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Showing posts from February, 2011

First Exposure to VDI

So yet more fun at work!  Crikey this year has started well :) Got my hands on a Citrix Application Gateway appliance, well the VPX version as I wrote last post. Finally had some time to play around with the thing and found that while it was pretty simple to get the simple stuff working the documentation (again!) was confusing when setting up some components. AD authenication was pretty tricky, once I'd figured out what the documentation was on about things started working fine.  Here are my gotchas for AD authentication on CAG v5. 1. You MUST have the correct license!  You need the Universal and Platform Licenses installed (I used a licesne server) 2. You MUST use an AD group, I found the "help" really un-helpful in this regard. Anyways once you get these two things sorted you are pretty much set to go.

Importing Virtual Appliances

Been working with the Citrix Access Gateway VPX.  However we have ESX 3.5 not ESX 4.0 (vSphere). This means we get the error Line 25: Unsupported hardware family 'vmx_07' when importing the OVF.  Grrrrr.  So how do you get round this?  Pretty simple really - hey that's becoming a catch phrase!  There are a couple of ways I used this one using OVFTool. Download and install the OVF Tool (I used version 2) from VMWare. Next convert the non-working OVF to a VMX like this ovftool citrixappliance.ovf citrixappliance_conv.vmx Make sure you name the out file something different to the original ovf name otherwise this wont work the tool fails to create a file as it already exists - i think this is the vmdk file Once you have your vmx (and vmdk and mf) you can happily edit the vmx xml file in notepad.  Change the line: virtualhw.version = "7" to virtualhw.version = "4" save the vmx file and convert it back to an OVF using the following

Backup Exec Clinging On to Selections

Morning.  Working on backup exec from Symantec I found that a backup job was failing due to a "Folder not found" error.  This was strange as the selection looked correct.  However when the selection summary came up we saw that an old location was present.  This location was not un-selectable in the Selections area as the actual disk had been removed. Until that is you click on the View Format -> Text radio button.  This shows you a text view of the selection which you can edit directly.  Removing the incorrect location. Hoorah. I guess a way to avoid this in the future is to remove the selection before removing the device.  Or check the text radio button :)

vCenter Plug Ins

Following on from my previous post I thought about how to show the resulting information from the PowerCLI one liner in vCenter. This is actually pretty simple.  You need to make a couple of files and then you are done. First make your web application or page.  What I did was to schedule a run of the PowerCLI script from the last post piped to ConvertToHTML and put the file under the UI folder within the Tomcat installation on my vCenter server which is C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps\ui Here is the actual script with some CSS added to so you can adjust how things look, a note if you are cut-n-pasting please make sure you don't add any line breaks as this will break the code. # Add VMWare Snap In Add-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core # Connect to vCenter Connect-VIServer -Server vcenter # Set up the styles $a = '<style>'; $a = $a + 'BODY{background-color:#eeeeee;}'; $a = $a + 'TABLE{border-width: 1px;border-style: s

PowerShell driving vCenter

Why oh Why did VMWare rebrand PowerShell to be PowerCLI?  I'm pretty sure this is to ties things up with their offering using PHP and the Service Console shell but come on.... Anyways rant off.  This is a great thing.  Being able to use PowerShell to control and query vCenter is genius.  Here is a script-ette I wrote to obtain the amount of guest machines running under a host.  This is useful - I think :) as DRS kinda makes the hosts themselves irrelevant from a capacity planning point of view so you need to look at the clusters, yes I know you can click on the cand you get a list of all the machines and a count too.  However this is a basic HTML page to show how you can avoid paying ££££ for some capacity planning 3rd party tools and just write them yourself! Anyways here's the code....you'll need PowerCLI installed and need to know how to connect to vCenter...aww shucks I'll show that here too :) Download and install PowerCLI from VMWare.  You need a valid VMWar

Citrix Farm oddness.

Recently ran into this one so posting this here for those Citrix Farm admins... We have two farms, an XPe (I know!) and a PS4 (yes I know already!!) which both work fine.  Clients use PNA v8 (!!) to connect and the web application allows both farms to be shown.  Cool. Some XP clients (and again I know!) stopped working on the XPe farm ONLY.  All application from he PS4 farm were fine.  After following procedure we found that this occured directly after a patching weekend.  Bingo.  Seems SP3 and some other patches (we didn't look to hard after we found the solution) change the permissions on a registry key.  Oh thanks.  This stops Citrix client 8 from connecting to the XPe farms.  Odd but true.  We changed the permissions back to allow the users access and things returned to live.  We did this using GPO but I guess manual would work too. HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSLicensing We gave everyone full control, however use your security policy to determine this!

Windows Direct Access

I've been looking into this Server 2008 feature and have run the Microsoft labs which annoyingly (although understandably) consists of two documents, the first you find is as you would expect about DirectAccess test lab, the second you find by actually reading the first document.  This second document details how the server environment is actually configrued so effectively you need this second document first! Anyways here's links to the documents in question.  Microsoft are now using a groovy name TLG, Test Lab Guide.  Cool :) The config for the servers TLG Setup... http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=ab6c61af-9c34-4692-815c-4396b482d31b And the Lab Document, TLG Demo... http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=8D21A4EE-6B60-4D6A-B789-E47139A43A3C Annoyingly you do repeat a few things in both documents - like joining servers to domains etc...but if you follow each step things DO work! So well worth the 2h

SharePoint WFE install.

We have a Microsoft Office SharePoint Services 2007 (MOSS) farm and I was asked to add a new web front end (WFE) server to help with capacity. Pretty simple process so I built a 64bit Windows 2003 server.  Fine.  Installed the MOSS binaries.  Fine.  Installed the language packs.  Fine.  Ran the Configuration Wizard.  oh. I got an interesting problem where the wizard couldn't connect to the database, and infact caused a .Net exception!  After some Google-ing I couldn't find anything which directly mapped to my issue, mainly based on permissions.  Then I remembered that we are running MOSS SP1. So I installed SP1 for MOSS and everything worked.  Hoorah.  Just a stupid error message which could led you down the garden path.

welcome

Herein lies the experiences and ramblings of me through my adventures with IT .  hopefully these pages will help someone avoid the issues and trauma and lead to at least one persons IT experience being like it should i.e things work first time :)