TechAgility

The T5545 Thin Client from HP is quite a neat mid-range device that has some nice features that can make your life quite easy, but so far it seems that it’s not all that easy to find out how to go about tweaking it to your environment and users?

I’ll update this later with some additional links to docs – but feel free to email me if you need additional info?

So some handy hints:
(This all applies to the latest Build 31 )

Logging on as Administrator – default password is root

Add HP or Debian Packages to T5545

• Fsunlock – unlocks file system (equivalent to XPe/WES’s EWF or FBWF)
• cd /media – or cd /mnt
• hpkg -i xxxx.hpk   or
• dpkg -i xxxx.deb
• fslock – locks the file system back up
• reboot

Use ezUpdate to automatically update image/packages/custom scripts/Stateless Settings/Persistent Settings
(This is also valid for the new ThinPro K2 build on the T5145)  
Do be aware that you do not need to endlessly reboot to test it – just call ezUpdate from the X Term Console?
·         If you need to validate what it’s doing then check the logs in ./writable/ezUpdate/log/ezUpdate.log using the MousePad from the Advanced area of the Control Panel
·         If you still do not have enough info then run “ezUpdate –d 5” to enable debug mode on the log
·         The order of what it will look for is:

• New Image
• Any new packages
• Custom
• Then check for valid Stateless profile
• Finally check for valid Persistent profile
  

  ezUpdate Admin Guide

·         If you’d like to test/demo the ezUpdate process then you could always *add* the rar package as shown here:

• Download this sample package: http://packages.debian.org/lenny/i386/rar/download
• Put the package in the packages directory on the ezupdate server
• reboot or simply run ezupdate
• Check the log and you should find that it has installed the package correctly
• Run “dpkg –list” in the Terminal to show that rar is now an installed package

·         If you’d then like to remove the application, then this is how we can go about it:

• fsunlock
• dpkg -r rar    (this might need to be hpkg depending on where the package came from?)
• fslock
• reboot/run ezUpdate
• if it still looks like it might be there, then use the dpkg –purge command?

How to deploy ThinPro Settings via Altiris or HPDM
Link to doc here:

Configuring TeamTalk
Have you ever been frustrated or in the dark on how to configure TT when it comes to GUI Menus?  There are a ton of specific GUI configs commands in the Team Talk 7.0 manual chapter 21 command line.   The commands can be added to teemtalk_wrapper.sh.  These settings will apply to all connections from HP Connection Manager.
The file to modify is – /usr/bin/teemtalk_wrapper.sh

Modifying the Menu
If your user has a need to modify the Menu under ThinPro (say they don’t want the Control Center up and available for users) – use the following technique.  You can use it to display commands as well as long as you select the right command.
1)      Login as administrator
2)      Right click on the Menu
3)      Open the menu editor
4)      Click the (+) to add an entry
5)      Then the command to start a connection is
a.      Connection-mgr start $ID
b.      connection-mgr start type:label  (under the usr/bin directory)
ex. connection-mgr start ica:”My ICA”

Get back in after locking down?
Pressing CNTL+ALT+SHIFT+S will bring up  hptc-shutdown – the Shutdown dialog that will give the Switch to Admin Mode Option.

written by dcaddick

The best piece I have read from the IT Industry in the last two weeks or so is:

Why desktop virtualization projects fail

Desktop virtualization is one of the hottest topics of interest and a major initiative of many companies. Touted benefits include lower operating costs, simpler management and desktop mobility. Below we’ll explore what the barriers to wide-scale adoption of desktop virtualization solutions are and some approaches to deal with them. It’s not a fit for everyone in a company but it can be for many.

Challenge #1: Assuming desktop virtualization makes sense because thin clients are cheap - Many people assume that virtualizing desktops is going to be magnitudes cheaper because thin clients can be found for approximately $300-400 whereas a PC can cost $500-$1200.

Tip: Client costs are only part of the picture. Desktop virtualization can reduce capital expenditures but do not expect that to be the case in the first year. Building the infrastructure is expensive (storage, servers, licenses, etc.) and may be the same in the first year. Think about using existing PCs as clients instead of replacing them with thin clients. Thin clients are cheaper than PCs but the reduction in hardware costs may not be seen for a couple of years due to the infrastructure needing to be built. More importantly, operational expenses will be seen immediately and that is where the true cost savings can be found.

………   more at source

I have also collated below some of the details I have discovered around the latest news on PCoIP and HDX-3D

From Brian Madden:

Look out PC-over-IP! Citrix announces new host-side GPU-based encoding for HDX 3D

For me the most crucial part of this post is explaining this:

How HDX 3D works

On the remote host side, Citrix is releasing a custom VDA for the environments where you want to use HDX 3D. (The VDA, or “Virtual Desktop Agent,” is the software agent you install on your remote workstation OS that lets it participate in a XenDesktop farm and gives the ICA hosting capability to a desktop OS.) Having a separate VDA shouldn’t be a problem for anyone since this is a physical workstation host solution anyway, so it’s not like you’re sharing the same disk image with remote desktop VMs.

On the client side, HDX 3D is just another plug-in for the Citrix Receiver. (That’s newspeak for “it’s just another virtual channel for the regular ICA client.”)
HDX 3D lets you configure the image quality, so you can balance the bandwidth-to-user experience. (PC-over-IP lets you do this too.)

From a technical standpoint, the HDX 3D engine replaces the existing ICA progressive display capability. It lets the OpenGL or DirectX stuff render on the host, and then it scrapes them and makes what’s essentially like an M-JPEG movie which is streamed down and played on the client. In many ways this is similar to the way HP RGS and Teradici PC-over-IP.

……….    more at source

What this tells me is that this is right in the zone for HP’s Blade Workstation’s as they have Nvidia based GPU, and that the BladePC’s would not be in at all as they are AMD/ATI based hardware. It’s also interesting to note some more details coming out via this Citrix Community Blog HDX 3D – What Happened to Projects Pictor, Apollo and Prism? and the subsequent comments from Sridhar Mullapudi, Sr. Product Manager:

Though the first release is available for only XD customers, future releases will enable XA customers to get HDX 3D using VM Hosted Apps technology. And with GPU virtualization and related technologies in the future, we will enable support of HDX 3D on virtual machines as well.

And for VMware Brian Madden had this commentary…

After VMworld, VMware still has to prove they "get" desktops. 13 questions about their desktop strategy they need to answer.

The irony of this is that I really, really want VMware to be successful with desktops. Competition from VMware has caused Citrix to put more innovation into their desktop delivery products in 18 months than they have in the past ten years combined. If VMware rolls over on the desktop, I hope that the Symantec or Quest can step up to apply pressure to Citrix or else we’re going to have another decade of innovation ice age.

But back to the main topic: VMware’s lack of desktop vision.

At last year’s VMworld, we got all these great indications of what VMware was capable of in the desktop space. (Here’s my article from then where I could hardly contain my excitement about six desktop announcements.) And how did VMware follow up at this year’s VMworld?

• We got demos of the PC-over-IP and the client hypervisor. (This has a lot of promise and looks to be really great.)
• We learned that VMware will OEM RTO Software’s Virtual Profiles technologyfor some future release of View. (Not View 4 though, from what we can tell.)

So those were two great things. (Tactical, but still great.) Unfortunately that’s kind of where the good news from VMworld stopped:

• VMware demoed their client hypervisor known as CVP. (yay!) But we learned that it won’t be available until 2H 2010! Last year they said their client hypervisor was going to ship by the end of 2009, and now it’s another 8+ months away!?!
• The View futures session was just about View 4. VMware still hasn’t announced a release date, although the rumor is it’s still coming at some point this year. View 4 will have PC-over-IP, but little else new. (Oh, it will have vSphere 4 support.)

  …………    more at source

from Citrix Community blog:

• Desktop Virtualization is not Server Virtualization  (This title pretty much tells it like it is)
• Setting the Record Straight on XenDesktop (there’s not that much difference between XenDesktop and View apparently? )
• Interesting comment towards the bottom – Lastly, while I differ with most of what one VMware Community member, Rkelly, posted re View vs. XenDesktop, I have to say I agree with his final point for the IT team in any VMware shop:  "Download the trial versions of both products and see for yourself" . You just can’t beat a “Try before you buy”

From Alessandro and Virtualization.info

Virtual Computer partners with XenoCode

The company already has a Xen-based client hypervisor and a fairly complex web-based console which uses virtual machines,  snapshots and clones to publish the right system environment to the right user with the right customization. Now Virtual Computer also simplified the management of the application layer thanks to a technology partnership with XenoCode, the application virtualization company that already has an OEM deal with Novell.

Compared to the Novell agreement, Virtual Computer is not OEM’ing the XenoCode Virtual Application Studio. It is just supporting the applications virtualized with the XenoCode technology out-of-the-box inside its NxTop virtual machines.

It is not a revolution but this way Virtual Computer is silently building an end-to-end VDI stack that one day could rival with the upcoming ones from Citrix and VMware.

And lastly….  I haven’t see this before? The AppFactory, based in UK from the looks of it and promising to Virtualize your Apps from 149 pounds an App?
I wonder how well these guys will do? Very slick and professional web site, so it will be interesting to hear how well they do?

written by dcaddick

So some of you may be aware that the new T5545 was released some while back with a new O/S designated ThinPro – this has recently been updated with a new release of Build 31 and now looks a little like this in Admin mode:

To switch to Admin mode there is a simple menu action in the lower left:

and the default password is “root”

Updated T5145 with ThinPro:

Now that by itself may not seem too significant but there has also been some significant changes to the T5145 – the old Admin Interface (ID:Admin\Pwd:Admin) looked like this:

But the newly released version HP ThinPro for HP t5145 Thin Client (128 MB) available for download since Jul 31st looks like the T5545?

In fact there appears to be very little difference between the two – even down to the fact that under the Advanced Tab there is an XTerm Console available?

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

**UPDATE** I have received the following comment:

has anyone had any luck with the Automating Citrix Xenapp whitepaper, as i have issues when trying to import the deploy XenServer Altiris job as both .bin files seem to contain the same jobs, which are for deploying clients.

And yes this is the case – I have contacted the Author and the doc should be updated, but if you need the *.bin file please drop me a line?

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

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

Deciding which Thin Client is good for you?

So you are considering a Desktop Refresh in your organization? Are you aware of the impending "Tipping Point" where the difference between PC’s and Thin Clients is about to become blurred?

Traditional Thinking:

Traditional thinking around Thin Clients focus’s on the matrix between a choice of Hardware at a good, better and best level and the choice of O/S that is used which is typically  WinXPe, WinCE or Linux – this then prompts the decision maker to ask and/or answer the following questions:

• Do you want to use these devices with a VPN Client?
• Do you want to use these devices with an SSLVPN?
• Do you want to use these devices with Web Based Applications running from a Local Browser?
• Do you want to use these devices with a limited set of USB Devices?
• Do you want to use these devices with an unlimited set of USB Devices?
• Do you want a highly secure Device?
• Do you want a device with as small an image as possible?
• Do you want a very dumb device that is essentially "set and forget"?
• Do you want a Device that is capable of running an AV Client?
• Do you want a Device that is capable of running additional Win32 Applications as part of the default image?

The last one sounds crazy but – apparently we have a client that has a 2Gb image with a locally installed version of Oracle Client – but this will clearly mean that the Customer needs a heavy weight Hardware and WinXPe.

Any requirement that relies heavily on a local browser accessing Web based applications really needs heavy hardware to handle the XML and Java processing loads, as these can be significant.

As far as VPN’s go this will almost invariably start enforcing the decision towards WinXPe – certainly from the case of Citrix’s Access Gateway when you have Security looking to make use of the End Point Analysis – although if you are considering using the Enterprise Edition then you can consider using Linux based Thin Clients.

If you are looking for broad USB support, then again you need to consider looking very hard at WinXPe as this offers the broadest support for a myriad of USB devices with very little effort by the local admin.

I guess it’s not surprising in light of this that WinXPe is the most predominant choice of O/S for Thin Clients, although there are some significant benefits to using a Linux core if you are not hampered by the above constraints

Blurring of the Lines?

So what do I mean by the "coming tipping point between the PC and the Thin Client"?

Well ask yourself if you want a PC that is locked down? or do you want a "Pre Locked Down" Device in the same manner as the Traditional Thin Client? Surely the TCO and ROI figures stack up, and if the device is already effectively locked down nicely then surely that is less effort that the IT Dept. has to put in to get it to where they want it to be?

The main stumbling block is that under the licensing arrangement with MS – any device using XP embedded is barred from being able to have a local installation of Office – so that pretty much precludes going much further with that right?

Well when you look around the market place today there are plenty of examples of 4, 8 and 16Gb flash or storage devices – so clearly it is possible to have a Thin Client/PC that has enough storage to run XP Pro? Surely that does away with the limitation preventing the installation of Office?

So when I thought about this further it’s quite clear with the advent of BartPE and Microsoft’s own WinPE that both the XP Pro and the Server 2003 O/S’s are capable of booting and running from a "read-only" image? So that just leaves the concept of applying an "Enhanced Write Filter" to XP Pro and we are nearly there? 

If we fast forward to say….  2010, it’s not unreasonable to think that you might have a choice of storage in a new Laptop – do you want 100Gb plus with a regular hard drive, or do you want longer battery life with a faster boot time with a 16/32Gb Flash storage unit? Now you join this with a low power Intel Core 4 Duo 2.7Ghz manufactured at 32nm that only takes 14 watts and …………….   so now tell me again why we aren’t going to see a blurring of the lines between Thin Clients and PC’s?  )

I think that sooner rather than later we are going to see a niche market of PC’s being designed and built with lower CPU’s, smaller RAM, less Power and less storage than Thin Clients – and at the same time we will start to see Thin Clients with more storage, RAM, higher CPU’s than the same PC’s

Conclusion:

So when we reach this point, the main decision to make is no longer based on Hardware at all but on whether you want to have your local IT Admin do the locking down, or buy a unit pre-locked down that you add a few Mission Critical apps to and then image away?

Please let me know if you have any feedback?

written by dcaddick