TechAgility

So I noticed some good info coming out of the MSDN Terminal Server blog, like:Introducing Remote Desktop Connection Manager and I was reasonably curious if the RDS Brokering would allow you to attach or add Physical devices like BladePC’s or BladeWS’s to the Virtual Pooling of resources available for users to RDP in to. So I figured the best way was to dive in and give it a shot?

So it seems like there are certainly no issues with installing Win 2008 R2 in a VM based on the VMware Workstation 6.5, remembering that there is no longer a 32 bit version. So here is some of what I found with the install:

Page 17 shows what the Web Access page looks
like (needs to be HTTPS – self signed cert is fine)

At this point I was able to successfully enter the details of my Windows 7 Laptop in the “Connect To” field and then the session on the WIN2008 Server was able to bring up an RDP7 (6.1) session

To double-check I’d need to access this web site remotely from another machine and check that works? But to be honest I was mainly after just figuring out  if I could attach physical units so I’ll leave that for now.

Details of what can be configured under the RDS

Page 25 shows:
Trying to specify devices that can be connected to – and it quickly
becomes apparent that you can only add Virtual Devices to the
mix – I now need to add Hyper-V to this Server (if it’ll let me?) and
then I should be able to add VM’s to the pool for assignment

Bottom line – to add additional devices apart from virtual VM’s
this would quite likely need a hack? to effect this and so here is
where my investigation ends for now.

So this is all of the post for now and I’ll try and place
a link here for the full document
(1.9Mb)

written by dcaddick

Just like London Buses, you wait around for ages, and then they all turn up at once? (Whitepapers, that is?)

HP reference configuration for Citrix XenApp: 1,500 Microsoft Office 2003 users on HP ProLiant BL460c G6 server blades

This document illustrates multiple blades configurations using bare-metal configurations and converting them to virtualized ones.  The goal is to illustrate the value of virtualization and detail cost and associated power improvements.

There are three configurations discussed:

• Configuration 1: x64, bare-metal – Four HP ProLiant BL460c G6 server blades
• Configuration 2: x64, virtualized – Five HP ProLiant BL460c G6 server blades
• Configuration 3: x86, virtualized – Four HP ProLiant BL460c G6 server blades

But I think that even with just these two images they tell the story quite succinctly?

Figure 1. Reference configuration 1 – Four bare-metal HP ProLiant BL460c G6 server blades (x64) – 1,608 users

Figure 2. Reference configuration 2 – Five virtualized HP ProLiant BL460c G6 server blades (x64) – 1,700 users

written by dcaddick

Essentially there are two PDF’s, the first is the Overview and the second contains the detail with the scripts embedded in the PDF document.

One key take-away from the Overview is this graph of how many users *you might* get from an x64 installation :

I don’t have the facilities or time to be able to test any of this but it certainly looks quite comprehensive and appears to leverage the HP RDP (Altiris Server) component quite well to Automate things as much as possible.

Two new white papers have been released to ActiveAnswers at HP.  These papers reflect a joint development effort by HP & Citrix which, when combined, provide customer value-add specific to our partnership.

"Data Center transformation – Citrix Deliver Center enabled by HP Adaptive Infrastructure" provides an overview of the collaboration:

"Automating Citrix XenApp on XenServer deployments on HP ProLiant servers" illustrates how HP Insight Rapid Deployment Software (RDP) can be used with Citrix-developed PowerShell scripts to automatically provision and manage XenApp on XenServer on ProLiant servers.  The paper provides the instructions and scripts to deploy a XenApp farm on XenServer from bare-metal to application publishing.

Please note that the scripts provided were originally developed for each company’s internal use and are not officially supported through tech support or escalation channels.  That said, the solution has been verified by the HP and Citrix engineering team and are being released to provide the scripts to customers who may find them useful.

written by dcaddick

So just as we headed in to the weekend I noted Brian Madden’s post – Microsoft’s RDP host-side rendering (Calista) plans include optional GPU offload hardware & custom chips. (Oh, and Hyper-V is required!) as well as Alessandro’s post Is Microsoft silently building a better VDI? and realised that this also tied in with some recent articles earlier in the week from the MSDN side of things around the new Remote Desktop Services (RDS now effectively replaces the old Terminal Services) on Windows 2008, namely getting Aero Glass Remoting in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Running WS08 Terminal Server as a virtualized guest under Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

So now this started getting me thinking, there is an almost unbelievable amount of hype right now about VDI, where it’s getting to the point that as soon as we hear about either a Customer or a Partner telling us that they have installed a PoC/Pilot or deployed VDI we can almost guarantee the next thing they will be wanting to know is “how do I get decent Video/MultiMedia/USB performance, it’s not working correctly, and I want it fixed”.

Ideally what should happen when designing a Desktop Virtualization Strategy (in my opinion) is start with the Success Criteria that the design needs to meet as defined by the business units/stakeholders/users, and if they are unsure or don’t know, then the best way to think about this is to strive to provide a User Experience that is *indistinguishable* from a normal PC.

Which is why the first part of designing the solution should be deciding on the Remote Protocol that is needed to meet the Success Criteria?

• If you only need to supply standard Office Apps then RDP will likely be fine
• If it’s Office Apps plus some Video with some USB devices then you may find that you can get away with RDP plus one of the RDP enhancements like TCX, etc.
• If it’s Office Apps plus some Video with some USB devices and you need to make this work over something less than a 10Mb LAN with a possibility of anything greater than 150 – 200ms latency then you may want to seriously consider ICA as the only viable choice.
• Now if you have demanding users that require a true PC like experience regardless of how it’s done then there are a number of choices like RGS (from HP), PCoIP (from Teradici), SPICE (from Redhat?), etc. however as you start to examine the pro’s and con’s of each one you may find that each one of these may bring further limitations to yuor design?

• The key takeaway from this is that you can have either a good 
  user experience *OR* low bandwidth – not neccessarily BOTH?

Desktop Virtualization today:

So my opinion is that currently there are two front runners out there today marketing, selling and deploying Virtual Desktop Solutions:

• Citrix XenDesktop
• VMware View

I know there are others of note, but generally these are the two main leaders today who are spending the most in Marketing trying to own the top spot in this area, and who both not only have a Solution and a Broker but also a Hypervisor that provides the grunt at the back end. However to a certain extent both of these solutions are fundamentally flawed in that neither of them *currently* have (or support) a Remote Protocol that delivers what I would refer to as a High Quality User Experience that is available today.

Side note on “High Quality User Experience”:

So far most of what I have seen in the field is examples of “Desktop Virtualization” that have been designed by IT for IT – not for the business or users. In some instances it has come as quite a shock to those designing the Solution that one or all of the various Stakeholders, Business or Users not only want the ability to view Training Video’s, but actually have the audacity to demand it as a Criteria of Success for the project? And USB redirection for their Blackberries too!

Bottom line, if your planned Desktop Virtualization solution does not include MultiMedia and USB as a measure of success then there is a good chance it’s fundamentally doomed? At the very least include some scope for a Phase 2 that will expand the project to include this and plan for it up front?

Yes VMware has announced a partnership with Teradici to develop PCoIP for VDI instances of View, (VMware does support HP’s RGS in View, but only to BladePC’s and BladeWS’s) but this appears that it will be based on a H/W PCIe card that will be capable of supporting 32 and 64 VDI instances from the hosted end, so there are some limitations like having to use Servers that can support PCIe cards, but the real kicker is that these cards won’t be available until mid-next year?

Yes Citrix has HDX, (re-Marketed term covering the ICA Protocol ) and although they have now started releasing the HDX-Flash add-on there is still no sight of the HDX-3D? For the life of me I can’t understand what is holding up Citrix on this, if it is really as good as it’s supposed to be then they should be releasing it now while they can beat VMware to the punch.

How to create a portable ver. of RDP7:

So with this in mind I looked a bit deeper at the RDP7 side of things to see what differences there were? First thing I noticed was that it’s still referred to as Ver. 6.1.7100.0 (this is Ver. 7, right?), and after some quick googling the next thing I came across is that it is relatively simple to take a copy of the MSTSC.EXE and save it to a folder on another machine and run this version (you will also need a copy of MSTSCAX.DLL and a folder beneath this named “en-US” and in this you’ll need a copy of MSTSC.EXE.MUI and MSTSCAX.DLL.MUI)

Once you have this accomplished you’ll be free to run the RDP7 Client to connect to either your Windows 7 or Server 2008 Host and see what differences there are. Essentially all of the differences are covered under the post:Aero Glass Remoting in Windows Server 2008 R2 but I must admit I was quite surprised at how well it was able to cope with a DiVX avi of Kung Fu Panda, the picture was really sharp and defined, the audio appeared to stay in synch and it didn’t appear to consume much more than 4 – 500Kb/s. When it came to Flash this again had good definition and sharpness – but there was lot’s of gaps in the playback – so on Flash it still scores a miss?

Putting this in context, here are some very rudimentary tests:

**NOTE** I did not test the Aero feature

Bandwidth was simply measured by using “Bandwidth Monitor” from www.bwmonitor.com
This also had the effect of causing 20 – 25Kb/s consumption just in the act of being displayed in the remote screen, so typically it was hidden until needed.

Conclusions:

• RDP7 is definitely an improvement – and provides a much clearer and cleaner display

• Gone are the old days of RDP presenting the screen with 6 or 7 horizontal bars from left to right and top to bottom
• It does appear able to deliver quite reasonable Video today
• It does not appear to have delivered much or any improvements in Flash

• Not much at the bottom end?
• But for Video and high usage scenarios? A resounding Yes.
• But I would still caution folks to do their own testing prior to jumping in? Bandwidth requirements for any Remote Protocol is both very bursty and it’s measurement is very subjective depending on what is happening on the screen?

• ALL Remote Protocols will suffer as soon as latency increases above 200 – 250ms – *APART* from ICA, Citrix has a number of technologies that make it possible for the ICA Client to manage and cope with latencies of 1000ms and more.
• HOWEVER, you then don’t have a “High Quality User Experience”, and I would very much doubt that even when the long-awaited HDX-3D does make it’s debut that it will be able to cope with much more than 200 – 250ms. If it can it will be *THE* Remote Protocol to beat.

written by dcaddick

If installing Citrix XenDesktop Receiver on any HP Thin Client with Windows XPe *prior* to the most recent release (Build 710) you may get an error, even after removing the original Citrix Client, that it is unable to install because of a previous Citrix Client install still exists…  I didn’t really waste any time on looking for the root cause as to whether it’s caused by the Uninstall routine of the preinstalled Citrix Client or other components…

Here’s the way I got it to work manually:

• Log on as Administrator
• Uninstall the Citrix Program Neighborhood client
• Delete the registry key HKClassesRoot\Software\Microsoft\Installer\Products\086B4262CB2…. (I didn’t write it all down)
             Search for “Citrix” in RegEdit, It’ll be very near the top
• Install Desktop Receiver Embedded Edition v11.10

The other alternative would be to re-image the device before you start with the most recent release?

And to set the the device to load the logon web page directly, set the registry entry:

• HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\WinLogon
• Shell = c:\progra~1\intern~1\iexplore.exe –k http://<ddc>/Citrix/DesktopAppliance

written by dcaddick

Essentially, the printer needs to be configured locally first, pretty much the same way you have it now. There’s additional information, with screen shots on how to configure this for ICA starting page 22 of the attached guide: http://bizsupport2.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01367435/c01367435.pdf

I’ve also reference a guide to supported HP printers with Citrix, just in case:
http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA0-8465ENW.pdf

written by dcaddick

For those who want to update their existing XP embedded Thin Client to SP3 – here are the links depending on which model you have?

5730 & 5630 (also supports 5720):
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=12454&prodSeriesId=3634720&swItem=vc-71017-1&prodNameId=3634724&swEnvOID=1058&swLang=13&taskId=135&mode=3

2533:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=321957&prodSeriesId=3691093&swItem=ob-70258-1&prodNameId=3691094&swEnvOID=1058&swLang=13&taskId=135&mode=3

6720:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=321957&prodSeriesId=3660785&prodNameId=3660787&swEnvOID=1058&swLang=13&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=ob-70196-1

written by dcaddick

I was at a conference with some other HP Colleagues a couple of weeks ago and we got to chatting about travel and it turned out that one of the chaps had travelled plenty around Asia and the US but hadn’t been to Europe or UK at all and was now going for his Wife’s Brothers wedding. So after discussing some of what my wife and I had been up to I promised him a compilation of the links regarding some of our chat.

So, for better – or worse, here it is for anyone who is heading that way? 

Accommodation:
Serviced Apartments in London, Europe, Asia and Australia
http://www.citadines.com
Serviced Apartments in US and London (these are around 55 – 70 quid a night, great value)
http://www.clubquarters.com/Locations.aspx (needs membership ID)

Ideas for what to do in the Cities?
Search the Guardian/Observer newspaper web site – Look for 24 hours in Madrid, or 48 hours in Paris, etc.
i.e. for Madrid http://browse.guardian.co.uk/search/Travel?search=madrid&search_target=%2Fsearch%2FTravel%2FTravel&fr=cb-guardian
Not only does this give you a good run down on the “essentials” but it’s a good starting point for making a list?

Flights etc…
www.lastminute.com

Train travel – global site
http://www.seat61.com

Things to do in London:
TNT Magazine (free – found outside nearly all London Tube stations)
http://tntonline.co.uk/tnt_today
Time Out Magazine (NYC and Sydney as well)
http://www.timeout.com/london
Go and see the Palaces:
http://www.londontown.com/London/London_Palaces
In particular make sure you find the time for Houses of Parliament, St Pauls Cathedral and the Westminster Cathedral. The Victoria and Albert Museum might be worth a go as well – but be prepared to spend the day?

Get along to the Borough Markets opposite London Bridge Station (open Fridays and Saturdays)

There are loads of Gastro Pubs in London, use this to find some? http://www.toptable.com/en-gb/venues/best-for/?l=7&id=29
                When looking for pubs in UK and other places to eat in Europe use this as a guide?
How to make the best of a Weekend in Paris with no prior planning?

Getting around London:
Tube – http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tickets/default.aspx
Try and get an Oyster card before you get there – dead easy to top up on the fly and avoids heaps of queues!

Not only that but you can add, say 20 quid then use a combination of Bus, Train, Tube out and back and it will automatically cap the charge at a max day usage as per these details http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tickets/faresandtickets/singlefares/5196.aspx great and easy way to get around and works with RFID – it’s the way ALL public transport should be done

written by dcaddick

I just wanted folks to know that there’s some new testing results out that would appear to indicate that with XenApp being virtualized on XenServer there is minimal overhead so long as you are not pushing the XenApp servers above 80% CPU

<snip>

A 4P/24C3 HP ProLiant BL685c G6 server blade equipped with the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor Model 8435 (2.6 GHz) can provide optimal support for up to 500 users when running HP’s most aggressive test workload (as described in User profile) in a 64-bit HP Server Based Computing (HP SBC) environment.

As a result of this and earlier test efforts, HP recommends enabling BBWC on HP SBC servers.

When the workload was virtualized, this HP ProLiant BL685c G6 server blade was able to support as many as 500 users, indicating that, for this particular configuration, virtualization overhead was negligible. However, common sense dictates that you are likely to encounter virtualization overhead with any HP ProLiant server platform running Citrix XenServer. Thus, HP extended this testing to compare the maximum – rather than optimal – numbers of users supported by bare-metal and virtualized configurations. These additional tests indicated that, with a maximum workload, there was a virtualization overhead of 30% – 33% for the tested configurations.

Since your production workload will not exactly match the workload used by HP for the testing described in this document, HP recommends sizing your HP ProLiant server platform to accommodate a virtualization overhead of at least 10% – 20%4.

more at….
Performance of HP ProLiant BL685c G6 with Six-Core AMD Opteron 8400 Series processors (2.6 GHz) in a 64-bit HP SBC environment

written by dcaddick

I was asked an interesting question at Tech@Work last week here in Sydney – I was asked by someone from Local Govt. where they could find TCO or ROI Calculators for justifying the purchase of Thin Clients.

This chap also wanted know where the break-even cost was for implementing Thin Clients?

So after chatting to him for a little while it became apparent that like a large number of SMB organizations they had the following:

• 150 or so PC’s
• 3 different types
• No real desktop management system other than Ghost
• They had attempted creating an SOE, but had not finished/followed it through

So I pointed out that it was likely that they already knew and understood the true annual cost of PC Support as published by Gartner in that it was likely to be costing them in the region of 140 – 160% of the capital cost of the PC per year? Yes they were.

So at this I pointed out that they have effectively proven to them selves that Thin Clients make sense – so why didn’t they just target say the receptionists (who only typically use email?) and replace the PC with a Thin Client and point the browser at the Web version of GroupWise? 3 x receptionists = 3 times the saving? and build on things from there?

It didn’t dawn on me till later that by asking for TCO/ROI/break-even costs he was actually wanting info on how PC’s compare to VDI? (and presumably he was wondering about the costs of the back end?) He just didn’t mention it all.

I guess my point is that you can start using Thin Clients in lots of places within in an organization to cut costs today before you even start down any road with VDI, Brokers, Hypervisors, etc. Start being inventive in how the apps can be deployed and used and you’ll start seeing a number of opportunities to do things differently?

written by dcaddick