EdgeSight 5.4 and Issues
I've spent the week studying for the CCA for XA 6.5, it's going okay. There's a fair bit of stuff that falls under the "xenapp" umbrella. I need to review the exam blueprint again to make sure I've covered off all the parts that are going to be assessed.
At work my Edgesight 5.4 rollout at work has hit some issues.
We currently have no published application reporting coming from Edgesight. The agents are definitely seeing the SEMS data (from which published application reporting is generated) but for some reason are not recording it. The issue has been escalated to Citrix Support but we have yet to come to a resolution, they aren't able to reproduce it the lab and I have limited leeway in which to conducting 'live' testing on a customer production farm so progress is slow.
On top of that, there also appears to be an issue with the Edgesight for VDA agent. When you configure a custom alert to poll for system performance data, and you set the poll interval at 10 minutes or higher, the alert never triggers.. ever. Poll intervals of smaller than 10 minutes appear to work fine. That's also with Citrix support, at least with this issue they have been able to reproduce it in their lab so we're just waiting for them to get back to us with a fix now.
I should be ready to site the 1Y0-A20 in a few weeks, yay..
Also, no F1 this weekend, booooo
a nice weekend
So that was a pretty good weekend. Got my CCA for XenDesktop 5, watched Arsenal smash Aston Villa, and the rain soaked Malaysian GP was fantastic.
I couch potoato'd it up like a boss!~
Melbourne GP
Jenson won the Melbourne GP in a very Jensonish manner. Safety car late in the piece took it from rather boring to sort of interesting, but he lead the race from first corner to finish and nobody really got close enough to him to put him under any pressure.
Best moment had to be Kimi complaining about blue flags over the radio and then being told they weren't for him. Oh Kimi..
Looking forward to seeing how the pace of the cars develop. The Mclarens look seriously fast, the Red Bulls are quick, but don't have the clear handling advantage they had last year, and the Mercedes look like they may be seriously challenging for podium finishes this year.
Should be a good year!
Did I Just… ?
Have you ever had one of those moments where you are working remotely on a system that could impact overall network connectivity, then midway through whatever it is that you are doing, your remote session drops out?
Yeah... I damn near just had a heart attack. I spent most of tonight patching XenApp servers in preparation for a large Edgesight rollout. During the early stages, while I was patching the data collectors, my remote session dropped and wouldn't reconnect. My first thought was 'dear god I broke the farm', but thankfully it was just my router being a piece of crap and rebooting for no reason.
Another odd discovery tonight was that our two load balanced web interfaces are configured differently. Not sure why that would have been done - it just doesn't make much sense - but it did cause me some confusion while testing data collector elections post patching. If the netscaler balanced my initial connection to the second WI and the first preferred data collector was offline, it wouldn't find the second one because it didn't have it listed, giving me no Xenapp applications. The first WI doesn't have this problem as it has both data collectors in its list.
I might look at bootstrapping the WIs to use a config file from one of the file clusters..
Arsenal 2 – 1 Newcastle
YAY!
The team actually showed some of that "mental strength" that Arsene loves to talk so much about.
95th minute winner, what are we, Man Utd?!
VMWare Lab – Planning
So I'm currently looking at putting in a fully featured VMWare vSphere Lab at home. I've been fiddling around with a something like this inside VMWare workstation for some time now, using virtual ESXi 5 hosts and while it has been educational, the inability to use 64bit VMs inside the virtual hosts - among with many other limitations - has been frustrating.
So now I'm in the planning stages of getting new hardware to build a full home lab.
ESXi Hosts:
- Shuttle SH67H7
- Intel i7 2600
- 2x Geil EVO Corsa Series DDR3 2x8GB
- Intel Gigabit ET Dual Port Gigabit
- SanDisk Cruzer Fit 4GB
Storage Host
- Intel i3 2100
- Gigabyte GA Z68P-DS3
- 8GB of DDR3 (already have)
- Case/PSU (Lian Li 2000-something, whatever PSU is in it)
- Intel Gigabit ET Dual Port Gigabit
- 4x WD Caviar Black 1.5TB
This storage host will be running Server 2008 R2 and the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target to provide shared storage to the hosts. After messing around a bit with OpenFiler and FreeNAS, it turns out the MS software target is the easiest to set up.
The Shuttle boxes turn out to be a rather cost efficient way of whiteboxing hosts. Since they include the case, PSU and motherboard in one package, you end up saving a few dollars. They come in a small physical form factor which is useful for those of us who don't live in mcmansions with dedicated home server rooms/basements.
Using the part list above and buying 2 ESXi hosts will cost somewhere around $3000 AUD. If I had a spare box lying around I'd turn that into the storage host. Unfortunately I gave my last retired box to my parents to use as a media PC so I'll probably have to buy a new one.
I'll also need another switch of some sort. I might try scrounge something being retired from work or off ebay.
Anyway, this is still in its planning stage as I work out exactly what I need and how much it will cost. I'll post a final item list when I actually bite the bullet and order it all.
XenDesktop 5 Study – Part 1
Identifying Pre-installation Requirements
Determine the requirements for the SQL (controller) database based on a description of an environment.
Supported Databases:
- SQL Server 2008 R2
- SQL Server 2008 R2 Express (Default for Quick Deploy)
- SQL Server 2008 SP1 or later
HA Approaches
- SQL Mirroring
- Hypervisor HA
- SQL Clustering
Determine desktop storage requirements based on a given environment
5000 Unmanaged Desktops will use approximately 40MB of DB space.
5000 Provisioned (MCS) Desktops will use approximately 59MB of DB space
5000 Desktops can generate approximately 8GB of transaction logs in 24 hours. Recommend using simple backups or frequent full backups for DB maintenance.
Based on a described environment or requirements, determine the optimal write cache location
Device Hard Drive - Stores the write cache on the target device's hard drive. Removes resources load from the Provisioning Server.
Device Hard Drive Persistent - Same as Device Hard Drive, but persists between reboots.
Device RAM - Puts the write cache in the target device RAM, very fast, but may be limited space.
Server Disk - Writes the cache back to the Provisioning Server, puts heavy I/O and network load on the server (this is the default setting for vDisks).
Server Disk Persistent - As above, but persists between reboots. All persistent files are invalidated if the master vDisk is changed.
Based on a description of an environment, determine the number of controllers and/or Provisioning services servers required for a XenDesktop environment
Rules for XenDesktop Controllers:
- N+1 Always ensure there is extra (controller) capacity in event of failure.
- 125-180 Desktop Registration per dedicated CPU Core
- 100-120 Logins per minute per dedicated CPU Core
2 Controller VMs with: 2x vCPU, 4GB of RAM providing Provsioning Services powered desktops can handle 2500 Desktops with an average launch and logon operation of 2.5 seconds.
Assumes resources, especially SQL, are not overcommitted.
Provisioning Services (5.6 SP1)
- Minimum spec is: 2GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM, 100Mbit NIC, Server 2003 SP2.
- Recommended: 3.5GHz DualCore/HT or higher, 4GB or higher, Dual 1GB NIC
- Virtual Provisioning Servers are supported
- Virtual Provisioning Server with 4vCPU, 40GB of RAM and a 10GB NIC can support 1500+ target devices per server with write cache on target device.