I previously blogged about a memory leak in Secure Gateway 3.1.1 and that you should avoid it. Citrix has released Secure Gateway 3.1.2 that fixes the memory leak in 3.1.1. Get it at CTX122212.
I’m presenting at the Fall Citrix User Group Norway in Geilo, Norway on Oct 7th-9th
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be presenting three sessions at the Fall Citrix User Group Norway event in Geilo, Norway from October 7th to October 9th. There will be plenty of great speakers coming including Simon Crosby, Rich Crusco, Rick Dehlinger, Benny Tritsch, Rene Vester and Alex Yushchenko. The event is going to be held at the Dr. Holms Hotel in Geilo. Very much looking forward to attending and thanks to the cug.no group for inviting me to speak there. Details on the agenda of the event are not public yet, but I’m sure they’ll be posted online soon at the cug.no website.
Advanced Citrix Training class posted for November 2nd – 6th in Las Vegas, NV
I’ve just posted up details on the November 2009 5-day Advanced Citrix training class that will be held in Las Vegas, NV. This class is a great opportunity for people who administer Citrix environments to get deep understanding of how Terminal Services and Citrix XenApp environments really work. We’ll also discuss server virtualization, Provisioning Server, XenDesktop, etc but the class is primarily focused on XenApp. This class is not made for people who are new to Citrix and we don’t spend time on pointless lab exercises that you can do without an instructor there. This is 5 days full of in depth technical lecture and best practices sharing. You don’t want to miss this.
The 5-day master class is $2895 USD and there’s a maximum class size of 16. Full details of what is covered in the class as well as details on how to secure a seat is located on the training page. Hope to see you there!
Weblogic Workspace (and other apps that use JVM) may crash after deploying Citrix XenDesktop 3.0 Virtual Desktop Agent
At a client of mine we’re steadily rolling out 3k instances of XenDesktop. One issue that surfaced early on is that Weblogic Workspace v10.2 crashed on launch after the deployment of the Citrix XenDesktop Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA). The client had packaged/certified the 3.03.059 release of the VDA. After deploying the VDA and rebooting, user’s of Weblogic Workspace 10.2 were unable to launch the application. The crash that would appear is this:
It turns out that this particular issue is caused by applications that attempt to acquire a large allocation of memory during startup. Something about the XenDesktop VDA breaks this ability. The good news is that Citrix has found this issue and corrected it in the new XenDesktop 3.0 Feature Pack 1 VDA (3.1.3236) which can be downloaded at CTX121590
The specific fix in this VDA that resolves the Weblogic issue is:
If an application requests a large block of contiguous memory, the allocation might fail.
[From XDE310VDA001][#207792]
Yet another situation that upgrading to the latest and greatest and sometimes be a good thing. The good news is that this VDA can be installed right on top of the existing VDA without incident.
XenDesktop (ICA Client) experiences long logon delay and also freezes when minimizing and maximizing or when locking and unlocking local PC
A client of mine experienced some slowness/freezing of XenDesktop 3.0 sessions when used from India. The slowness is experienced during logon, but also during a minimize/maximize of the XenDesktop session or during an unlock of the local PC. Here is the background of this issue and what was done to mitigate the issue.
Background: Client uses folder redirection of Application Data folder. That AppData folder is currently redirected across the WAN because of lack of infrastructure in India. Yes, I realize this is an extremely bad practice, but it’s what they decided to do and it’s what I currently have to deal with. Client PCs are in India. XenDesktop VMs are in Chicago. Circuit is 9MB bandwidth and approximately 270 ms of round trip latency.
Issue: Desktop Receiver takes approximat
Root cause: Through WAN emulation and some Wireshark traces both problems were identified
Solution 1: Shut off AppData redirectio
Solution 2: Find a workaround
I’ve sent this info to Citrix so perhaps it’ll make it’s way to a KB article. It’s certainly a niche situation, but perhaps someone else might run into this. To re-iterate, this is NOT a XenDesktop problem but is an ICA Client issue. It just happens that the client was using XenDesktop when the issue was discovered.
Beware of Secure Gateway v3.1.1 – it has a major memory leak that will take down your WI/SG environment (UPDATE)
After having just migrated a customer from Web Interface 3.0 + Secure Gateway 2.0 to Web Interface 5.1 / Secure Gateway 3.1.1 I had the unfortunate pleasure of finding a memory leak in Secure Gateway 3.1.1. After some period of time (hours/days depending on how busy your SG environment is) the private bytes in use by the Secure Gateway service climbs to a point where it stops functioning. When this happens you’re down. What’s worse is that if you’re using traditional port monitoring on a hardware load balancer, the SG Service still listens on 443 so your load balancer won’t direct users away from the non-functional Secure Gateway host. About three days ago Citrix pulled the Secure Gateway 3.1.1 download as visible on CTX121012 However that doesn’t help me much since my customer was turned up a few days prior to it being pulled UGH!. Anyway, I’m now in the process of uninstalling SG 3.1.1 and installing 3.1 in it’s place (which sucks because 3.1 has a security vulnerability). Hopefully Citrix will put out a fixed 3.1.1 release and more importantly hopefully they start communicating these types of things through their blog, etc.
UPDATE: Citrix has released Secure Gateway v3.1.2 that resolves the memory leak. Get it at CTX122212.
Unofficial Citrix Training re-launched!
Over the course of the last few years, I taught an Advanced Citrix training class that was originally developed by Brian Madden. Over those few years, I took the material and updated it, rewrote large parts of it and made it my own. At the same time, Dr. Benny Tritsch began contributing to the material and was teaching the class in Europe. After BrianMadden.com was acquired by TechTarget, Brian (and myself and Benny Tritsch) effectively halted those training classes. This is why the Training URL on Brian’s site says “We’re working on our 2009 schedule”. Anyway, I’ve arranged a relationship with a training facility and I intend on giving the training class anywhere from 2-4 times per year (no need to become a career trainer – there’s plenty of those out there now). If you’re looking for a training class to really learn how Citrix works, then this is the class for you. We don’t do any of those pointless labs that are in most training cirriculum. The class is 5-days of lecture, whiteboard, and great conversation and Q&A. It’s an opportunity to learn a lot of things you might not know exactly how they work and it’s a great time to bring questions about your environment. While the class focus is 80% on XenApp, we’ll talk about VDI, Application Virtualization, User Environment management, WAN acceleration, VPNs, etc. We won’t just talk about what they are, I’ll give you the real scoop on the strengths and weaknesses of the technologies and the vendors. The best part about the class is that you have an opportunity to shape the discussion! I’ll send an email out a week before the class starts asking specific questions on what things you want to get out of the class. Then I’ll attempt to tailor topics based on the interests of the class. Of course I make myself available for questions specific to your environment as well.
The first class will be in Sept 14-18, 2009 in downtown Chicago with another class in Nov 2-6, 2009 (location TBD). The cost of the 5-day instructor led class is $2895 USD. The class material is always kept up to date so you’re not left with some old material that’s irrelevant to what you’re working on now.
To view more details about the class and to register, please visit the training page.
MS App-V and Citrix CDM.SYS can BSOD Citrix servers and Citrix XenApp Multimonitor exception hooking is case sensitive, but why?
So I’ve got a client that I’ve been rolling out HRP04 for XenApp 4.5 in order to resolve a nasty conflict between Microsoft App-V and Citrix’s Client Drive provider cdm.sys that results in BSODs in certain circumstances when users of App-V applications try to perform I/O to their client drives. The system BSODs with a Stop 8E. I’ve been cautious about rolling out HRP04 because we’ve found re-introduction of some multimonitor glitches that were quite stable with HRP02 (as long as Post-HRP02 3040/3044 wasn’t deployed – can’t remember which of those two the seamless problem came from). Anyway, I’ve got HRP04 rolled out to about 80% of the farm, but we have one app that was bombing in Seamless mode because the application didn’t think that the session had an 800×600 sized display. What’s strange about this issue is that I ran a utility as a published app that clearly demonstrated that the session believed it had a multimonitor config with the correct screen resolutions.
In situations like this in the past, I’ve simply disabled Citrix’s DLL hooking for whatever feature I had issues with. I’ve done this successfully with the multimonitor hook in the past by following CTX110301 But in testing this particular app, I found it only solved the issue about 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time it threw up the same minimum monitor resolution message and exited. Well, I was in the process of opening a support case with Citrix (which was taking FOREVER BTW) when I stumbled across this gem in the above mentioned KB:
“The name should include the extension, is case-sensitive, and should be semicolon-delimited.”
Sure enough switching the process name to it’s proper case as displayed in Task Manager and the app was properly skipping the multimonitor hooking 100% of the time and is running without incident now.
My question is now this: Is this truely a limitation of how the process hooking works? Or is it merely a case-sensitive string comparison issue? I’m hoping it’s the former.
Secondly, we’ve learned that reading really IS important. Your teachers weren’t just giving you crap back in grade school
Want to learn more about VDI strength and weaknesses? Attend my session at Pubforum 2009 Dublin
I’ll be giving a session a Pubforum 2009 in Dublin, Ireland on June 5-7 (yes Friday through Sunday, this is a geek conference after all). I’ll be presenting on VDI and where the industry in general is at now that XenDesktop 3.0 has been released. Stop by and say hello!
Finally someone who “gets” cloud computing
Hoff tipped me off to this great audio recording of Larry Ellison speaking on “What the hell is the cloud?”. It’s an enlightening bit of audio that reflects some of my thoughts on the hype surrounding cloud computing. Definitely an entertaining listen.
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