Citrix have released a new version of Personal vDisk for XenDesktop/VDI-in-a-box with huge new improvements.

Whats new in Citrix Personal vDisk 5.6.5

Personal vDisk v5.6.5 provides a redesigned filter driver that improves overall application compatibility.  This release also removes the need for an assigned drive letter for the app space (currently the V: drive) and offers dynamic free space balance between the apps and profile space on the user’s personal vDisk. This release reduces the PvD generated CPU overhead by 44%.

Source

Download Citrix Personal vDisk 5.6.6 here (require MyCitrix id)

Citrix have released a new version of Profile Management 4.1.1, this release have lots of issues fixed and now it supports vDisk to XenDesktop + more.

What is Citrix Profile Management 4.x

Profile management ensures that the user’s personal settings are applied to the user’s virtual desktop and applications, regardless of the location and end point device with best reliability and performance.

Profile management is enabled through a profile optimization service that provides an easy, reliable way for managing these settings in Windows environments to ensure a consistent experience by maintaining a single profile that follows the user. It auto-consolidates and optimizes user profiles to minimize management and storage requirements and requires minimal administration, support and infrastructure, while providing users with improved logon and logout.

Profile management is available as a feature of XenApp Enterprise and Platinum editions and XenDesktop VDI, Enterprise and Platinum editions. Customer entitlement to use this feature is based on Subscription Advantage as outlined in the EULA. Download usage rights of Profile management on previous versions of XenApp and XenDesktop are allowed per the terms of the EULA. Download is extended to Presentation Server 4.5 (Enterprise or Platinum editions) and XenDesktop 4.0 (VDI, Enterprise and Platinum editions).  Please refer to the EULA as the final authority of usage rights.

What’s New in Profile Management 4.1

This version includes issues fixed since Version 4.0 was released. For the list of fixed issues, see CTX124164. In addition, this version includes the following new key features:

• Support for personal vDisk – This XenDesktop feature is a personalization solution for pooled-static virtual desktops. If the feature is enabled, XenDesktop adjusts the Profile management configuration so that profile data is written to and read from the personal vDisk.
• Group Policy enhancement – Profile management comes with an .admx file that contains all of the same settings as the .adm file, which is still supplied. For more information on .admx files, see your Group Policy documentation.
• Simplified default inclusions and exclusions – The list of files and folders that are included in and excluded from Profile management processing has been revised to support some newer, commonly used applications. For example, the generic exclusions for Local Settings or AppData\Local in previous versions are replaced with lower-level, more specific exclusions by default.

Source

Download Citrix Profile Management 4.1.1 here (require MyCitrix id)

Citrix have released a new version of Citrix Receiver for Android 3.1

What’s New

This article is a must read, if you are building a demo environment with hardware, where you have limited storage capacity.

My scenario is, I am building a new demo environment with 2 IBM servers that have 2 SATA-3 drives in each server, i want to virtualize the servers with Citrix XenServer so i can build a Virtual Demo Lab. Citrix XenServer identify both harddrives and i can choose to install the xenserver on 1 of the drives. XenServer installs smooth as always, after installation i connect with XenCenter to my Citrix XenServer and in XenCenter i only see 1 Local Storage and not 2 Local Storage.

My intention was to run the XenServer on first harddrive and all the VM’s on the second harddrive.

Summary

This article describes how to add a second harddrive as a local storage to XenServer.

Requirements

Adding new hard-drive in XenServer is a bit different from the traditional Linux process. For XenServer, you need to create a container called a ‘storage repository’ to define a particular storage target (such as a hard disk), in which Virtual Disk Images (VDIs) of VMs are stored. A VDI is nothing but an abstracted storage space which acts as the hard-disk for VMs.

Xen storage repository supports IDE, SATA, SCSI and SAS drives  when locally connected, apart from iSCSI, NFS, SAS and fiber channel in case of a remote storage.

Procedure

Steps to create an SR in a XenServer.

1. SSH to the XenServer as root or use XenCenter Console.
2. Find the disk ID of the new device using the following commands:

# cat /proc/partitions

You will see list of all the HDDs and partitions. Find which device is your new local disk. This is probably “sdx”(most probably sdb) or “/cciss/c0d1p0”.

# ll /dev/disk/by-id

This command will list the disk ids for all the partitions/HDDs present in the server as shown in the image below.

Find the disk ID of the “sdx” or “cciss/c0d1”disk. The “scsi-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx” or “cciss-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”format is what you need.

3. Find out the ‘host-uuid’ in the XenServer using the following command:

#xe host-list

The uuid (RO) is the ‘host-uuid’  you need.

4.Create a Storage Repository (SR):

# xe sr-create content-type=user device-config:device=/dev/disk/by-id/<scsi-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> host-uuid=<host-uuid> name-label=”Local Storage 2” shared=false type=lvm

- Or -

# xe sr-create content-type=user device-config:device=/dev/disk/by-id/<cciss-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> host-uuid=<host-uuid> name-label=”Local Storage 2” shared=false type=lvm

- Or -

# xe sr-create content-type=user device-config:device=/dev/<sdx> host-uuid=<host-uuid> name-label=”Local Storage 2” shared=false type=lvm

You can verify it from XenCenter with the following steps:

1. Connect to the XenCenter.
2. Go to the ‘Storage tab’. You will find the details of all storage repositories here. You can see the storage ‘Local Storage2′ in the list.

This signifies that the disk has been added successfully. Now, you can start creating VM’s on it.

Summary

This article describes the steps for upgrading to vSphere 5 in a Citrix Provisioning environment.

This applies to Provisioning Services version 5.6/5.6SP1/6/6.1 and VMware vSphere 5.x

Requirements

Procedure

Source