As I mentioned in this post, businesses need their IT staff to communicate well. While they also need employees who are experts at specific applications or technologies, they also need ones who might not know specific technologies in depth, but can understand how multiple systems interact. The former role is often filled by an “engineer” while the latter is filled by an “architect.”

As functions are consolidated and hardware footprints decrease, the need for architecture has increased dramatically. As companies continue to virtualize, engineers who used to be hardware experts are being asked to be “application experts.” Since Virtualization management software allows for allocation additional resources to servers as needed, server engineers no longer need to be as thorough at gathering system specs. They’re now able to just change the “hardware” configuration until the application works. This has resulted in them essentially becoming application support for their users. Given the cost of maintenance agreements with vendors like Microsoft, the Engineer is often just the liaison between the customer and vendor.

It’s like Tom from Office Space! I’m a People Person!

So far, we’ve only discussed how application delivery has changed from the server perspective. There’s still the network, security, and storage implications! Since storage and network hardware still need to exist, they should be considered when deciding how best to deliver applications and content to end-users. This is where “the application delivery architect” comes in.

If you look at the diagram below, you’ll notice the typical flow for an application.

From left to right, the user connects to the internet and if possible, uses some sort of Wan Optimization solution. Once they’re at the hosting DC, they are hitting the Infrastructure behind which the Application lives. The Application Delivery infrastructure can include the network, server, security, and storage Infrastructure as well as an Application Delivery Controller. The image below provides a bit more granularity to the traffic flow.

In “typical” environments, the Network team is responsible for Layers 2 and 3 (Switching and Routing) after which traffic is handed off to servers. Layers 4 through 7 can be handled differently depending on the environment. In some cases, the traffic might go straight from the switches and routers to a server. In other cases, it goes through an Application Delivery Controller before getting to the servers and onto the application. When an ADC comes into play, the system can perform a number of functions to offload traffic from the servers. This can include SSL Offloading, Caching, Compression, and even some Firewalling. The idea is that you can purchase “cheaper” servers if not so much is needed from them. This strategy lends itself very well to Virtualization since companies can experience much better consolidation ratios.

Since there are multiple ways to go about delivering an application, a true “application delivery” role needs to exist. Let’s consider the necessary components to properly deliver an application:

1. Availability - Application owners need to determine the availability requirements for their application. From there, the Infrastructure requirements can be derived.

2. Performance - Application owners should determine the performance requirements for their application. From there, Infrastructure requirements are again derived.

3. Security - Application owners determine security requirements for their application. Given these requirements, risks are either mitigated via the application code or an Infrastructure component like an Application Firewall.

4. Access – Here’s where an Application Delivery Architect really shines. Based on information from the developers, Infrastructure should be designed that allows the Application to reach customers as quickly and efficiently as possible.

5. Monitoring/Measurement – This is the component at which the success criteria for the other components are measured. If the Application needs to perform in such a way, advanced monitoring should be put into place to ensure the behavior is actually occurring. The more the monitoring resembles real user behavior, the better.

Given unlimited resources, it’s not difficult to excel at every one of these components. The need for an Application Delivery Architect role comes into play because in the real world, solutions need to be delivered that meet numerous constraints including cost, time, and effort. Ideally, such an architect is given an application, requirements, and a budget and told to deliver. Since the role requires a good understanding of all the pieces involved (storage, server, network, security, and monitoring,) the architect should excel.

IT employees always have a multitude of choices when designing a solution. Ask a server person to design an always available solution and they’ll probably get expensive, resilient physical servers or build out a very resilient Virtual Infrastructure. Ask a network person the same question and you’ll get expensive, resilient switches and routers. The same goes for storage. Since an Application Delivery Architect understands all the components, they’re able to choose the most effective solutions. That person should understand that if you invest in a good Application Delivery Controller, you can spend less on servers and networking gear. That person should also understand enough about the development process that they can immediately recognize when an application is designed in such a way that it will abuse the infrastructure.

In conclusion, if a company’s goal is to deliver applications and content as efficiently as possible, an Application Delivery Architect role might be just what they need. In most cases, the role should pay for itself in increased efficiency and reduced Infrastructure spends.

A few years back I was using VMware client on my desktop to install multiple Operating Systems for the sake of learning them. Who has thought then that this little piece of software would be doing wonders some years later. Virtualisation has revolutionised the way consolidation can be done in the Datacenters with cost savings as a driving motive. It has definitely given a new definition to the present datacenters. Well thats something most people would be talking around on the net these days.

But something that has taken me to surprise was this years Gartner report on ADC segment when it mentioned few vendors offering virtualisation on top of the application delivery controllers. I had spent few hours understanding these vendors, their solutions & then relate it to the current trend. Most vendors today have their  ADC solutions capable of handling multiple application environments. In this case multiple means – a production deployment, a development LAN, a testing environment or even several DMZ’s. The ADC’s are capable of being chopped logically to act as a separate device each for the respective environment. Now some vendors do it on the basis of VLAN’s & some prefer to do this on the basis of physical ports (which is more secure ofcourse). This is desireable when the two setups have to be isolated from each other or there has to be no communication between them directly for security reasons. This was virtualisation on a broder level would mean. But no, theres something more beyond this.

With virtualisation happening so much at datacneters, there are number of  virtual instances being created each day. Now with so much of playing on virtual instances, there is always pressure on the team’s managing ADC’s to add that respective instance to the Load-balancing farm or remove it from there. This would then be a bit of uneasiness for any team managing ADC’s due to the frequent changes. So there was a need that the ADC solutions should be intelliegnt enough to understand these dynamics of instances & accordingly bring up or remove an instance from a particular server farm. Some ADC vendors understood this requirement early & has already arrived with their solutions. These solutions act as intermediatery between the Virtualisation console & the load-balancers thus dynamically adding or removing instance from server farm on ADC. Since citrix already had virtualisation solutions & also ADC’s, it was a cake walk for them to integrate the two. But there are other vendors in the segment like Radware & Zeus who has worked to bring a timely solution.

If one thinks that ADC cant go beyond this, then wait. Very recently IDC was also talking about ADC’s & their virtualisation. This seems to be a joint report from Cisco & IDC. We have known Cisco for their ASA firewall solutions where it was all about creating contexts & allocating resources to each context. Thus each context would we having their own resources & management would be isolated from other contexts or instances. Cisco has now added the same approach to their ACE solutions. Here they can create multiple instances of loadbalancers on a single ACE, resource allocation can be done per instance/context, each context managed separately. But how much of this is really the need of market. Is it just a marketing stunt to attract attention that they have this unique feature or do they really have something good to offer. When we talk about virtualisation on servers, there is clearly a mention of certain amount CPU / RAM / Diskspace required by the software or operating system. But with ADC’s where theres no such standard measurements recommended, where one setup can be entirely different from another customer, how does one decide how much of CPU, RAM or disk space(if any) can be utilised per instance/context. They are merely manual calculations out of hypothesis & not realistic. How can one judge how much CPU/RAM is required for any particlar instance & can one guarantee that max thresholds wouldn’t reach beyond the configured limits.Any deviations, & imagine the loss not just for one instance or customer but many (considering opex model). Talking of statistics, cisco ACE can support max 250 instances with max 15000 SSL TPS & 340000 CPS. Which means each instance would get 1360 CPS & 60 SSL TPS. Would such statistics be desireable by end customer when choosing such solutions. With such parameters probably one would decide to stick to their traditional style of application delivery rather than going for such solution.

Though Virtualisation is definitely a driving factor in industry today but how many technologies could actually adopt it to deliver optimised results to end customer is something to be seen in the months to come.

Citrix Released a new Citrix Client and guess what? They changed the name …

Why Citrix still works with version numbers I cannot understand, why do you need version numbers when your going to change the name anyway?

Now, Citrix has a ‘online’ and a ‘offline’ plug-in, which of course does make sense in regard of having streaming applications which you can use offline and published applications which you use on-line.

Where is the neighborhood?

After installing the Citrix Online Plug-in v11.2 I notice that the Program Neighborhood is no longer present in the client, only the client formerly know as Program Neighborhood Agent seems to be in the package. Citrix has announced this would happen: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX121727

It’s no big secret Citrix is wanting to get rid of the Citrix Program Neighborhood Client because of it’s lack of central management. With this action they are forcing customers to move to a Citrix Web Interface (XenApp Services) solution.

The new version is an executable in which you can extract the .MSI files with the /extract parameter.

You will see the following .MSI files after extraction:

Henny Louwers

Citrix released a Citrix client for the Windows Mobile Based devices. Supported Windows Mobiles versions are 6.0, 6.1 and 6.5.

Apparently Citrix starts off with version 11, guess they had like 10 internal versions before they released this one. I am an Apple iPhone user myself and I like the Citrix Receiver for iPhone since it’s (full) support for (all) Citrix Access Gateway Editions.

http://www.citrix.com/English/ss/downloads/details.asp?downloadId=1858162&productId=186&c1=sot2755

Henny Louwers

ITSOLUSENZ ‘s has designed Application Maintenance services with greater skills that aids you release the potential of your existing application and extract the best out of them. Our solution highlights the key issues like minimising Total Cost Ownership, toning-down applications depression times and making use of legacy systems without compromising on productivity or business operations. We have supreme and different applications intelligence which assures that your applications are maintained perfectly through offshore-ability analysis and maintainability analysis.

ITSOLUSENZ’s Application Enhancement services ensures application modernization and upgrade issue to boost business processes which are otherwise complicate or laborious to monitor and organise. We believe that enterprises require a regular refurbishing of applications to speed up business development and productivity. We enhance clients to manage and update such legacy systems, multiple technology platforms, rich maintenance costs, unsupportive systems, and integration problems through our flexible and valuable application maintenance and development deliverables. Identifying theft /threats, reducing the cost and mitigating risks, we enable clients enhance and maintain their legacy systems and organisation applications at minimised costs and immediate recovery-times.

We address metrics-driven approach and deliver solutions that are on parallel level with international standards. Our merits in Application Maintenance and enhancement services are We follow a metrics-driven approach and deliver solutions that are on par with international standards.

Met deze quote start het zeer actievolle filmpje van Citrix dat ons moet aanzetten dit jaar naar het Citrix iForum af te zakken.

Is het een gevaarlijke (IT) wereld?  Toch wel, als je er in de huidige omstandigheden niet in slaagt om je business en IT snel en efficiënt op elkaar afgestemd te houden, laat je gegarandeerd kansen liggen.

Op het iForum zullen onderwerpen aan bod komen als:

• hoe Application Delivery kosten kan verlagen
• hoe Security verbeteren
• hoe flexibiliteit in ICT verhogen
• wat zijn de nieuwste technologieën
• en nog veel meer…

RealDolmen is aanwezig op het Citrix iForum als technologie partner, dus schrijf je in en kom zeker eens met ons praten over welke gevaren u wakker houden…

A simple computer that marries the mind-boggling computing power of quantum mechanics with the ease of manipulating light is now a reality. A device, which has been built in a research laboratory, proves that a specific quirk of atoms, which lets scientists conduct huge computations almost instantly, can be perfectly mimicked by light, which is much more practical to control than individual atoms.

The result could be a computer that performs some tasks a billion times faster than today’s supercomputers, using relatively simple technology that’s already well understood.

The device mimics quantum interference, an important property that makes quantum computers exponentially faster at tasks such as breaking encryption codes or searching huge databases. Instead of interference, conventional computers use particles to perform tasks sequentially, like a librarian looking for a book by inspecting the entire library one volume at a time. Interference essentially allows you to make clones of that librarian—one librarian for every book—and set them all loose at once. The new device proves that using light interference is just as effective as quantum interference in retrieving items from a database.

To search the database, a beam of light is directed toward a modulator. The light is first split into two, with one part travelling through a prism so that a rainbow of different frequencies of light shines on the modulator. Each frequency shines through a different compressed or expanded part of the modulator, which bends that frequency of light the way a straw appears bent when sticking out of a glass of water. The rainbow of frequencies is then recombined into a single beam. By mixing the new beam with the original beam that entered the device, a single frequency will emerge as having been altered by its trip through the database.

If 50 different frequencies of light shine through the modulator, and if the 20th frequency is the altered one, then we know that the bit of information being searched for is located at position 20 in the database. A conventional computer would have had to check 20 times to find the location. If the database in question were the London phone book, the search for a single phone number could take a conventional computer several million searches, while a light-based device could pinpoint the number in just one.

What makes the device particularly attractive is that it is so simple in comparison to quantum computers. Engineers have had decades of experience precisely manipulating light and all the concepts in the device are based on well-known, 19th-century classical physics— although the technology to carry out the experiment only became available in the last 10 years.

This may change the way we store and access information on the future, but what practical use does this have to you now?

Well, it’s about harnessing the power of innovation. CIOs, CTOs, IT and MIS Directors all look at how their role affects the success of their business. Success involves combinations of creating competitive advantage and new business models, launching new products and entering lucrative markets. All of these require operational excellence but more than that real innovation.

Innovate or die is a mantra used by many business leaders, however for Information Technology it is essential.

At Hardware.com we understand that innovation is important, our technical teams in the networking world of Cisco, HP, Force10, F5, Juniper and Eaton understand the implications of hardware deployment in the areas of application delivery, data centre design, switch solutions, IP telephony, network security, routing and wireless solutions and not least power management.

Managing the network of today, creating business opportunities and innovating for the future – turning theory into reality.

Mark Cadbury

Marketing Director, Hardware.com

Microsoft heeft een tool uitgebracht om 2 of meerdere gevirtualiseerde Microsoft App-V 4.5 applicaties samen te laten praten namelijk de Application Virtualization Dynamic Suite Composition Tool. Dit was voorheen behoorlijk wat handwerk met de nodige trial en error om dit aan de praat te krijgen.

De daadwerkelijke tool bestaat uit een enkele executable (sftdynsuite.exe), er hoeft dus niks geinstalleerd te worden. Wanneer deze tool gestart wordt moet er een Package Root aangegeven worden, vervolgens selecteert men de primary package en een secondary package en geeft men aan of de package(s) dependent/mandatory van elkaar zijn. Hiermee wordt aangegeven dat de applicatie de andere applicatie nodig heeft om te kunnen functioneren.

Wanneer op ‘Save’ gedrukt wordt, zal de OSD file van de primary package worden overschreven. Van de bestaande OSD wordt een Backup gemaakt (.BAK). Na een save actie is het mogelijk terug te gaan naar de vorige configuratie door op ‘Restore’ te drukken.

Zo is het ook mogelijk om bestaande dependencies uit elkaar te halen. Wanneer de applicatie (.OSD) opgehaald wordt zal deze tool meteen weergeven welke dependencies er binnen de OSD file staan.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DAA898DF-455F-438A-AA2A-421F05894098&displaylang=en

Henny Louwers

Citrix heeft een nieuw produkt uitgebracht genaamd Portable Profiles. Dit produkt had in de betafase de naam Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM). User Profile Manager / Portable Profile is door Citrix overgenomen van Sepago om een gat binnen Citrix te vullen mbt het sneller laden/afmelden van Windows gebruikersprofielen. Citrix heeft krijgt vaak min of meer de ‘schuld’ gekregen voor het traag laden van gebruikersprofielen, echter is dit meer de schijn doordat Citrix de Windows logon schermen vervangt voor de Citrix logon schermen. Nu zijn er al  meer produkten op de markt welke deze problemen aanspreken, denk aan de Flex Profiling Kit, RES PowerFuse User Preferences, etc.

Binnen Citrix Portable Profiles is het niet noodzakelijk om gebruik te maken van een Mandatory Profile doordat Portable Profiles een profiel ‘inleest’ waarna deze niet meer is aan te passen. Dit versnelt het logon proces aanzienlijk gezien het feit deze de instellingen niet meer hoeft samen te voegen. Citrix noemt dit profiel een template profile. Sterker nog, Citrix Portable Profiles negeert Mandatory Profiles (ntuser.MAN).

Een ander voordeel van Citrix Portable Profiles is dat het mogelijk is om mappen te synchroniseren welke niet binnen de User Profile staan zoals C:\ProgramDir, laat het duidelijk zijn dat dit wel de nodige problemen kan veroorzaken.

Nu was lange tijd de vraag over hoe dit produkt gelicentieerd zal gaan worden. Het antwoord daarop is dat deze tool gratis te gebruiken is bij de aanschaf van Citrix XenApp Enterprise/Platinum en XenDesktop Advanced/Enterprise en Platinum editions. Hieruit blijkt weer dat Citrix erg graag de hogere versies aan de man brengt.

Meer info:
http://www.citrix.com/site/jumpPage.asp?pageID=1453077

Henny Louwers

I was reading the Wall Street Journal this morning and came across an interesting half-page ad in the Personal Journal section.  It stated simply, “Accelerating the business of innovation.”  They had a big head shot of John Hill CTO of Siemens IT Solutions and Services where he provided the quote around better return on capital investments, faster responsiveness to their customers, etc etc.  The one statement that Mr Hill made that resonated with me was, “freedom to focus on business innovation, not rudimentary IT plumbing.”  Perfectly stated Mr. Hill and I couldn’t agree more.

We have all seen, for many years now, that IT is working hard enough to just keep the lights on and not enough time on helping the business innovate, increase competitive advantage, etc.  The business depends on IT more than ever before and business executives do see the strategic importance of technology as core to their product and service strategy and central to their differentiation and competitive advantage.  But the rub here is that executives I’ve talked to are concerned about the ability of their IT organizations to support it.  Now that isn’t to say that some IT executives aren’t working hard to fulfill the business’ needs using all the tools and processes at their disposal, but……..

Here is where the ad got me to thinking.  This is where IT can get out of the vicious cycle that it finds itself in when it comes to the old standard, design-build-operate model that has plagued IT for years.  By using virtualization technologies like VMware and XenServer along with a solid application and desktop delivery infrastructure, and combine that with a new strategy of business technology, IT can make the transfomation to business enabler.

The technology of virtualization and application delivery speak for themselves and I’m not going to do a deep dive here, but these technologies need to be a key component of an IT Portfolio and IT needs to take steps to transform itself from Information Technology to Business Technology.  I’ll address how in another article.  Suffice it to say that IT executives cannot afford to maintain status quo.  They must replace standalone, product-oriented support functions through business-oriented services and focus the remaining IT organization on a proactive governance model of the company’s ecosystem.  Business-Technology-as-as-Service (BTaaS) is what needs to happen.  With the virtualization and application delivery infrastructures as the base of the BTaaS formula, IT can be that enabler.

I was reading the Wall Street Journal this morning and came across an interesting half-page ad in the Personal Journal section.  It stated simply, “Accelerating the business of innovation.”  They had a big head shot of John Hill CTO of Siemens IT Solutions and Services where he provided the quote around better return on capital investments, faster responsiveness to their customers, etc etc.  The one statement that Mr Hill made that resonated with me was, “freedom to focus on business innovation, not rudimentary IT plumbing.”  Perfectly stated Mr. Hill and I couldn’t agree more.

We have all seen, for many years now, that IT is working hard enough to just keep the lights on and not enough time on helping the business innovate, increase competitive advantage, etc.  The business depends on IT more than ever before and business executives do see the strategic importance of technology as core to their product and service strategy and central to their differentiation and competitive advantage.  But the rub here is that executives I’ve talked to are concerned about the ability of their IT organizations to support it.  Now that isn’t to say that some IT executives aren’t working hard to fulfill the business’ needs using all the tools and processes at their disposal, but……..

Here is where the ad got me to thinking.  This is where IT can get out of the vicious cycle that it finds itself in when it comes to the old standard, design-build-operate model that has plagued IT for years.  By using virtualization technologies like VMware and XenServer along with a solid application and desktop delivery infrastructure, and combine that with a new strategy of business technology, IT can make the transfomation to business enabler.

The technology of virtualization and application delivery speak for themselves and I’m not going to do a deep dive here, but these technologies need to be a key component of an IT Portfolio and IT needs to take steps to transform itself from Information Technology to Business Technology.  I’ll address how in another article.  Suffice it to say that IT executives cannot afford to maintain status quo.  They must replace standalone, product-oriented support functions through business-oriented services and focus the remaining IT organization on a proactive governance model of the company’s ecosystem.  Business-Technology-as-as-Service (BTaaS) is what needs to happen.  With the virtualization and application delivery infrastructures as the base of the BTaaS formula, IT can be that enabler.

Ik zie veel Terminal Server/Citrix omgevingen waar gebruik gemaakt wordt van RES PowerFuse 8 (2008) Enterprise Edition waar User Preferences helaas niet gebruikt wordt. Dit is een stukje over User Preferences van RES PowerFuse en waarom het handig is deze altijd toe te passen als je de beschikking hebt over een dergelijk software pakket. Ik noem in dit stukje even RES PowerFuse maar dit zou ook Citrix Profile Manager zijn of de Profile Hiving oplossing van AppSense.

Velen van jullie zullen ongetwijfeld weten dat dit een krachtig stuk software is welke volledig (lees: het meeste) rendement behaalt icm het gebruik van Mandatory Profiles (read-only profiles), ik wil graag onder de aandracht brengen dat het ook erg behulpzaam kan zijn binnen een omgeving waar gebruik gemaakt wordt van zogenaamde Roaming User Profiles.

Een klein stukje terminologie:

- Roaming User Profiles: Profielen welke volledig door gebruikers aan te passen zijn en weggeschreven worden naar een gedeelde map, wanneer een gebruiker aanlogd op een andere werkplek/Terminal Server wordt het profiel gedownload en toegepast;

- Mandatory User Profiles: Profielen welke zeer klein en read-only zijn (en dus snel laden), wanneer een gebruiker aanpassingen maakt binnen dit profiel worden deze verwijderd wanneer deze gebruiker afmeldt;

- Flex Profiling: Dit wordt beschouwd als ‘best of both worlds’, gebruikers laden een Mandatory Profile echter blijven instellingen bewaard (op de gebruikers home drive of aparte (hidden) drive mapping) van applicaties waar dit voor ingesteld wordt. Wanneer het Mandatory Profile geladen is worden de zogenaamde flex gedeeltes geladen. Hetzelfde proces vindt plaats bij het afmeldenwaarbij de flex gedeeltes weggeschreven worden voor de gebruiker afmeld.

Met name Systeembeheerders willen pas als laatste redmiddel het gebruikersprofiel verwijderen om een bepaalde problemen te verhelpen. Dit omdat het zoveel gedoe is om de gebruikersinstellingen weer te herstellen. Wanneer er echter gebruik gemaakt wordt van User Preferences wordt de drempel voor het verwijderen van het gebruikersprofiel aanzienlijk verlaagd. Dit zorgt er dus voor dat de tijd om uit te zoeken waar een probleem zich voordoet aanzienlijk verkort wordt en dat het verwijderen van het gebruikersprofiel één van de eerste akties wordt ipv één van de laatste.

Zou het nou noodzakelijk zijn om gebruikersinstellingen te herstellen kan er simpelweg gekeken worden naar welk GUID toegekend is voor de specifieke User Preference item (In ons voorbeeld de Favorieten):

Deze GUID is terug te vinden in de vorm van de bestandsnaam voor de specifieke instellingen op de gebruikers home drive. Zou een gebruiker dus bijvoorbeeld zijn Favorieten van een eerdere datum teruggezet wil hebben is het een kwestie van het betreffende GUID bestand te herstellen van backup.

Binnen de meeste Terminal Server omgevingen is het ook gebruikelijk wanneer een gebruiker afmeldt het lokale profiel van de gebruiker te verwijderen zodat de Terminal Server ‘schoon’ blijft. Er zijn bepaalde applicaties welke de instellingen wegschrijven in de ‘Local Settings\Application Data’ folder binnen een gebruikersprofiel, deze gaan verloren wanneer de gebruiker afmeld en het lokale profiel verwijderd wordt. Denk hierbij aan RSS instellingen, Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon instellingen, deze zijn dus ook dmv RES PowerFuse User Preferences eenvoudig te bewaren.

De meeste IT medewerkers zullen ongetwijfeld bekend zijn met het scenario waarbij er teveel te doen is en te weinig tijd of te weinig collega’s om problemen (structureel) op te kunnen pakken. RES PowerFuse User Preferences zorgt ervoor dat er weer een stukje tijd teruggewonnen wordt welke weer ergens anders voor gebruikt kan worden. Deze oplossing kan op jaarbasis veel tijd schelen voor de IT medewerkers op de vloer.

On November 19th and 20th, one of our solutions partner Victrix will be hosting seminars on how both Elfiq and Citrix products can be used to strenghten application delivery.  For more information please click here.

For the ones doing the designing of Citrix Architectures Daniel Feller has posted new Visio Stencils for the new Citrix Product Line:

We all know, people like pictures!

Henny Louwers

Shannon Ma is bezig met het ontwikkelen van een nieuwe tool voor het ‘preppen’ van XenApp Servers. Het werkt hetzelfde als Sysprep voor Windows alleen dan voor al je XenApp onderdelen. Huray voor de luiaarden onder ons! Ik en anderen met mij hebben dit natuurlijk al eens gedaan in de vorm van een Kix script, op de een of andere manier blijf ik het toch vrijwel altijd met de hand doen.

http://shannonma.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/cloning-a-xenapp-server-with-xenappprep/

Henny Louwers

Do you remember the end of the last post in this series?  I stated that “even chairmen have to seduce, cajole, and convince to get things done”?  It is so true if you want to accomplish your goal of getting application delivery and/or virtualization discussions to the highest levels of your company.  What I’m going to talk about and what you need to do is build a coalition.

By building a coalition you take your individual authority and you transform it into a collective authority.  The people in your company that will try to knock you down and dismiss you will have a tougher time doing so if you have that collective authority.  My initiatives within HP, I took the time to build the right coalition of management outside my normal “chain of command”.  The few dozen folks that I had put together changed a corporate direction.  The fact that we were organized and we were speaking from conviction was a powerful message to the upper layers of managment and the C-level folks.

Another reason to build a coalition was that my endeavor, like most, didn’t fit neatly into any of the existing organizational “boxes”.  The Citrix environments that were inside the company crossed many business unit boundaries and I need a broad cross-section to make sure that I got my Point of View and “Manifesto/proposal” into the right folks.  I think the folks that I had brought into my little revolution shared the same revolutionary tendencies that I did no matter wherever their current organizational home was.  My mentor took a look at the group that I had put together and he told me that it looked like an ink blot that had bled all over the formal org chart.  He was right.

Another thing that my mentor told me was that I wasn’t the only frustrated, visionary in the company.  This was so true.  I was quickly finding that I wasn’t the only that “got it”.  So how did I find these other revolutionaries?  I asked myself, “who was in my immediate vicinity that I had already been talking to about my ideas?”  Here is what else I looked at:

• were there any staff groups or teams in the company that might be inclined toward my point of view?
• were there any cross-company initiatives that I wasn’t aware of that I could tap into?
• who (across the company) might have a stake in the success of my endeavor?
• were there any internal newsgroups or e-mail distribution lists I could hijack?

Here are some other things that I did. 

• Since Sharepoint sites were easy to put up, I started a Sharepoint site where I could post my “manifesto/proposal”. 
• I started to build an email list of some of the people that I thought would share my views. 
• I created an online forum to where others could share their perspectives and help me to fine-tune my “manifesto/proposal”. 
• I identified some outside experts at our partner, Citrix, that could lend the cause credibility. 
• I created opportunities to work together with the people of my network on some ad hoc projects that I would pull in.

Let me tell you this fact, coalitions get stronger when they focus on a common task.  I looked for other involvement opportunities.  I went to the yearly partner-only conference for Citrix partners, Citrix Summit, and spent quality time with my HP colleagues.

Take this one piece of advice.  Stay underground for a while, at least initially.  Use your network of people to build and strengthen your business case and identify opportunities for early wins.  I saw first hand that as people within my network started to talk to others in their immediate vicinity, the “virus” of my point of view started to spread.  Remember to not get impatient.  If I were to map the curve of my endeavor, it was flat at first and then as the network of people I started to spread the virus we soared.  By that time we started to get the attention of top managment.  With that, don’t be too quick to present your top management with a “go/no go” decision.  I remember this thing my grandfather used to tell me when I was younger and we would go hunting on his farm; “it’s easy to shoot one pheasant out of the sky, but it’s harder to bring down a flock”.  I took that statement to heart, I kept on building my “flock” of people that were thinking the way I was.

As I close this section of the series, let me share with you this little tidbit of information that I learned.  You, like I, have an advantage that top management often doesn’t.  Most of the people that report to them are forced to think like them and don’t think about anything else then what they are told to think about.  These type of people fight to stay alive in corporate life.  People that I put together and you put together fight to win.  Continue to build your coalition and inspire the other revolutionaries in the company.  If you build strength from below, top management will ultimately come to you.  I guarantee that.

In the next part in this series, I’m going to talk about finding the right person in your organization that can say yes and make it stick.

So in the last post I showed you the first few pictures that I draw during my conversations with folks that either want to know “why application delivery” or for folks that have an application delivery infrastructure, but are only doing XenApp.  The next steps here are to now tell the story of “delivery” instead of “deployment”.  At this level of conversation we are wrapping in Citrix technologies like, Provisioning Server, XenDesktop, XenServer, XenApp, etc.  At the end of this conversation the one thing that you want to get from your management would be the buy-in to get an assessment done.  That way you can make sure that you have a holistic view of your infrastructure and in the case of an already existing environment you aren’t carrying over any problems from the old to the new.

The one thing I want to point out here is that you need a good sized whiteboard.  I like to keep all the drawings on the board so that everyone can see the progression of the discussion.  What you will also find along the way here is that your audience is going to ask a lot of questions.  This is what I love about whiteboarding.  It really gets folks engaged and talking.  You’ll be amazed at how easy the ideas and feedback will flow when you get going.

So this is the point in the conversation that I evolve the conversation into the “delivery” section.  This is really where it starts to get cool.  I start by writing the word “DELIVERY” and drawing this picture but first without the words in the boxes.  So just leave the boxes blank for now:

 So in order to drive the point home about getting out the “old way” of doing things (distributed computing) to more of a delivery architecture the above picture points out a few things.  First, to centralize as many of the applications and desktops as possible, with as few standard images as possible close to your datacenter.  From there you deliver these dynamically, on-demand to end users.

So once you have the picture above and you talk about centralizing and delivering apps and desktops from a central location, explain what you mean.  How?  Easy.  In the first box closer to the “application icon” you will write in “App WL” for “application workload”.  Explain to your audience that what you now have is a standard catalog with a “master” image of all of your application workloads (Exchange, SAP, SQL, etc) that can be delivered dynamically to either your physical or virtual servers.  Of course, I’ll tell you to virtualize as many servers as possible, but by following this thought the rest of the way through you now have a very highly efficient datacenter, even for those servers you can’t virtualize.  Make sense? 

The next box you are going to write in “App UI” for “application user interface”.  For Windows apps this will be the delivery mechanism will be XenApp.  So from here you can either be “virtualized” on the server or streamed to the client and virtualized there for mobile and offline users.  For the web applications your delivery mechanism needs to ensure that the applications are optimized for best perfomance, security, and efficiency.  This delivery mechanism would be NetScaler.  You can better illustrate that concept by drawing a line across the App UI box and on the top of the line writing Win and on the bottom writing Web.

The next box you will label Desktop.  Here is where I love explaining the beauty of Provisioning Server, XenDesktop, and XenServer.  The whole goal here is to separate the delivery of applications and desktops.  By just moving the desktops into the datacenter with all of its application hard-coded in we don’t solve any problems.  My best practice way to do this is to deliver a pristine XP or Vista desktop and then delivery the applications into that desktop from separate application delivery controllers.  You benefit from two things here: 

1. you eliminate compatibility problems
2. you create a more stable, high performance environment

Finally you will draw an arrow to a box labeled “PC” next to the user icon on the previous drawing.  This now illustrates the “delivery network” that will be optimized to deliver apps and desktops to any user around the world in the most efficient manner possible.

The next thing here is to talk about management and “orchestration” of workflows with the necessary tools.  The tool to create those workflows is the Citrix Workflow Studio that I highlighted in an earlier post.  Integrating the individual management consoles for the different components of this type of solution with what you might already have in place from HP, IBM, Microsoft, etc.  You can illustrate that by adding the already existing picture you drew like this:

 Citrix Workflow Studio will allow you to “orchestrate” communications between all the different Citrix products more easily and will make it easier to integrate into your exisitng systems management solutions.

So now you have made your case and management has bought in.  You now need the next steps.  The next steps involve what I like to call a “design discovery”.  You could also call this an Infrastructure Assessment.  Your local partner should be able to help you with this or you can engage Citrix Consulting Services to do this for you.  Why do you want to do an assessment?  This gives you a chance to understand the strengths of your current application delivery environment, the risks and opportunities inherent in your current application delivery approach, how your company strategic goals map to a new approach to application delivery and to roadmap the delivery of applications for both the short-term and the long-term.

I hope this has helped you better formulate a way to get more buy-in from management to expand or implement an application delivery infrastructure.

Let me know your thoughts.

First, let me preface this post by saying that I despise Powerpoint.  Not that I’m against Office, just Powerpoint for presentations. Why? they aren’t engaging, no one remembers more than 20% of the information in those anyway, and if I just wanted them to read something I would have sent an email.  I work to engage people in an interactive dialog when I talk about application delivery and virtualization.

I want to share with you the kind of conversations that I have at every initial meeting with potential clients and even clients that already have an application delivery infrastructure.    The reason for doing this is to help you to build your case to your management team for expanding Citrix Application Delivery in your environments sans Powerpoint like I do when I’m in front of a client.  I’m a big fan of using pictures to share my ideas, thoughts, and to solve problems and I’m going to share with you how I do that for application delivery and virtualization.  Check out one of the greatest books on this subject by Dan Roam.

I have many versions of my whiteboard conversation depending on the level of meeting I’m having (CIO, Network Architect, Desktop Operations, etc) but they all start pretty much the same way, I ask questions.  Before I stand up to draw anything I’m asking questions around priorities, challenges with apps not meeting metrics, etc.  Now I would expect that since you are on the inside of your organization you wouldn’t have to do as much discovery as I do, so build upon what you know and do your due diligence.

I’m going to start at the beginning of my whiteboard so for those of you who don’t have an application delivery infrastructure you can see how you get started.  For those of you who have an application delivery infrastructure and you want to expand it, this will show you where to start and go from there.

 The one thing that is true and constant in today’s environments is that business runs on applications.  When access to or perfomance of applications is compromised, top and bottom line results are affected.  We know that for our companies to be successful, we must ensure that the business’s applications are accessibile, reliable, secure and fast.  This is where I draw an easy picture:

 As we all know our companies are facing some pretty strong forces that are separating users and applications.  These forces are dynamic and very volatile.  They increase the challenge of ensuring users can use the applicatios they need when they need them.  Then I draw this picture:

So what are those forces that are driving users and applications apart?  They range on the user side from globalization to e-commerce and on the application side from consolidation to new application types like .NET/Web 2.0/Java etc.

The way we have built infrastructures in the past are no longer viable models today.  They are too rigid and don’t adapt well to rapid-fire changes in the business world.  One common experience among the majority of clients I talk to is that when they want to make applications available to end users they encounter multiple levels of complexity.  To get the application rolled out they have to engage the server group (who are worried about power and datacenter space), the network group (who are always thinking about bandwidth and traffic), the security group (who are always thinking about the risks and the vulnerabilities), the systems management group (who try to make it all fit together), and finally the desktop group (who is ultimately responsible for supporting the clients).  This is what we call “distributed computing”.  This siloed approach is easy to organize people by their technical disciplines, but it seriously makes things harder to get done in today’s fast moving world.  So while I explain that last piece I draw this picture:

So as you can see by the line labled “silos” through the Servers box, this is what we are talking about above.  An unintended consequence of incremental investment in these fucntional silos is that your infrastructure becomes too hard to change.  What you have then is an infrastructure that lacks scalability and it’s inflexible.  It is also costly to implement and maintain and finally changes to this kind of infrastructure or the applications can cause unplanned consequences in this now weak environment.  In the end, you might have solved the issue at that point in time, but your infrastructure is still so rigid that it can’t change fast enough to meet the business needs.  I can tell you from first hand experience that trying to optimize every silo I outlined earlier will never increase your company’s agility.  As you can see I have a down arrow drawn and labeled it Agility and I have an up arrow that is labeled TCO.  That TCO number represents per user costs.  Making changes in the current environment requires additional investment.

Ok, so I showed you where the majority of folks are at, now you have to visualize how to pictorialize your environment in as simple pictures as possible.  In the next post I’ll show you how to take this part to your management and really “sell” the idea of application delivery to them and the rest of your company.

Thank you Vinny Sosa and thank you to Gus Pinto for bringing this post back into the light.  I was just working with a client where having this information at quick glance would have been very beneficial.  I’m putting this on a sheet and laminating it.

Application Performance Monitoring (powered by Citrix EdgeSight)

• EdgeSight Agent to Edgesight Server – TCP 80/443 (Payload and alerts)
• EdgeSight Web console (non-IMA) to RSCorSvc on EdgeSight Agent – TCP 9035
• EdgeSight Agent internal communication – TCP 9036 (client-side database)
• EdgeSight database – SQL 1433 (configurable)

Client-side Application Virtualization -

• Streaming Client to Application Hub (File Server/Share) – SMB 445

EasyCall

• To client – HTTP(S)-TCP 8443 (PSync)
• To Admin console (non-IMA) – TCP 443
• To LDAP Directory- TCP 389
• To PBX – port varies by vendor

Independent Management Architecture (IMA) Services – TCP 2512, 2513

Licensing Service – TCP 27000, 27009 (configurable)

Server-side Application Virtualization

• Management Console (Using IMA) – TCP 2512, 2513
• Application requests – TCP XML 80, 8080 or 443 (configurable)
• Access to Applications Virtualized on the Server – ICA-TCP 1494, 2598 (Session Reliability)

Single Sign-on (powered by Citrix Password Manager)

• Management Console (non-IMA) or Agent to Password Manager Service – TCP-443
• Management Console (non-IMA), Agent or Service to credential store
  • Network File Share Credential Store – TCP/UDP 445 (CIFS) or TCP/UDP 135-139 (NetBIOS)
  • Active Directory Credential Store – TCP/UDP – 389, 636, TCP – 3268, 3269
  • Novell File Share Credential Store – TCP/UDP – 524  

SmartAccess (powered by Citrix Access Gateway)

• Standard and Advanced Edition
  • Client connections- TCP-SSL 443 (configurable)
  • Advanced Access Control (AAC) to Appliance communication – TCP 80 or 443 (configurable), 9001, 9002, 9005
  • Management Console
    • to Appliance (non-IMA) – 9001, 9002, 9005
    • to AAC – IMA-TCP-2513
    • Enterprise Edition
    • To client – SSL-TCP 443
    • To internal network – SSL-TCP 443, Native Authentication port (i.e. RADIUS 1812, LDAP 389), Native application ports (i.e. ICA-1494)
    • Management console (non-IMA) – SSH-TCP 22, HTTP(S)-TCP 80/443

SmartAuditor

• Management (non-IMA) – Use local console on Agent or on Server.
• Agent to Broker (Recording and Policy Check) – TCP 80/443 (configurable)
• Player to Broker – TCP 80/443 (configurable)
• Agent to Server (Metadata and Video)- Microsoft Message Queuing,
  • Default – TCP: 1801; RPC: 135, 2101*, 2103*, 2105*; UDP: 3527, 1801 (*These port numbers may be incremented by 11 if the initia choice of RPC port is being used when Message Queuing initializes. A connecting QM queries port 135 to discover the 2xxx ports.)
  • Over SSL- TCP 80,443

WAN Optimizer -Guidance provided was to get it from Admin Guide

• Appliance to Appliance – Pass-through native application port (e.g. ICA-1494, HTTP-80, LDAP-389)
• Management Console (non-IMA) – TCP 80
• Client to Appliance – TCP 443

Web Interface

• Client connections – TCP 80/443 (configurable)
• Server-to-server – TCP XML 80/8080, 443 (using SSL Relay)

Management console (partially IMA) – DCOM 135 (+ configurable high port range), IMA-TCP 2513, TCP 80/443

“These are the times that try men’s souls.  The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”  Like I said in the last post on this topic, I’m a history buff and this is what George Washington ordered to have read to his men at Valley Forge on Christmas Eve, shortly before crossing the Delaware.  These are Thomas Paine’s words and again like I stated previously his most famous work, Common Sense was the manifesto for the American Revolution.

In order to build your revolution for bringing application delivery and virtualization into a business transforming strategy you too need to write a “manifesto”/proposal.  It’s not enough to just have a Point of View; you have to be able to pass it on, to be contagious and infect others with your ideas.

This “manifesto”/proposal should do the following:

• demonstrate the inevitability of the business and technology shift – here’s why it is right, right now.
• speak to timeless business needs – here’s why you should care.
• draw clear implications for action – here’s where to start.
• gain support – here’s how you can contribute

Every single day I’m sure you hear people inside your organizations who complain and moan about what the company should be doing.  But I will guarantee that the number of people that actually ever take the trouble to write a well-reasoned ”call to arms” is extremely low.

As I stated above you need to treat your efforts and your “manifesto”/proposal as a virus.  What I mean is, what can you do to make it even more infectious?  Here is what I did for my efforts inside HP.

• I looked for what my mentor called “data mines”.  What he meant was things that will “explode” when they are read.  I looked for the hard facts that challenged ingrained mindsets and created urgency.  I won’t share intimate details here but suffice it to say there was a very large number of disparate environents around the world that were setup and licensed costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars.  When I added this little “data mine” in the “manifesto”/proposal, I got a response.
• Stay constructive.  Don’t criticize. Don’t rehearse past failures.  Don’t look for culprits.  I was very honest in that these disparate environments that were put up for whatever reason were done out of desparation.  There was no formal process or procedure in place that would allow them to do what they needed to do.  I stated that this had to end and this is why.
• Next I provided broad recommendations, but I made sure not to argue for a single, do-or-die course of action.  This is my suggestion to you, remember that you are launching a campaign that will need to go forward on several fronts.  Stay flexible.
• Keep your “manifesto”/proposal short.  My “manifesto”/proposal was 4 pages.  A 60-page whitepaper isn’t a “manifesto”, it’s a consultant’s report, and it will NEVER EVER get read.  My 4-page document was passed around so many times it was like the piece of cartoon baggage with all the stickers on it.  I had a distribution list in an email so long that I had to scroll for 3 or 4 seconds to get to the last person’s name.
• My “manifesto”/proposal was opportunity focused.  Yours should be the same.  It’s more likely to get read and passed around if it focuses on the upside rather than the downside.  Ask yourself, “where the big win?”  I showed management what the ultimate architecture would look like, how it would work, how much it would save in real dollars and in time saved in the way that applications were being delivered at the time.

Another guarantee that I’ll make you; you will hear dozens of reasons for not doing something.  I can tell you also, from firsthand experience, when timid, backward-looking people go scrambling for an escape hatch, BOLT IT SHUT.  This will happen so be prepared.  Here are some of the things that were thrown around during my efforts:

• We don’t have the skills to do this My bolt in the door was, “we can get them and here is how we do it”.
• We don’t have the bandwidth to deal with this right now.  My bolt in the door, was “we have no choice.  Here’s what we should stop doing.”

I had to build a case for my intellectual authority in this endeavor and you will have to as well.  The depth of my analysis and the quality of my thinking, along with the clarity of my reasoning had to come out on every page of my “manifesto”/proposal.  I also had to make sure that it was in the best interests of the organization.  You need to be sure that your “manifesto”/proposal does not contain anything that would suggest your motivation is selfish.  Even though you are passionate about the technology you need to make sure that you don’t come across as some “product champion” trying to get your widget built, or some corporate wonk trying feverishly to defend a budget.  When it comes to making you into a revolutionary you can’t afford to be sectarian or narrow-minded if you want to change the way your organization thinks and does things.

Here’s another little history lesson to help you see my point on this.  Martin Luther King spoke for African-Americans, but he called upon all Americans to embrace justice and equality.  Unlike Malcolm X, Martin Luther King was inclusive rather than exclusive.  He understood that America could never live up to its promise if it relegated some to a permanent state of despair.

In the next post in this series I’ll delve into the reasons why you need to build a coalition.  Even chairmen have to seduce, convince, and cajole to get things done and so will you.

Read “Are you a revolutionary in your company? Part One” here.

Here is a great video from Mark Templeton, President and CEO, Citrix, where he discusses how Citrix has moved its business in new directions. 

Check it our here. 

During my recent keynote presentation at the Association of Information Technology Professionals, I spoke about how to develop a strategy around virtualization and application delivery. I said, “I’m sure we can all agree that we work in a new world of business and IT. Things are changing so fast that the old, decrepit business models that most companies still have in place are struggling to adapt. The folks in IT that work in the technologies like virtualization (and I use that term very broadly) and application delivery are the people that are the seers of the future, but yet we sometimes feel isolated and impotent.” To expound upon that statement I can safely say that most of the folks I spoke to don’t know where to begin in building a movement to bring what we know to be solid technology and a true enabler of business agility to a wider audience. I’m going to share some thoughts and insight from my experiences of being a revolutionary and a visionary.

I stated that “virtualization” technologies are a radical departure from the way things were done in the past and a very disruptive set of technologies. Change is something that most fear, for many diverse reasons. We’ve all heard many every senior executives claim to “embrace change” and every CEO has preached that “change is the only constant”. So why is it so hard for us to get the attention needed to make virtualization and application delivery the de facto standards and the leading strategies to accomplish the business’s goals?

The first step here is to have a “point of view” or POV. By having a very well articulated POV you can argue against any precedent. During my days at HP I created the POV that Citrix was the technology that could be used to centralize application delivery and control runaway costs. My point of view was considered “rogue” at times, but it was a beacon of sorts, something that gained support and allegiance from the highest levels of management.

I learned early on from my mentor that a POV needs to meet four criteria: it must be credible, coherent, compelling and commercial. To be credible it must be based upon hard and fast data. I had very high aspirations for my viewpoint, but it needed a true foundation in fact. My ‘flag waving and strong rhetoric wasn’t enough. I had to dig deep and wade into an ocean of data. I spent six months with Citrix Customer Care gathering data on licensing costs and just as much time analyzing the environments around the world that were setup for 10, 20, or 30 users. I was building a strong understanding of what was going on inside the company that no one else had paid attention to.

Your POV must be “coherent”. The pieces of your point must fit together and be mutually reinforcing. As I stated in the previous paragraph, I was considered rogue for a while, and this is where my point of view was being dissected from the management perspective. They were looking for any and every inconsistency in my story. Here is where my mentor told me, “logic lapses are not allowed Michael, you don’t need to have perfect clarity, but there is no place for muddied thinking.” That has stood out in my head for the past 4 years. I can tell you that you will not get a second chance to make that impression to management and passion is no substitute for a coherent point of view.

As much as I would like to stick to “just the facts ma’am”, I had to also garner more support from my peers and superiors, to do that I had to speak to their hearts as well as their intellect. I was ready to share with anyone why my cause would make a difference in the way the company would conduct business, make application rollouts more efficient, and save a large amount of money over time. I made my point into a story of what happens if we don’t alter the way that we deliver applications, build out infrastructures and license these environments.

So I pose to you this question, “what makes your POV truly worthwhile?” If you want your company to do something, your POV must be commercial as well as compelling. If you can’t describe how it will save costs, increase productivity, etc you won’t get far.

I can tell you from experience that you will lose many battles in the process of winning the war. Don’t get discouraged or lose faith. Your POV will sustain you and provide a sense of courage from which to draw upon. My mentor told me that, “if you are going to fish, use a big hook. Setbacks are inevitable. Just know that you have a good cause – one that is in tune with what is going on in the industry and is inherently worthwhile, and more importantly will help your company stay relevant in the “age of revolution.”

In my next post, I’ll cover the next step which is to write your own manifesto. I’m not talking anything like Lenin, but something that will infect others with your ideas. I’m a history buff and one person that comes to mind that personifies what I’m trying to say here is Thomas Paine. Paine’s most famous work, Common Sense was the manifesto for the American Revolution. You need to be like Thomas Paine and write your own manifesto. It doesn’t have to be long, but it has to be contagious. Stay tuned for the next post in this series.