Again the team of ControlUp created an nice and cool freeware utility called NetScaler Monitor. As this Citrix product is becoming more and more important in many organizations it’s nice to see that there is something available which keeps an eye on your infrastructure. In this Glance at Free article I’m going to provide you more insights about this new freeware utility.
Controlup Logon Simulator
One the companies that really get the strength of the community are the guys of Controlup. Beside they sponsor lots of community event, shares data gathered with the community they also have several free tools in their portfolio. In this Glance at Free I’m going to take a look at the free Controlup Logon Simulator.
Re-using PCs with Thin Client functionality is still used a lot. In the past I wrote the article How to: Build a ThinBased-PC with Windows 7/XP where I describe how you can turn a Fat Client into Thin Client functionality using scripts and policies. Although it’s working, it’s time consuming and difficult to maintain. Also when using Thin Clients it can be difficult to configure those fully to the needs and requirements of the organization, especially when there is no management environment available (because the Thin Client does not have that or the company did not buy it). Andrew Morgan encountered the same issues and developed ThinKiosk to solve both issues. ThinKiosk is developed as the first Windows based software only product to convert Fat Client into a Thin Client, but it’s also often used to manage Thin Clients based on a Windows based operating system. ThinKiosk integrates with the big three suppliers in SBC and VDI: Citrix, VMware and Microsoft.
In this Glance at Free I will show and describe the free community edition; however at the end I will mention the additional features which are available in the Enterprise edition briefly.
RDPSoft is a company that develops Remote Desktop Tools; they call their selves the Remote Desktop Tools company. Besides their commercial software like Remote Desktop Reporter, they also have a freeware Admin Toolkit available. This toolkit can be downloaded (after registration) from their website. Which tools are available in this toolkit and what do they offer.
With the release of App-V 5 Microsoft radically changed the way the App-V product is used and also the way it is managed. While there is always way for improvements several community people are/have developed additional tools/products around the product. One of the guys is Bram Wolfs, which created the App-V scheduler. The App-V scheduler offers both App-V functionality in a GUI (by default available as PowerShell commands) as it also offers several new functionalities which are not by default available. App-V Scheduler is developed to be used in different scenarios and integrates well with much used techniques and product in the market. Let’s take a look what the App-V Scheduler offers.
In previous App-V Tools articles I took a look at all kind of freeware tools available for App-V 4.x and earlier called SoftGrid. Now Microsoft released App-V 5 a while ago. With App-V 5 the whole product is redesigned so all previous tools cannot be used on this environment. However the App-V community is really great and there are already a whole bunch of new freeware tools developed and published. In this seventh part of my App-V tools series I’m going to look at the first set of App-V 5 tools. There are already more out, so expected a part 8 (and probably more) in the near future.
Although Citrix Resource Manager was not perfect, many Citrix administrators are missing the functionality when they upgrade to XenApp 6.x. EdgeSight is after too complicated and requires more back-end components, while in large companies the central monitoring system is too complex, provide too much information and/or does not satisfy the specific needs of Citrix administrators. Happily this gap is (partly) filled my some freeware tools, where in this article XenApp Farm Health Report and Farm Nanny.
Read more: XenApp Monitoring: XenApp Farm Health Report and Farm Nanny
The App-V platform is still a platform where end-users and/or administrators are looking for additional functionally or quick access to features/options that are not directly accessible.
In this Part 6 already, I will show again some released utilities for the App-V Platform.
Pierre Marnignon well-known from his website CitrixTools.Net and the corresponding freeware utilities now created a product called Virtual User Environment Manager. The Virtual User Environment Manager (VUEM) is available in a free community edition and a commercial edition for support, quicker updated and possible new specific features. VUEM is a product that is positioned in the user management/workspace market. This caused even some challenges before the product was available, but this lead to a lot of publicity. Let's take a look at the product and because this is the Glance at Free section I will use the community edition.
Again CitrixTools.Net developed some new utilities, so we are ready to review them and write part 4 in the glance at free section of CitrixTools.Net. In this part we will take a look at the XenApp Application Maintenance Manager, XenApp Policies Export Manager and RDS Session Utilities.
With the major adaption of application virtualization and especially App-V (formerly known as SoftGrid) also the amount of freeware tools is still expanding. In this fifth article I will discuss new freeware utilities for App-V. The article discusses App-V PkgView and Batch .
Introduction
Still one of the big challenges in Serves Based Computing environment (and when many users are using the same workstation in a VDI - or a traditional fat client environment) is still the user profile. One of the issues with user profiles is that the profile does not unload correctly and the profile stays on the server/workstations forever. If the root cause cannot be found or solved you will end up with hundreds of user profiles on the local disk, which takes a lot of disk space and makes troubleshooting more difficult.
On Windows XP or a Windows 2003 Terminal Server you could simply delete the profile directories (after a reboot of the system, to be guaranteed that no files are in use) and when the user logs on again everything run fine again.
However this is not a real clean method, because the registry referral still exists to profile directory. When Windows XP and Windows 2003 Terminal Server finds out the registry key is still there and the user profile directory on the disk does not exist it just create the key again. Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 2008 (R2) have a different behavior. When the key is still found, the key is renamed and a new key is made. The user will logon with a temporary profile (so settings are not retained) and at log off the renamed key is place back in the original state.
With this behavior in the latest version the needs for a utility or script is needed more and more so let's take a look at some of the available tools.
With the major adaption of application virtualization and especially App-V (formerly known as SoftGrid) also the amount of freeware tools is expanding. In this fourth article again I will discuss the utilities App-V Self Support Too and the toolset App-V DeployNPublish.
Beside commercial product Immidio (the manufacturer of Flex Profiles and AppScriber) also released a set of utilities as the Immidio Resource Kit. This Resource Kit is available for free (after registration on the Immidio website). In this Glance at Free article we will take a look of the utilities within this Resource Kit.
Update: Farm Monitor is not available as freeware anymore.
Introduction
Gourami is still evolving their FASE product suite. New additions are normally for a while available as a beta and most times for a specific period available as freeware utility. Currently Farm Commander is available as a freeware product (after registration). Farm Commander can be used for copying multiple files from one location to another, compare server with each other, test connectivity, search eventlogs, reboot servers and much more.
Let's take a look at this utility in this glance at free article.
In 2009 Citrix released a utility called Citrix XenApp Publishing Extension. In this Glance at Free article we will look what the Extension of the utility and if this is real add-on to the current default Citrix management consoles.
First find out what the extension exactly is of this utility. Maybe you would expect that the utility adds additional functionality into one of the Citrix Management Consoles, however this is not true. Actually the extension is a (kind of) standalone utility which simplifies the process of publishing applications within a Citrix infrastructure.
Farm Monitor is a utility that can be used to monitor the basic functions of your Citrix servers. Gourami released this product for a limited time for free. Only registration is required for getting a license to run the product continuesly. In this Glance at Free article I will take a look at this product.
Some while ago I already wrote two glance at free articles about freeware tools available for SoftGrid. Nowadays SoftGrid have been renamed to App-V and more nice utilities have been released. In this article I will show those tools for App-V called Softbar, App-V 4.5 Client Diagnostic and Configuration tool, App-V BPA and App-V Add-on ADM template.
With the release of App-V 4.5 Application Virtualization product (formerly known as SoftGrid) Microsoft also introduced the App-V 4.5 Resource Kit tools. This freeware tools are delivered by Microsoft to unlock all the potential possibilities in this new release. In this Glance at Free article I will take a look at the tools available within the Resource Kit and their added value.
Some while ago I already published two articles about CitrixTools.Net FreeWare utilities. In the timeframe between those articles Pierre Marningon of CitrixTools.Net developed again some new tools. These new tools together with some tools I did not mentioned in the previous articles are reviewed in this third part article about CitrixTools.Net Freeware Tools.
Introduction
In two earlier articles I already described a lot of utilities from CtxAdmTools. In this third article I will described the latest set of tools delivered by Guillermo Musemeci.
As you probably already know I'm also searching for some new useful freeware tools. Lots of these tools were already described in the glance at free sections. During the search (and a reminder pointer during the PubForum 2008 Nice) I found the website CtxAdmTools of Guillermo Musemeci on which many small tools are published. In this article (series) I will show you the most useful tools mentioned on this website.
All tools are available as a setup package or a standalone tool. I would advice to use the standalone tools, because are just single executables (so an installation is not needed and only the tools is placed in a directory and a start menu shortcut is created.
Introduction
In this first article I started with describing the tools delivered by Guillermo Musemeci. This article will continue with more tools.
As explained in this article periodically reboots on a Terminal Server are a best practice. This can be achieved using several techniques and products. For example Citrix Presentation Server/XenApp has built in features, Microsoft has the tsshutdwn.exe available and there are some commercial products like ShutdownPlus TSE. There are also some freeware utilities available like Centralis Centinel and CTRL+ALT+DEL TSReboot.
In this article I will describe TSShutdn, Citrix Reboot Feature, Centinel and TSReboot.
Introduction
The functionality to create a PDF file out of the business applications and the default office applications is nowadays at many companies a demand. Most end-users do not want to create the PDF fully on their own, but mainly have a report (or similar) out of another application saved as a PDF file for distribution.
For this demand several PDF printer software products have been released. Such a program creates a new printer within the operating system and when this printer is selected by the user a PDF file will be made as the file would be printer on a real printer device.
Many of these programs offer a freeware version for personal use on operating systems like Windows XP. The "freeware" feature is announced a lot on the websites of these manufacturers. Many organizations assume that such a free version can be used on Terminal Servers as well, but logically the technique and methodology is completely different. Because of this many PDF creator products are offering normal paid products for a Terminal Server.
But because the assumption is made that the software is for free (and also is not made really clear on the websites of the manufacturers), there is no budget allocated for that and the need for a freeware product is still there. In this article I take a look at those PDF creator products that also offer a freeware version for Terminal Servers.
A few months ago I got an e-mail from Pierre Marmigon that he released a new website related to Server Based Computing. The website started with a good article and corresponding tool to configure these settings described in the article to your need. The weeks after that e-mail, the website was filed with lots of freeware tools for Citrix Presentation Server/XenApp. In this glance at free article I will demonstrate you these tools available for download from CitrixTools.Net.
In article 1 I started with describing the CitrixTools.Net freeware tools. In this second part I will continue with the more tools off CitrixTools.Net.
Introduction
Microsoft Windows 2008 has lots of new features for Terminal Services. One of these enhancements is the possibility to access the RemoteApps via a browser via the TS Web Access.
By default the only option is to display the application on the TS Web Access or not. Unfortunate the TS Web Access does not have an option to filter the display of applications based on username. The people of TS Factory also find this a pity and released a freeware utility to make filtering based on users and group access.
Introduction
Once in a while I still found some new freeware tools I was not familiar with. With the announcement that Citrix is working on starting local applications on one of the well-known SBC community sites in the some of the replies a referral to the website of MQ Technologies was made. Curious that another product beside RES PowerFuse was already available I went to the website I was amazed the solution was a freeware tool. Beside this tool MQ technologies offered also other freeware tooling. In this Glance at Free article I will take a look at their freeware tools named Remote Application Centre, Remote Executer for Terminal Server and Remote File Transfer.
In one of the earlier Glance at Free articles I already mentioned that if you are working with the Microsoft MMC will get frustrated my losing the mouse in one of the Remote Desktop sessions. In the same article I already described one of the alternatives named visionapp Remote Desktop (vrD).
But of course there are more alternatives. Another alternative is Remote Desktop Manager by Devolutions. Beside RDP connections you can also configure VNC connection out of one graphical interface.
One of the most heard complaints about Terminal / Citrix Server environments that the session or programs are responding slowly. It is also one of the most difficult complaints to trouble shoot. Most times the user cannot explain exactly what is going slow (you will definitely recognize the answers like: everything, just slow and nothing is working) and besides many factors can influence the user experience of a Terminal Server session.
One of the issues that can cause slow responses in a Terminal Server environment is the latency between the client and the Terminal / Citrix Server. A variable that is not easy to be determined.
Therefore Fabrice Cornet of FCConsult created the tool Latency Checker. In this Glance at Free article I will describe the possibilities of this freeware tool.
At the end of January of 2008 Douglas Brown pointed me to a utility called about the Smart Citrix Client created by a French company called Virtual Technologies. Because I never heard of this freeware utility I directly downloaded the utility to take a look at it. My experiences with this freeware tool are described in this Glance at Free article.
A few Glance at Free articles ago I already wrote about Thomas Kötzings Web Interface modifications. These modifications are changing the behavior of the default Citrix Web Interface, but Thomas also created a nice another add-on for the Web Interface answering one of the most asked questions about the usage of Web Interface: How many requests is the Web Interface server handling in a time frame?
In this Glance at Free article we are going to look how this Analyze Centre works.
In an earlier article I already described two freeware tools which made it possible to export the Citrix configuration into a format usable for documentation purposes. There are also nice tools available to export your Published Application settings, so in a case of a mistake or a failure your applications configuration could be restored quickly. Unfortunate no comparable functionality was available for back-up and restores Citrix policies. Till December 2007 when Mark Elliott released his VB scripts.
I already mentioned the PAU utility in one of my earlier Glance at Free articles about importing and exporting Published Applications. In that article I also mentioned that PAU is providing much more services than only back-up and restore Published Application. In this Glance at Free article I will go through all the features of this Published Application freeware utility.
Nowadays Citrix Web Interface is the most used way to access the Citrix Published Applications. The product evolved from the very basic NFuse to the current Web Interface 4.6. In previous versions it was pretty difficult to transform the website to the needs of the organization, especially because the code changed with every new release. During the time of the product evolvement you can now modify the basic look pretty easy via the Access Management Console.
1Click Modification
People are by default a bit impatient, so it often occurs that user double clicks the application icon more then once but actually just once to open it once. To prevent users by starting the application more than once in a short time the 1Click modification is available. Just like most modifications you replace two file to activate this modification. In one of the files (applist.inc) you can specify the time the icon is disappearing from a user perspective. When a user start the application the icon is disappearing and the place it was located is just empty as displayed in below print screen.
In one my earlier Free at Glance articles I already showed good freeware tools available for the SoftGrid platform. Now SoftGrid is becoming more and more popular the amount of resources is also rising. In this new article I will show you another set of useful SoftGrid Freeware tools.
With default Microsoft's Terminal Server implementation (with Windows 2003) you should use Network Load Balancing for dividing user between the Terminal Servers. NLB is not checking the user sessions per server (at determine the server with the least user), but just divides the users over the servers. Therefore companies are often using Citrix because of the Load Balancing feature available in Presentation Server. Citrix default Load Evaluator is based on concurrent sessions and probably still the most used load balancing technique. But is the price for Citrix not to high for only load balancing the users? The guys behind CTRL-ALT-DEL developed TSLoadBal. A freeware tool to load balance the users over Terminal Server based on the concurrent load of users per server.
RTO Optimization Console
In Citrix Presentation Server 4 Citrix added CPU and Memory optimization to the Presentation Server product. These features were not developed by Citrix but licensed from RTO Software. Logically these components in CPS are just a subset of the features RTO offers in their own product.
Within the Citrix Presentation Server console you can only enable or disable both features on farm level and server level. On farm level you specify the time the optimization job should be run and which applications you would like to exclude. To give you more control over this features RTO released the Optimization Console, which is available for free (with a limitation of the usage and available options).
If you have every build a Citrix environment for your company as an external specialist one of the most time consuming tasks is documenting the environment. Especially the Citrix settings configured via the Citrix Management Console. Often just print screens were used or own made tables typing in every session manually. Happily some people are struggling with the same problems and created some tools to make life a little bit easier.
Ilja Godau created the tool called Citrix PS Documentor and Leonardo Curbelo Jr created the tool called Citrix Farm Inventory. Both tools will be described in this Glance at Free article.
Normally in a Citrix Environment the most changed configuration part are the Published Application Settings. So also in this part the most mistakes can be made for example removing a complete Published Application, changing display settings or remove/adding the wrong server or users from a Published Applications.
Therefore you could document the settings via tools as described in the Glance at Free article CPS Farm Inventory, but you could also export those settings in such way you can import with a single command again in your farm.
This can be accomplished via MFCOM commands which are included in every Citrix Presentation Server (as described in the MFcom manual, but it is much easier to use one of the available tools. In this article I will describe some of the available tools.
In the earlier Glance at Free article I already discussed the SFTImport tool. This tool makes it possible to add your sequence to the SoftGrid database from the command line.
But there are more nice tools available for the Softgrid software created by Rodney Medina and Dennis Damen. In this article I will introduce these tools to you.
Introduction
Appedit is developed by Rich Pulver in the time Metaframe XP was there. But the program is still working on Metaframe 3.0 and Presentation Server 4. Writing this article I'm using Citrix Presentation Server 4.
Introduction
2X is already known by their products like 2X Application Server, 2X Thinclientserver and 2X Load Balancer and their very completive pricing of these products. With SecureRDP 2X even have a Freeware product. Like more products this product comes originally from Terminal-Services.net company, which was acquired by 2X some time ago.
With SecureRDP you can add an addition layer of security to your (Terminal) Servers by filtering connections to the server before a user will be presented with a login screen.
Introduction
CTRL-ALT-DEL Consultancy is a (as the name already applies) a consultancy firm based in Australia. Beside there consultancy tasks they also developed several nice freeware tools where TSPassChg is the most well known. In this article we will take a look at a couple of their tools developed for the Terminal/Citrix servers. Additions to the loginscript
The people behind CTRL-ALT-DEL created a several tools that helps you adding additional functionality to the login scripts.
With QRYPUBAPP you can query the name of the Published Application that the user is starting. The command QRYPUBAPP [published application name] for example QRYPUBAPP Notepad. If the Published Application name can be found the query will give an errorlevel 0 or if not found an errorlevel 1. Using this is your loginscript you could make IF statements launching additional command like copy an INI file or setting a registry key like the example below.
If applications are installed on a Terminal this is normally done via Add/Remove programs or via change user /install command. This sets the Terminal Server in installation mode. When an application within this installation mode writes registry keys to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER Microsoft writes this key also in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Terminal Server\Install\Software. These values in this key, called Shadowkey, will be applied to a user when he logs on to the Terminal Server if no keys (or older keys) are found in his profile based on a time stamp. Because the checking is done on time stamp you can experience strange behaviors if a new server is applied to your infrastructure. This behavior occurs because the values in the Shadow key got the time stamp when they are installed. Users can have different settings in their profile, but with an older timestamp. When these users logs on to new server, the Shadow keys settings are written in their profile because the date is newer than the setting in the user profile, which is logically unwanted.
If you are system administrator or doing a project for example where you are developing server roll-out you probably getting annoyed starting up the Microsoft RDP Client for every server you would like to connect to.
So you are using Microsoft's MMC snap in Remote Desktop, but are getting crazy that the mouse on regular base stays within one of the sessions, while you are working in another session.
If you are working at different customers you are probably getting nuts of remembering all the different user accounts and passwords.
Combining all these annoyances you are searching for a tool where you can store your credentials, logically order all the servers and is working perfectly (in stead of the MMC Remote Desktops) and if possible for free.
Probably the consultants of VisionApp had exactly the same feeling and created VisionApp Remote Desktop. Let's take a look of this freeware product can satisfy are needs.
Update: VisionApp Remote Desktop is no longer available as a freeware utility.
Introduction
Update: ReconnAct is now part of the Immidio Resource Kit
There are several users at companies whose are travel around locations and/or buildings. Often these users take over their existing session (which is in disconnected mode or still active on the other workstation) especially with new improved Workspace control options within Web Interface and PN Agent.
Because the user is taken over a session al settings are already configured like for example printer settings or other location specific settings. It would be nice to detect that the client machine is changed and that some settings should be changed based on the movement of the session to another machine.
Checking variables within the session you will notice the variable CLIENTNAME, but unfortunately this variable is not checked if an session is being moved from one client to another. So the client name stays the same till the session is logged off (the client name variable holds the name of the client the session is initiated on).
So this variable can not be used for noticing a client change. Dennis Damen has created ReconnAct for this challenge.
Introduction
In an earlier article I already described a number of Envoke IT freeware tools. In the meantime they created again a few nice tools. So time again to take a look at their new tools.
EnvokeIT is from origin a Scandinavian company started by a couple of persons working in the Server Based Computing market. During their jobs they developed a set of nice tools, which are (in their standard version) available for free. In this article I will try out these tools.
If you have a big Terminal Server infrastructure environment you probably like to configure all settings at one place and settings are propagated to all the servers in your environment in stead of configure those settings manually. If you take a look at Citrix many settings can be configured using Citrix Management Console and since Windows 2003 you can configure a lot of settings using GPO's (but read this article if you would like to configure RDP settings on a server where also Citrix is installed).
One of things that is not fully implemented in the Citrix Management Consoles (via policies) are the settings within the Citrix Connection Configuration. The guys of Login Consultants developed a ADM template where most of these settings can be configured using GPO's like client mapping, timeouts for disconnection, etcetera.
But for settings the permissions on the protocols itself could only be done via manual intervention. Therefore Bas Blauw developed the tool TSConSec to solve this problem.
For a few years Softricity is available and was the first offering application virtualization. Nowadays Softricity is just acquired by Microsoft, so we will hear a lot of this technique in the near feature. If you have already worked with Softgrid you probably have the same experiences as I have. I really like the technique and the way the application works, but the way a new sequence (application package) needs to be added to the database is a really time consuming action.
Daniel Nikolic of DNC-IT.com had the same feeling and developed SftImport. SftImport is a command line tool with parameters to add/delete or change sequences into the Softgrid database.
Citrix is providing as with several tools to check the Citrix environment you are maintaining. One of these tools is called MedEvac.
Citrix created MedEvac to test if on the server the XML and IMA services are available. Let's found out if the tool is addition to your toolbox.
