Application Virtualisation is not a new technology, yet many companies are not using it. By placing an applictaion in a ‘bubble’ you can run, for example, different version of Microsoft Office on the same PC wihtout any problems – effectively because the application isn’t actually installed.
For the purposes of this article I wanted to see how easy it would be to ‘profile’ (or package) Microsoft Office 2010 for streaming using XenApp 6.5, including configuring offline access.
I’m currently working out a suitable design for a System Center 2012 Configuration Manager deployment. One of the first things that you need to decide is your site hierarchy, specifically should you implement a Central Administration Site (CAS) with Primary Site(s) model or simply a Primary Site with Secondray Site(s) model. You may be one of the ‘lucky’ few where your design is simple and will always remain so!
Having looked into this, and event tested both in a lab I thought I’d share my opinion and experiences, one thing I should make clear at this point in time – there is no single reason for considering whether or not to use a Central Administration Site, in fact sometimes there are political or business reasons to adopt this model regardless of any technical requirements.
You may have noticed that when you deploy site roles to System Center 2012 Configuration Manager servers that more often than not content is distributed across one or more drives. In Configuration Manager 2012 you can configure the drives that are used by some roles, such as the Distribution Point, during deployment. There is however a simple alternative; for every dive you do not want to contain Configuration Manager files (note that WDS will still choose whatever drive it wants when you enable PXE, unless you install and configure before hand!) create a file in the root of that drive named NO_SMS_ON_DRIVE.SMS as illustrated below:
Note When Vyatta Core got discontinued, a group of its users who wanted to keep using it forked the last available source code to start VyOS. See more here: https://vyos.io/
I’ve just moved the Vyatta device I deployed previously on Hyper-V to an ESXi environment. Initially all appeared well however yesterday I started to get some strange issues when accessing resources that were on a different subnet and thus passing through the Vyatta router.I did some simple copy paste tests and locally, in the same subnet, I was getting ~100 MB/sec, cross-subnet I was getting…wait for it… 15 KB/sec!
On further investigation the Vyatta device had ‘Flexible’ NIC’s instead of ‘vmxnet3’ NIC’s. On changing these NIC’s and reconfiguring the Vyatta device, including NAT rules, followed by a reboot I’m now getting 100MB/sec+.
I’m working on an odd issue at the moment with System Center ConfigMgr 2012 RTM. I have a Primary Site and a Secondary Site, the Secondary Site is PXE enabled however PXE boot isn’t working, clients are getting the following error: PXE E-53 No boot filename Received
With NetScaler VPX 10 now released I thought I’d upgrade the HA pair I’ve configured for the recent articles on the site.
Needless to say the pocess is fairly quick and fairly simple, click the jump to read more.
Following the XenApp 6.5 deployment in my previous article I thought I’d detail how to configure Access Gateway for Storefront 1.1, I’ll also leverage the Load Balancer I configured in a previous article so essentially users will be able to login remotely using Access Gateway, then be Load Balanced by the NetScaler to an appropriate StoreFront Server on your internal network.
This article assumes you have deployed the NetScaler Appliance (instructions here) and configured basic Network Settings including a DNS Nameserver.
In this article I’ll cover setup of an internal NetScaler VPX Load Balancer for Storefront 1.1. Note that this configuration will also work with Storefront 1.0, just the Storefront MMC snap-in doesn’t work as-of the 1st April this year!
Use the following article to install and configure Storefront for internal use first.
In this article I’ll briefly cover the deployment of XenApp 6.5 alongside the Citrix Licensing Server configuration, this is very much geared towards an article that I’m working on at the moment for Citrix Access Gateway (NetScaler VPX based) configuration for Storefront 1.1 and also Local Balancing Storefornt via the NetScaler VPX appliance.
I’ve come across an issues with a Configuration Manager 2012 deployment where an ESXi 4.1 VM configured with an E1000 NIC will Crash / Hang at Boot just as Windows PE loads the GUI. The boot gets stuck on “Windows is Starting Up.” I’m unable to do anything other that hard-reset the VM.