Support  |  News & Events  |  Blog  |  About  |  Help  

Category Archives: Provisioning Services

Why Not Amazon Web Services?

April 24, 2014 10:39 am ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Thinking about moving to Amazon Web Services? Address these 4 Concerns FIRST

We’ve been hearing a lot of debate recently about using Amazon Web Services for all or part of a cloud infrastructure. Many people sing their praises whole-heartedly, and we here at VirtualQube have even explored their offerings to see if there was an opportunity to bend our own cost curve. But there really is a mixed bag of benefits and features. How do you know if the move is right for you? We’ve narrowed it down to 4 concerns you should address in light of your own circumstances before making the move.

1. Business impact

First of all, let’s analyze the business model for AWS. Amazon rents out virtual machines for a reasonable price per desktop. But in order to get their best price, you have to pony up 36 months of service fees in advance to rent the space. If you’re an enterprise with three years of IT budget available, this is a great deal. If not, take a closer look.

The pricing from AWS also assumes that virtual machines will be spinning-down 40% of the day. If your workforce mostly logs in within an 8:30am – 6:00pm time frame, you will greatly benefit from this pricing. If your employees have much more flexibility in their schedules (due to travel, seasonal workload spikes, or shifting hours for coverage), then you may need to look at another provider.

AWS also allows for 1GB of data to flow into their cloud for free, and only charges for the outflow of data. This is great for storage if you only use it sparingly, or in the case of a disaster, but can add-up quickly if you need to access your data frequently. While this doesn’t seem to be a concern now, as businesses exchange more and larger files, the cost of this pricing model could quickly outweigh the benefits.

2. Operations impact

The operational capabilities of Amazon truly are world-class. However, to achieve scale and offer its best price/experience the lowest cost of operations, AWS has one set way of operating and its customers are required to interact with AWS in this one way alone. So AWS may not offer the flexibility that would make it easy for you to add services to your existing operations.

If your firm fits AWS’s standard use case, it could lead to an easy transition, but if you have unique requirements, the friction caused with your organization could quickly lead to discord, operational changes, and many other business costs while trying to fit the mold AWS promotes.

3. Technology impact

The technology benefit of AWS is really second-to-none. Their infrastructure has the best hardware and capabilities offered by any of the cloud vendors. The efficiencies of scale mean you can get access to best-of-breed hardware faster than you would otherwise. The only caveat is this could give you a false sense of security.

How we approach business is to think of all the things that CAN go wrong, because many times they eventually do. We coach our customers to prepare for the times when technology will fail. And fail it will. We have consistently seen multi-million dollar technology fail unpredictably, even in hundred million dollar installations. These cases are NOT supposed to happen, and may not happen frequently, but they will happen. And if the failure impacts your business, it doesn’t matter how expensive the underlying technology is. And when the technology does fail, will you be able to get a senior engineer on the phone to immediately address your concerns?

4. Flexibility impact

The ability for AWS to match your business needs during hyper-growth and/or significant volatility could make the business case alone. With AWS’s web interface, your internal technology leader can order additional computing capabilities and they will be ready as soon as you hit “Enter.” The days of placing hardware into a room, hooking up cables, creating and testing images are truly over for all cloud users, and AWS does shorten the timeline for creating these technologies from minutes to seconds. Companies with significant growth who are doubling or tripling in size within a year many years in a row are a perfect match for AWS. No question.

Your final decision…

To sum it all up: AWS works well for you if:

  • You have a scale of operations and support for tens of thousands of users
  • There is three years of IT spend on the balance sheet and it can be invested today
  • You are a typical player in your industry, which fits AWS’s definition of your industry
  • Your IT needs to meet business demands that fluctuate exponentially, immediately, and unpredictably
  • You take advantage of some advanced features for business continuity

For an more in-depth discussion on this topic, check out this: LINK. For an in-depth cost analysis, check out this: LINK. Please note, you will have to be a Citrix Service Partner to access the cost analysis.

 

Posted in: Best Practices, Cloud Computing, Disaster Recovery, Education, Mobile Computing, Provisioning Services

IntelliCache and the IOPS Problem

May 20, 2011 4:21 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you know that we’ve written extensively about XenDesktop, and spent a lot of time on best practices and problems to avoid. And one of the biggest problems to avoid is poor storage design resulting in poor VDI performance.

In a nutshell, the problem is that a Windows desktop OS uses disk far differently than a Windows server OS. Thanks to the way Windows uses the swap file, disk writes outnumber disk reads by about 2 to 1. You can build your virtual desktop infrastructure on the latest and greatest server hardware, with tons of processing power and insanely huge amounts of RAM, but if all of the disk I/O for all of those virtual desktops is hitting your SAN, you’ve got a scalability problem on your hands.

Provisioning Services (“PVS”) can help to mitigate this in two ways (assuming for sake of argument that you’re provisioning multiple virtual systems from a common, read-only image): First, if you build your Provisioning Servers correctly, you should be able to serve up most of the OS read operations from the Provisioning Server’s own cache memory. Second, you can use the virtualization host’s local disk storage as the required “write cache” - because all of those write operations have to go somewhere while the virtual system is running.

But XenDesktop 5 introduced a new way to provision desktops called “Machine Creation Services” (“MCS”). We wrote about this in the April edition of our Moose Views newsletter, so if you’re not familiar with all the pros and cons of MCS vs. PVS, I’d encourage you to take a brief time out and read that article. Suffice it to say that, despite all the advantages of MCS, the biggest downside of using MCS to provision pooled desktops was that all of the IOPS hit your SAN storage, which limited the scalability of an MCS-provisioned VDI deployment.

But all of that just changed, with the release of XenDesktop 5 Service Pack 1, which was made available for download a week ago (May 13). With SP1, XenDesktop 5 is now able to take advantage of the “IntelliCache” feature that was introduced as part of XenServer v5.6 Service Pack 2. Using MCS with the combination of XenDesktop 5 SP1 and XenServer SP2…

  • The first time a virtual desktop is booted on a given XenServer, the boot image is cached on that XenServer’s local storage.
  • Subsequent virtual desktops booted on that same XenServer will boot and run from that locally cached image.
  • You can use the XenServer’s local storage for the write cache as well.

The bottom line is that you can move as much as 90% of the IOPS off of the SAN and onto local XenServer storage, removing nearly all of the scalability limitations from an MCS-provisioned environment.

With most of the IOPS for running VMs taking place on local storage, it’s pretty straightforward to figure out how many VMs you can expect to support on a given virtualization host. Dan Feller’s blog post does a great job of walking through the process of calculating the functional IOPS that your local XenServer storage repository should be able to support, and inferring from that number how many light, normal, or power users you should be able to support as a result.

This also means that using XenServer as the hypervisor for your XenDesktop 5 deployment is going to yield a significant performance advantage over any other hypervisor, unless or until the other guys come out with similar local caching features. So, if you’re a VMware shop, my advice is this: Go ahead and virtualize all of the supporting XenDesktop server components on your VSphere infrastructure. Run your XenDesktop 5 VMs on XenServer hosts, and just don’t tell anyone! If you’re asked, just say, “Oh, yeah, these are my XenDesktop host systems - they’re completely separate from our VSphere infrastructure, because we don’t need the (insert favorite VSphere feature) function for these systems.” Your infrastructure will run better, and no one will know but you…

Posted in: Best Practices, Citrix, Provisioning Services, VDI, Virtualization, VMware, XenDesktop ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Top Ten VDI Mistakes (According to Dan Feller)

May 13, 2011 10:20 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

Dan Feller is a Lead Architect with the Citrix Consulting group, and has written extensively about XenDesktop. We found his series on the top ten mistakes people make when implementing desktop virtualization to be quite enlightening. In case you missed it, we thought we’d share his “top ten” list here, with links to the individual posts. We would highly recommend that you take the time to read through the series in its entirety:

#10 - Not calculating user bandwidth requirements
Back in the “good old days” of MetaFrame, when we didn’t particularly care about 3D graphics, multimedia content, etc., we could get by with roughly 20 Kbps of network bandwidth per user session. That’s not going to cut it for a virtualized desktop, for a number of reasons that Dan outlines in his blog post. He provides the following estimates for the average bandwidth required both with and without the presence of a pair of Citrix Branch Repeaters (which have some secret sauce that is specifically designed to accelerate Citrix traffic) between the client device and the virtual desktop session:

Parameter XenDesktop Bandwidth without Branch Repeater XenDesktop Bandwidth with Branch Repeater
Office Productivity Apps 43 Kbps 31 Kbps
Internet 85 Kbps 38 Kbps
Printing 553 - 593 Kbps 155 - 180 Kbps
Flash Video (with HDX redirection) 174 Kbps 128 Kbps
Standard WMV Video (with HDX redirection) 464 Kbps 148 Kbps
HD WMV Video (with HDX redirection) 1812 Kbps 206 Kbps

NOTE: These are estimates - your mileage may vary!

One thing that should come across loud and clear from the table above is what a huge difference the Citrix Branch Repeater can make in your bandwidth utilization. And as we’ve always said: you only buy hardware once – bandwidth costs go on forever!

#9 - Not considering the user profile
It should go without saying that user profiles are important. But if it’s number 9 on the list of things people most often screw up, then apparently it doesn’t. In a nutshell: If you mess up the users’ profiles, the users won’t be happy – logon/logoff performance will suffer, settings (including personalization) will be lost. If the users aren’t happy, they will be extremely vocal about it, and your VDI deployment will fail for lack of user buy-in and support. There are some great tools available for managing user profiles, including the Citrix Profile Manager, and the AppSense Environment Manager. AppSense can even maintain a consistent user experience across platforms – making sure that the user profile is the same regardless of whether the user is logged onto a Windows XP system, a Windows 7 System, or a Windows Server 2008 R2-based XenApp server.

Do yourself a favor and make sure you understand what your users’ profile requirements are, then investigate the available tools and plan accordingly.

#8 - Lack of an application virtualization strategy
How many applications are actually deployed in your organization? Do you even know? Are the versions consistent across all users? Which users use which applications? You have to understand the application landscape before you can decide how you’re going to deploy applications in your new virtualized desktop environment.

You have three basic choices on how to deliver apps:

  1. You can install every application into a single desktop image. That means that whenever an application changes, you have to change your base image, and do regression testing to make sure that the new or changed application didn’t break something else.
  2. You can create multiple desktop images with different application sets in each image, depending on the needs of your different user groups. Now if an application changes, you may have to change and do regression testing on multiple images. It’s worth noting that many organizations have been taking this approach in managing PC desktop images for years…but part of the promise of desktop virtualization is that, if done correctly, you can break out of that cycle. But to do that, you must…
  3. Remove the applications from the desktop image and deliver them some other way: either by running them on a XenApp server, or by streaming the application using either the native XenApp streaming technology or Microsoft’s App-V (or some other streaming technology of your choice).

Ultimately, you may end up with a mixed approach, where some core applications that everyone uses are installed in the desktop image, and the rest are virtualized. But, once again, it’s critical to first understand the application landscape within your organization, and then plan (and test) carefully to determine the best application delivery approach.

#7 - Improper resource allocation
Quoting Dan: “Like me, many users only consume a fraction of their total potential desktop computing power, which makes desktop virtualization extremely attractive. By sharing the resources between all users, the overall amount of required resources is reduced. However, there is a fine line between maximizing the number of users a single server can support and providing the user with a good virtual desktop computing experience.”

This post provides some great guidelines on how to optimize the environment, depending on the underlying hypervisor you’re planning to use.

#6 - Protection from Anti-Virus (as well as protection from viruses)
If you are provisioning desktops from a shared read-only image (e.g., Citrix Provisioning Services), then any virus infection will go away when the virtual PC is rebooted, because changes to the base image – including the virus – are discarded by design. But you still need AV protection, because the virus can use the interval between infection and reboot to propagate itself to other systems. The gotcha here is that the AV software itself can cause serious performance issues if it is not configured properly. Dan provides a great outline in this post for how to approach AV protection in a virtual desktop environment.

#5 - Managing the incoming storm
In most organizations, the majority of users arrive and start logging into their desktops at approximately the same time. What you don’t want is dozens, or hundreds, of virtual desktops trying to start up simultaneously, because it will hammer your virtualization environment. There are some very specific things you need to do to survive the “boot storm,” and Dan outlines them in this post.

#4 - Not optimizing the virtual desktop image
Dan provides several tips on things you should do to optimize your desktop image for the virtual environment. He also has specific sections on his blog that deal with recommended optimizations for Windows 7.

#3 - Not spending your cache wisely
Specifically, we’re talking about configuring the system cache on your Provisioning Server appropriately, depending on the OS and amount of RAM in your Provisioning Server, and the type of storage repository you’re using for your vDisk(s).

#2 - Using VDI defaults
Default settings are great for getting a small Proof of Concept up and running quickly. But as you scale up your VDI environment, there are a number of things you should do. If you ignore them, performance will suffer, which means that users will be upset, which means that your VDI project is more likely to fail.

#1 - Improper storage design
This shouldn’t be a surprise, because we’ve written about this before, and even linked to a Citrix TV video of Dan discussing this very thing as part of developing a reference architecture for an SMB (under 500 desktops) deployment. We’re talking here about how to calculate the “functional IOPS” available from a given storage system, and what that means in relation to the number of IOPS a typical user will need at boot time, logon time, working hours (which will vary depending on the users themselves), and logoff time.

Just to round things out, Dan also tossed in a few “honorable mentions,” like the improper use of NIC teaming or not optimizing the NIC configuration in Provisioning Servers, trying to provision images to hardware with mismatched hardware device drivers (generally not an issue if you’re provisioning into a virtual environment), and failing to have a good business reason for launching a VDI project in the first place.

Again, this post was intended to whet your appetite by giving you enough information that you’ll want to read through Dan’s individual “top ten” posts. We would heartily recommend that you do that - you’ll probably learn a lot. (We certainly did!)

Posted in: Application Virtualization, Best Practices, Branch Repeater, Citrix, Provisioning Services, Storage, VDI, Virtualization, XenDesktop ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Citrix Fixes the Provisioning Services - KMS Problem!

November 17, 2010 12:24 pm ⋅ 7 Comments ⋅

This is big news for anyone who wants to use XenDesktop to facilitate a Windows 7 migration. Here’s why: It only takes a moment’s thought to realize that if your desktop virtualization project simply trades inexpensive desktop SATA storage for expensive data center SAN storage, it’s not going to do good things for your ROI. So provisioning your virtual desktops from a shared Standard Image is a must. And that’s what Provisioning Services (“PVS”) allows you to do. If your standard Windows 7 OS image is, say, 15 Gb, you only need one instance of it on your SAN regardless of how many virtual PCs you’re provisioning from it. Then, using the Citrix Profile Management tool in conjunction with standard Group Policy folder redirection techniques, you can merge user personalization at logon time.

There was only one problem…turning a Win7 vDisk into a Standard Image broke the Microsoft license key. The only way around that was to use Key Management Services (KMS) to auto-activate systems as they were provisioned, but there were problems in using KMS with PVS, as we’ve documented in earlier posts.

I am happy to report that the problem has been addressed in PVS v5.6, SP1, which is now available for download at the Citrix download site. Not only that, but PVS v5.6, SP1, also works with a Multiple Activation Key (MAK) for smaller environments where KMS is not justified. Here’s the difference between the two activation methods:

KMS is a service that runs on a server in your own network. It supports Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2, Vista, Win7, and Office 2010. However, it requires a minimum number of systems checking in for activation before any systems will be activated. That threshold is 8 systems for server activation, and 25 systems for workstation activation. Prior to SP1, systems provisioned from a Standard Image looked to the KMS server like the same system checking in again and again, so the threshold counter didn’t increment. SP1 fixes that. Please note, however, that you must be running KMS on a 2008 R2 server if you want virtual machines to increment the threshold counter.

With an MAK, the activation server is hosted at Microsoft. The MAK is a reusable key that’s good for a predefined number of activations. With SP1, PVS will cache the activation confirmation code for each system, so they will automatically reactivate on subsequent reboots.

Here is the configuration process, straight from Citrix. First of all, the Imaging Wizard allows you to choose which activation method you’re going to use:

PVS Imaging Wizard

Choosing the Activation Method

Once you’ve chosen either KMS or MAK, here are the next steps:

KMS Activation

  • Reset the activation status on the vDisk image:
    • Boot the master target device from vDisk in Private Image mode
    • Run slmgr.vbs -rearm in console on master target device
    • Shut-down master target device
  • Put disk in Standard Image mode and stream. Target devices will automatically register with KMS server, and activate (provided there are at least 25 systems checking in).

MAK Activation

  • Put disk in Standard Image mode and stream.
  • Use “Manage MAK Activations” to remotely activate streamed target devices. This is done only once per group of devices.
  • Provisioning Services will cache activation confirmation code for each device so that devices will automatically reactivate on subsequent reboots.

Kudos to the Citrix PVS development team for getting this done and out the door. Great job!

Posted in: Citrix, Licensing, Microsoft, Provisioning Services, VDI, Virtualization, Windows 7, XenDesktop ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , , ,

More on Provisioning Services and KMS

August 17, 2010 5:19 pm ⋅ 7 Comments ⋅

Last fall, we posted about Citrix Provisioning Services and Microsoft KMS activation. To briefly recap, here’s the issue:

  • When you convert a Windows 7 OS image to a shared image for provisioning, it breaks the Microsoft license key.
  • The way you deal with that is to use Microsoft’s Key Management Services (KMS) to auto-activate systems as they boot.
  • A KMS server must have a minimum number of systems checking in for activation before it will activate anything (5 different server systems must check in before it will begin activating servers, and an aggregate of 25 servers and/or workstations must check in before it will begin activating workstations.)
  • If your KMS server is running on Windows Server 2008 R2, both physical and virtual systems will increment the counter. If it’s running on an earlier server version, only physical systems will increment the counter.

In the comment thread of that earlier post, “Chris” stated that he was trying to use Provisioning Server to provision Windows 7 systems, but that they were not incrementing the counter on the KMS server. It turns out that he was absolutely right, and I thought this was important enough to bump the issue by writing another post rather than just going back and commenting on the older one.

It turns out that, although Provisioning Server changes the host name as systems boot, it does not change the machine ID (“CMID”). And, unfortunately, the CMID is what a KMS server looks at to determine whether a machine that’s checking in is a new one that hasn’t previously checked in. Therefore, all of your provisioned Windows 7 systems will look to the KMS server like the same system checking in over and over again, and will not continue to increment the threshold counter.

According to a blog post by Thomas Koetzing a couple of weeks ago, Citrix has told him that this will be fixed in the next release of Provisioning Services, scheduled for sometime in Q4.

Frankly, I’m pretty disappointed by this whole issue. Windows 7 has been out now for almost a year. The big push by both Citrix and Microsoft is that XenDesktop is a great way to roll out Windows 7. Provisioning Services is a must for any significant VDI deployment, because otherwise you eat up far too much of your expensive SAN storage. But yet we’re still stuck in a situation where we can’t use Provisioning Services to provision Windows 7 unless we have at least 25 physical systems checking in with our KMS server for activation. In my opinion, there is no excuse for this issue not being addressed long ago…particularly when it’s been a known issue since the release of Windows Vista.

I did find a workaround described by Kirk Kosinski in a Citrix forum post:

What I did was create a VM with VL media, sysprep and power off, convert to a template, then deploy the template 25 times and boot each VM once (a few required a reboot before contacting the KMS for whatever reason). My KMS server could then activate clients successfully, at least for a while… the activation count will decrease over time if the machine doesn’t contact the KMS server, so you will periodically need to redo this process.

The VMs don’t have to join the domain to activate so you don’t need a complicated sysprep script, just make sure to not include any license key in the script…

This strikes me as a bit of a pain, particularly when you’ve got to do it every six months or so to keep your systems alive, but it should at least work until Citrix and Microsoft get this sorted out.

Posted in: Citrix, Licensing, Microsoft, Provisioning Services, VDI, Virtualization, XenDesktop ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , , ,