of group A or B or and so on.

Hide Drives :

In this example we hide C: for all users except for Domain Admins. When you start playing around we GPP you’ll learn how really powerful it is. I highly recommend you start following Group Policy Center for weekly tips.

So here’s what I want you to do now :

1. I hope you dig it – and that you’ll love it so much that you’ll share it with others
2. You should become a Fan of my FaceBook page here

PS : Click here to get Free Instant Access to my new 80 page eBook “Citrix XenApp 5.0 for Windows 2008 – A Hands-On Guide“ that will help you Install and Configure the main Citrix products.

I have posted a new Tuning Policy for Citrix XenApp 6 available in the Download section of this blog. Most of the registry keys have been imported from the previous Terminal Server & XenApp Tuning Tips Group Policy v1.1. There are some Group Policy Best Practices templates around, but the power of mine are that they are ready to go. There are no extra configuration required.

Remember that UPHClean is natively embedded into Windows 2008 and later and it’s recommended to Disable Data Execution Prevention on Windows 2008. This can be done with this command : bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOff

Change log :

• Moved keys from HKLM\Software to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node
• Added more StubPath’s to speed up the profile creation for new users
• Added instructions on How To Import the settings in GPMC within the zip file
• Deleted “WFDontAppendUserNameToProfile“
• Deleted “NoRemoteChangeNotify“

Resources :

• CitrixTools.net – Terminal Server & XenApp Tuning Tips

Note :

Please note that these policy’s are provided “as is” and that using these is at your own risk. Please feel free to leave comments below regarding bugs & suggested improvements in future releases.

Pierre Marmignon is the man behind CitrixTool.net and he has recently popped onto my radar again with a new upcoming product call Virtual User Environment Manager Agent (VUEM). I’m a big fan of his products so this new VUEM tool got me curious so I hit him up today with some interview questions.

Pierre, can you give us a quick rundown of your new project and what it does for people ?

Virtual User Environment Manager has been designed to provide a first level environment management (e.g., shortcuts creation, network drives mapping, network printers, registry stuff). The tool will be architectured around a SQL Database, an Admin console and an agent, provided as a Windows Service (although the .exe can also be launched via a logon script).

How would this tool work together with Citrix User Profile Manager and Flex Profiles ?

Well I like to say that UPM and Flex are managing the profile settings save / restore while VUEM will manage the environment. Basically it has been designed to be a perfect UPM / Flex companion, taking care of the environment management part which is for now missing in these two products.

Where did you get the idea to this new tool and why ?

I’ve been a fervent user of a freeware called “BrsSuite” developed by Fabrice Cornet. It was managing shortcuts, network drives, printers and ports. The development has been stopped although the tool was really cool. I’ve started to develop a new agent for my customers (as the provided agent had some big issues), but I was then stuck in making it evolve because I was not the original developer. Then I decided to start the project again from scratch. That’s how VUEM has started.

Then as the development was running I’ve decided to add some extra features like the ability to disconnect a session as soon as the log off is detected to make the log off look faster or like creating an environment variable with the client IP…  I’m integrating very cool products like AppSense or RES ones, but I really feel that there is a real need of a free tool taking care of basics things. People that cannot afford the previously mentioned products are for now using scripts, but they are limited and not easy to manage.

As an extra, from the poll I’ve made it seems to be a real need of an intermediate solution.

When will this new VUEM tool be available for download ?

I hope to release it in September with a beta this summer (according to the time I can free up for this project).

XenApp Cloning Tool are your most popular tool. What’s the advantage of yours compared to Citrix’s own tool ?

Actually I don’t like to compete with other products / tools even Citrix one (lol). Let’s say that the philosophy behind my tools is really different. I’ve developed a set of tools that is handling all the needs I’ve faced while deploying provisioned / cloned XenApp servers, needs that were not filled by XenAppPrep (like extra tasks, XenApp configuration Management, cache disk initialization …) which ends up in I think a more complete tool handling all use cases and more suited to production environments.

Where can we get to know more about you and the work you’re doing ?

So here’s what I want you to do now :

1. In the comments below, please tell me what’s your favorite tool from CitrixTools.Net
2. You should follow me on Twitter here

PS : Click here to get Free Instant Access to my new 80 page eBook “Citrix XenApp 5.0 for Windows 2008 – A Hands-On Guide“ that will help you Install and Configure the main Citrix products.

Microsoft recently released a new free tool called Remote Desktop Connection Manager. I’m not going to cover this here, but you should take a look at this post and I highly recommend this article Dynamic Remote Desktop Connection Manager connection list. This is a super cool PowerShell script that makes sure your connection list is always up to date.

If you’re like me you’re probably daily using Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection for RDP, but wouldn’t you love to have something similar for ICA? Well those days are over thanks to tekHelix’s xConnect.

So here’s what I want you to do now :

• In the comments below, please tell me what’s your favorite Remote Desktop Manager
• If this post scratched where it itches, please share it via the retweet button

PS : Click here to get Free Instant Access to my new 80 page eBook “Citrix XenApp 5.0 for Windows 2008 – A Hands-On Guide“ that will help you Install and Configure the main Citrix products.

People new to the virtualization space could get very frustrated when they find out that their Hypervisor of choice preforms much worse than a bare-metal installation. Haven’t the vendors and independent analysis like Project Virtual Reality Check stated that there is no longer any excuses for not running Citrix XenApp on a Hypervisor. The latest numbers shows that the performance are almost the same on XenServer, VMware and Hyper-V.

That being said, to get these high performances requires that you have done your homework and implemented all the Best Practices. Unfortunately there is way to many bugs out there and I’m not even going to start…but I have almost begged Citrix to pay more attention to their own Support Forum in this post.

In this post I’m going to share some important tunings related to poor network performance on Citrix XenServer 5.x family.

Disable Task Offload :

For Windows 2003 VM’s you will need to create a registry key to DisableTaskOffload – REG_DWORD = 1 under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameter. The easiest way is to create a Group Policy to push this registry key.

Disable CheckSum Offload :

The second fix you should try if you still have poor network performance is to Disable Checksum on the XenServer interfaces, both the Virtual (VIF) and the Physical (PIF). Be aware that you don’t need to restart the XenServer or the VM’s. This script will do this automatically on all you network interfaces in your XenServer Pool.

echo Setting checksum off on VIFs
VIFLIST=`xe vif-list | grep "uuid ( RO) " | awk '{print $5}'`
for VIF in $VIFLIST
do
echo Setting ethtool-tx=off and ethtool-rx=off on $VIF
xe vif-param-set uuid=$VIF other-config:ethtool-tx="off"
xe vif-param-set uuid=$VIF other-config:ethtool-rx="off"
done
echo Setting checksum off on PIFs
PIFLIST=`xe pif-list | grep "uuid ( RO) " | awk '{print $5}'`
for PIF in $PIFLIST
do
echo Setting ethtool-tx=off and ethtool-rx=off on $PIF
xe pif-param-set uuid=$PIF other-config:ethtool-tx="off"
xe pif-param-set uuid=$PIF other-config:ethtool-rx="off"
done

Note :

Please note that this script is provided “as is” and that using this is at your own risk. Please feel free to leave comments below regarding bugs & suggested improvements in future releases.

Citrix Provisioning Services 5.6 is out and I have finally had time to play around with it in my lab. There are a lot of bug fixes and great improvements when it comes to Simplicity. In this post I will show you some new GUI screenshots and in my next blog post about Provisioning Services I will show you how to successfully upgrade to Provisioning Services 5.6 from previous versions.

Validate Store path during configuration :

Provisioning Services Image Wizard :

Provisioning Services Auto-Add Wizard :

The new Auto-Add Wizard makes a big different compared to the old PXE Auto Add function. You are now able to define Computer name prefix and suffix according to your naming standards. The only thing I miss now is Auto Computer Account creation, because you still need to do this via the PVS Console and then reboot the new Target Devices.

Click here to get free eBook “Citrix XenApp 5.0 for Windows 2008 – A Hands-On Guide“

Citrix has recently released a very helpful tool called HDX Monitor for XenDesktop to help you make sure that your users get the best user experience. The tool as you can see above is organized into sections that cover the various HDX technologies. Printers telling you about which client printers are mapped, System Information telling you about XenDesktop Agent version and best of all Network showing the latency between Client & Virtual Desktop. Citrix, please provide something similar to XenApp.

Another cool feature are links to 720 & 1020p demonstration videos on the web. Also if something is wrong, this is marked with red text and provides you with links to resources on the web on how to solve and troubleshoot.

Resources :

• SYN334 : HDX Internals : How to deliver a great user experience for every user, every time!
• HDX Internals – Knowledge Base Articles

Click here to get free eBook “Citrix XenApp 5.0 for Windows 2008 – A Hands-On Guide“