Working as a consultant and evangelist in the EUC space, I’ve always had a keen interest in monitoring and validation of user performance metrics. I’ll be honest though, after over a decade working in this market, it was really hard to find excitement or passion in this market. Monitoring was really just Monitoring and the flavours were similar at best!

While reviewing the market back in 2014 for a Citrix Partner, I selected ControlUp as the preferred solution for many reasons; since then, joining the ControlUp Advisory board and deploying the solution with customers, my passion for the product has really grown.

With ControlUp, administrators get what they need; tools to do their job, realtime visibility, and of course reports for the management types. In addition, with ControlUp’s truly unique, cloud based analytics and reporting approach with “ControlUp Insights“, the potential for this product is phenomenal.

In short, ControlUp is the management, monitoring and reporting tool I wish I had when I worked in administration!

Going forward, I’m delighted to announce I’ve entered into a part time agreement with ControlUp to work closely with the team, evangelizing that promise I saw in the product back in 2014, providing input on future versions and using the platform to provide interesting insights in blog posts and script based actions for the community.

This work has already begun with the PVS health check report Script based action, the Application Layering product comparison, XenDesktop 7.9 MCS IO feature overview and a new set of Script Based Actions based on deep process IO and Network usage I’m ironing the creases out of coming in the next few weeks.

Next week, I’ll be at E2EVC Dublin doing my thing with ControlUp, I hope you’ll pop by and say hi if you’re there!

Despite enabling Gallery access on the MDX App settings, for some reason on Android access to the upload from device page was being blocked when “document Exchange (open in)” was set to restricted.

If you lifted this restriction, all worked well. but Nobody wants that.

Anywho, with much pain and wandering around the Google Android Developer documentation, the following exception list allows you to restrict the App successfully while still allowing access to local files for upload.

{action=android.speech.tts.engine.CHECK_TTS_DATA}{action=android.app.action.SET_NEW_PASSWORD}{action=android.app.action.START_ENCRYPTION}{action=android.intent.action.GET_CONTENT}{action=android.intent.action.PICK}{action=android.intent.action.CHOOSER}{action=android.intent.action.OPEN_DOCUMENT}{action=android.intent.action.RINGTONE_PICKER}{action=android.intent.action.DIAL}{action=android.intent.action.MAIN}{action=android.media.action.IMAGE_CAPTURE}{action=android.provider.MediaStore.RECORD_SOUND}{action=android.media.action.VIDEO_CAPTURE}[action=android.intent.category.APP_GALLERY}

C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Citrix\StorageCenter\cifs\AppSettingsRelease.config

Add the following line the config:

<add key="disable-folder-permission-verification" value="1" />

Once added, recycle the StorageCenterAppPool in IIS as below: I have it on strong authority this will be resolved in a future build, but no promises. A big thank you to Dan Brinkmann, George Christophi and Citrix Support for this fix.

After creating an AppDisk, it got a little stuck. I tried deleting the task and AppDisk but the disk just seemed to be stuck in the “creating” phase indefinately.

To remove it, I had to do the following in Powershell from a delivery controller:

ASNP Citrix*
get-applibtask -active $true

Once i had identified the TaskID, i ran:

Stop-AppLibTask -TaskId 5be48afc-263b-454e-b3e9-5a2db6b966ff
remove-AppLibTask -TaskId 5be48afc-263b-454e-b3e9-5a2db6b966ff

Now just one last thing to do!

get-applibappdisk and find the entry in the “creating” state:Now finish with a:

remove-AppLibAppDisk -AppDiskUid d54681d3-6d0a-4259-b3ee-b90a899033bd

using the DiskUid that you saw in the previous get-applibappdisk command.

Thats it!

Update:

if you find that the machine you usually use to capture app disks is no longer available. use the following command to release it:

set-BrokerMachine -IsReserved $false -MachineName <MachineName>

PS: I could have piped a lot of that, sure! but my mac pipe symbol is currently out of action so i did it the hard way. if you are the type who reads others blogs and leaves comments to improve the scripting, I’m sure there are new people on the Microsoft forums you could be bawking at right now.

During another Great E2EVC Conference, my friend Ronnie Hamilton and I presented a session on the greatness of Netscaler Insight and we planned to share the following presentation afterwards as there were a number of sizing recommendations and figures that didn’t lend themselves to a presentation!

In this presentation you’ll find the following topics:

• What is Netscaler Insight.
• Demo of insight data natively from Insight manager.
• What’s it available in (licensing).
• Deploying Insight in 5 minutes.
• Integrating it into director.
• How can it be deployed.
• What’s new in version 11.
• Netscaler Sizing Considerations.
• Insight Manager Sizing considerations.

Download link.

A big thank you to Ronnie and E2EVC for the great trip. See you soon!

But as always I figured I’d share this feature in case anyone else needs it.

So RDP files encrypt a password in a very specific way and details online are cagey.This is something I set about doing myself and I’m happy to annouce I’ve included it in the following Free Powershell module for your use!

The module is very simple:

Importing the module:

Import-module RDS.Password.dll

Converting a string to a password:

Get-RDPPassword -Password "SomethingSecure"

This will give you an rdp password, pre formatted for an rdp file.

Optionally, you can include -ToClipboard to copy the text to the clipboard for easy copy -> paste into an RDP file.

Get-RDPPassword -Password "SomethingSecure" -ToClipboard

And that’s it, simply import the module and off you go.

If there is anything further you want to do with this, i.e. providing an RDP file to enter it into, accepting PSCredential as an argument or anything like that, get in contact and we’ll see what we can do!

Consent:

This module is provided absolutely free of charge, using this module in a commercial product on the other hand is not condoned!

Also, don’t ask me to reverse it, i’m not going to do it.

Download:

Here:

As one who still remembers (and has the scars) from those dreaded tape restore days to off site locations. I remember spending 72 hours + trying to restore machines to different hardware, struggle with different tape drive manufacturers and trying to find the right tape!  I jumped ship from sys admin long ago and moved to EUC, avoiding the backup market like the plague in later years so I really was a fresh set of eyes to this age old conundrum.

Recently I stumbled across Altaro VM backup as part of my usual day to day readings and my interest was piqued. Withstanding that as a home lab owner and a hypervisor snob I really only run vSphere and Hyper-V was normally not something I enjoyed working with… I got talking to a nice gentleman from Altaro and I was invited to join the closed beta for vSphere.

For those unfamiliar, Altaro recently released Altaro VM backup v6 with added support for vSphere. With this release and support for my beloved vSphere, I spun up an instance of Altaro, ditched the manual and decided to “have a go” to see if I could do it.

Installation:

The installation was a no brainer, I simply downloaded the software, ran the installation and opened the console. It was quick enough to not go for a coffee, which is good or bad depending on your mood at that time of the day.

Using the console:

(dashboard overview)

The Console reminds me a lot of Nutanix Prism for it’s simplicity and pleasing design. It’s completely wizard driven and in 6-7 steps From plugging in my hypervisors (vSphere, stand alone ESXi hosts or Hyper-V), to setting a backup location (local disk, removable disk, Nas, network share, etc.), to configuring a schedule took just minutes.

The console also has a great feature where you can manage multiple connections from a single console without feeling like you’re losing functionality.

Using the product:

 (Seed to disk example)

Altaro have made this dead simple. You have two storage types of choice and you can use multiple repositories for each type. Offsite and Onsite. As mine was just a lab, onsite made sense, but the ability to ship stuff offsite when required sounds like a great option. When bandwidth is limited to offsite, you can even “seed to disk” as depicted above and move it manually off site to save precious bandwidth. Super clever technology!

As this is VM based, I expected some hang ups on restoring VM contents. But Altaro have included a number of granular restores such as file and mailbox restores directly in the console. Nice touch. Altaro VM backup can also leverage VSS for “Application consistent” backups, this I was not expecting from a VM backup product and is very clever for when you need to leverage Microsoft VSS technologies.

(Granular file restore wizard)

Once configured, I decided to test a VM backup, a granular file restore and a VM restore. Restorations are very flexible, choosing the target host, network connectivity and restored device name. Wonderful approach and thought behind this process, it did what I wanted it to do in seconds. Happy with my progress I added a few virtual machines, set the backup schedule and wandered off back to whatever I was doing before and left it alone for a few weeks.

Support when you need it:

Until one faithful day last weekend my Citrix XenDesktop delivery infrastructure went kaboom.  I was performing my XenDesktop 7.6 upgrades to feature pack 3 (as you do when you’ve a home lab and like that kind of thing) and my storefront infrastructure decided not to uninstall or install. It decide to break and I couldn’t fix it. With the built in verification process in the product, I could quickly check that the backups were “OK” but something else was amiss….

I’ll be honest, as a developer and consultant, I use my lab every day, for tinkering, testing, Microsoft Visio and other such activities. Not having my lab on Monday morning was not an option I wished to think about. In my mild panic I remembered I had meant to review a backup product, I wondered if it was still working?

To my joy, it was working! It had taken a backup of the environment just last night and I set about performing a restore, but I had an issue.

Those rage inducing days in the datacenter were back, I had a backup? but I couldn’t restore!

But this is where Altaro saved the day for me. Inside of their console there’s a live help button! Within minutes I was connected to a support agent and my restore was running happily (it was my fault, consequently).

In review:

It took me less than 10 minutes to start my first backup. It ran in the background for a month backing up my stuff with no issues and saved me from a very nasty bug in Citrix storefront allowing me to restore my VM’s in minutes (saving me hours of work rebuilding my site).

You can grab a free copy here: http://www.altaro.com/vm-backup/download.php for up to 2 VM’s and a functionality matrix is available here too: http://www.altaro.com/vm-backup/pricing.php.

Having reviewed the features and prices of Altaro, this is definitely a product to keep in the back of your mind for environments suitable. It’s great software backed by great people with a strong focus on simplicity and killer functionality.

My issue was simple, as a developer and powershell zealot, I regularly used the pipe Symbol (|) in anger. Well in anger i mean, I was literally angry as despite pressing the frickin pipe key, an imposter appeared in the remote console…

• Looked like a pipe? Yes!
• Acted like a pipe? NO!

So anyway, being a Citrix CTP has it’s benefits, I reached out to the aforementioned blokes and sure enough a few emails were exchanged and poof! issue resolved.

To paraphrase Dustins email:

1. Open ~/Library/Application Support/Citrix Receiver/Config in a text editor
2. Find the KeyboardLayout setting in the [WFClient] section
3. Change KeyboardLayout to: British
4. Save the file
5. Launch the session

Tada! Pipe back to normal. Thanks again Simon and Dustin.