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About a year ago a bunch of Citrix experts myself included traveled to Citrix Headquarters to help the Citrix education team designing the CCEE 1Y0-A15 exam. Now a year later the exam is finally in beta and the final exam will become publically available as of June 28.

Today I received the Exam Preparation Guide for the exam, which has me and the other guys credited as part of the Item Development Team!

I scheduled the CCEE beta exam for Friday May 7th. I'm not planning to prepare for the exam so I hope the fact that I designed a large part of the questions is enough for me to pass:)

Wish me luck!

At the end of this month Citrix will release firmware version 9.2 for Access Gateway Enterprise. Coolest thing in this new release is that secure access to XenApp and XenDesktop will be totally free of charge from now on! This is part of the Access Gateway Platform license that Citrix announced with the release of the Access Gateway VPX (http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx124138).

Here’s a list of the new features:

No per-user charge for secure access to XenApp and XenDesktop
All Access Gateway and NetScaler appliances running 9.2 will support secure access to XenApp and XenDesktop without requiring additional user licenses. This change saves customers money, allows Access Gateway to be sold with all XenApp and XenDesktop editions, and gives customers a reason to upgrade from Secure Gateway.

Customer requiring advanced features of Access Gateway such as network VPN, clientless access, and SmartAccess still must purchase Access Gateway “Universal Licenses” or upgrade to Platinum editions of XenApp, XenDesktop, or NetScaler.

Improved smartcard support
Access Gateway 9.2 and XenApp 6.0 deliver true smartcard single sign-on that avoids users having to enter passwords. This solution is ideal for government agencies looking to achieve compliance with HSPD-12. This release also adds support for OCSP and group authorization through LDAP for smartcard users.

More clients
Access Gateway 9.2 adds client support for Mac OS X and Window 7 (32 and 64 bit). Endpoint analysis is also available on Firefox and Internet Explorer 8 browsers.

Multiple language support
This release delivers support for French, German, Spanish, and Japanese in all user-facing elements.

Form single sign-on to web applications
Users no longer need to enter credentials twice when accessing web applications. Access Gateway 9.2 delivers single sign-on capabilities to any web application that supports HTML forms.

File share enhancements
File share bookmarks now support Microsoft DFS and username token substitution (e.g. \\fileserver\homedrives\%username%).

Authentication enhancements
Access Gateway 9.2 adds additional authentication options including LDAP password changing, nested LDAP group extraction, group based logon control, and password extraction when using a onetime password. 

Today the guys from PQR and Login Consultants released the Phase II whitepaper of Project Virtual Reality Check. This phase is mainly focussed around the new Intel Nehalem Processor and has some interesting results!

From the Project VRC website: 

This new Project VRC phase 2 whitepaper focuses completely on analyzing Terminal Services (TS) workloads running on the latest generation hardware and hypervisors. While in phase 1 of project VRC VMware ESX3.5, Citrix XenServer 5.0 and Microsoft Hyper-V 1.0 were tested on a HP DL385G5 with AMD “Barcelona” processors, this whitepaper reviews vSphere 4.0, XenServer 5.5 and Hyper-V 2.0 running on HPDL380G6 with Intel “Nehalem” processor.

Project VRC made a deliberate choice not to directly compare Hypervisors in phase 1 (and published results in separate whitepapers), the community and the vendors, logically, did. Therefore, we decided that Project VRC will release this single whitepaper for the phase 2 results, including the three hypervisors.

You can download the new whitepaper on the website: http://www.projectvrc.com

As of last Tuesday Citrix released Provisioning Server 5.1.

So.. lets take a look at the new features:

Standard Image NIC Teaming
Enables teaming of NIC’s on provisioned devices using Intel or Broadcom based NIC teaming drivers.  

This was a feature that was already available for private image mode, but is now also available for standard image mode. Especially needful in high available environments where XenApp is being provisioned.

This is actually an extremely cool feature! This greatly simplifies the process of upgrading the Provisioning Server client software, where you normally had to reverse image the vDisk to a physical harddisk in order to make changes to the Provisioning Server client drivers. You can now directly boot the vDisk in either XenServer or Hyper-V and just make the changes right there!

User Assigned vDisks
Selects the vDisk to stream to a provisioned system based on the user logging into it.

Important to know here is that during boot time the user is asked for username and domain. There is no password authentication in this functionality. The user assigned vDisks feature is only meant to identify the user and assigning the right image. This feature can be useful for schools so that students don’t have to choose their image from a menu, but get the correct image by just typing in their username.

Offline Database Support
Allows for continued operation of Provisioning Services hosts and provisioned systems in the event of a database failure or outage. 

What happens here, is that al Provisioning Services hosts have their own cached database stored locally so that when the database server fails, new booting systems can still be mapped to the correct image. During this time the PVS hosts may not be rebooted! Sounds pretty formilliar....Local Host Cache anybody?

Server Maintenance Mode
Provides a mechanism to place a Provisioning Services host into “maintenance mode”, automatically moving streaming sessions to other hosts in the farm.

Can be pretty usefull, before this release you had to just stop the streaming service so all devices would failover to the other hosts.

Multiple Partition vDisks
Enables imaging of systems that have multiple physical or logical drives into a single vDisk. 

XenConvert 2.0 is now being used for the Image Build process. XenConvert gives you the opportunity to convert up to 4 volumes to your vDisk.

Read Only vDisk Storage
Improves system performance by allowing VHD’s to be deployed on read-only volumes, reducing disk I/O. 

I don’t exactly know what is being meant here. But it looks like with this feature you’re now able to host your vDisk on SAN volumes directly attached to your PVS hosts without the need for a product like Sanbolic MelioFS.

Is there anybody that can confirm this?

Auditing and Enhanced Logging
Provides enhanced ability to monitor system and administrator activity. 

Yet another step to becoming a really mature product.

XP Embedded Streaming
Provides ability to build and stream XP Embedded images used by thin client machines. 

This is quite a nice feature for companies using Windows XP Embedded thinclients. Now you’re able to provision desktops, terminal servers and thinclients all with the same product.

Also take a look at this Q&A about the new release:

Citrix finally released some documentation about the Provisioning Server / XenApp usecase. The documents are available for 2 weeks but I just noticed them yesterday.

Provisioning Services for XenApp - Reference Architecture
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX120512

Provisioning Services for XenApp - Implementation Guide
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX120513

Provisioning Services for XenApp Best Practices
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX120464

One thing I find really annoying is that each time when I need technical information about Citrix products, I have to download the complete PDF guide of the product from the Citrix website. In the past I always saved the documents on my laptop so that I had quick access to the documents, but after a while documents are being updated and my local copy contains old information…So with this frustration in mind I’m very happy I walked across this beta version of Citrix eDocs. I don’t know how long this site is online, it seems to be not that long because content is still being uploaded and not all Citrix products are available yet. The site looks a bit like Microsofts technet. It’s very easy to navigate through the product documentation and it's pretty quick! It looks like all document types are available; Installation and Administration Guides, Readme’s, Release Notes, etc..

I must say I’m very happy Citrix came up with this!