Varrow Blogs

I recently went on a scavenger hunt looking for a simple Storage Resource Management tool that could help one of our customers easily monitor their storage utilization across multiple SAN/NAS devices and multiple hosts. I wanted something that would make it easy for them to see how much storage is available and how much has been consumed. If the product was also capable of offering historical trending and analysis then even better, but more than anything else I was looking for SIMPLE and USEFUL..

One of the most critical, determining factors when examining the feasibility of configuring an application for delivery in a server-based computing environment is whether or not an application will work in a multi-session OS.  There are a multitude of factors, i.e. the way an app writes to the registry, file permissions, poorly coded apps, etc, [...]

Frankly, this post is a bit narcissistic.  Digging for this data at time of need is becoming a bit weary,  so hence the quickie. Includes CX4 and CX3 models…
By the way, these were generated from the Clariion Procedure Generator, if you aren’t using this tool then you aren’t working efficiently. Download below, Powerlink account [...]

A common topic that comes up when implementing a new Celerra for a customer is how to configure networking.  What’s the point of five nines of uptime if your networking isn’t reliable?  So, what to do?  The Celerra offers some great options for high available network configuration.  Most built on industry standard items…a few proprietary [...]

I recently setup a VMware ESX 3.5 server inside VMware workstation 6.5 on my personal computer at my house. I wanted to setup a SAN, particularly iSCSI and NFS for my ESX server to work with. This would allow me to test different advanced features such as VCB (VMware Consolidated Backup), VMotion, and DRS (Distributed [...]

Celerra shop? Excellent.  You’ve taken the necessary steps to invest in the most unified, performance driven platform on the market today. Now what? Well in most situations tweaking your array is not necessary, those fine individuals at EMC know what configurations are appropriate for specific types of access, read/write profiling, and plan accordingly. But there [...]

 
In the last few weeks I’ve met with a couple different clients that use Windows Terminal Server to provide applications to their end users.  While their environments worked pretty well and were very cost effective, they still have some pretty common problems.  Performance was usually an issue depending on how many people were connected and [...]

 I am getting ready to do a project with one of our clients to implement Symantec Storage Foundations for Windows on a Microsoft SQL Cluster.  Now, I am not normally an implementation engineer.  I just happen to have a situation where the client is very important, and none of our other engineers have experience with [...]

The great thing about virtualization is that it makes servers so easy to provision.  On the other hand, if you’re the guy doing backups is that a good thing?  Unrestricted, servers can multiply like little bunnies leading to a huge amount of growth in data to retain and backup.  Plus, you now have more servers [...]

Upon recently executing a POC for XenDesktop 3.0 which involved a USB-based 3DConnexion Spaceball device and a CAD application I realized how configuring this functionality isn’t quite a straightforward process.  While enhanced support for USB devices in included with the 3.0 version of XenDesktop, information needed to complete the configuration is dispersed across many different [...]

Earlier this week I decide to nuke the Windows XP OS on one of my old desktops I had laying around the house.  As with most Windows desktops it had become slower and slower and had more and more problems.  So instead of doing the annual “wipe it clean and start over” routine with Windows [...]

Here are some useful resources for troubleshooting Citrix Application Streaming.
Troubleshooting Application Streaming Issues – http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX113304
Application Streaming FAQs for Administrators – http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx118181
RadeRunSwitches – Application Streaming – http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/josephno/2008/03/28/RadeRunSwitches+-+Application+Streaming
Citrix Application Streaming Guide for XenApp 5.0 – http://support.citrix.com/servlet/KbServlet/download/17820-102-18856/Application-Streaming-Guide.pdf
How to Find the .Rad File that is Used to Launch a Streamed Application – http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX114673
XenApp Plug-in for Streamed Apps – [...]

As VDI is used more and more across the enterprise, the use of thin clients becomes an obvious choice when it comes time to replace client hardware.  Some of the advantages to going the thin client route are:
-          Cost – Thin clients are usually half the cost or less of a standard PC.  Prices can [...]

Most people won’t argue that storage requirements in most organizations are growing.  I think it comes back to the old fear of deleting any data, even if you know it’s obsolete.  You can buy more disks (for far cheaper than a year ago!) but you can’t bring back data from thin air.  The first rule [...]

We have seen Citrix XenServer becoming more and more popular as an enterprise level virtualization platform lately.  The question often comes up, “What is the recommended way to do backups of our XenServer environment?”   With virtualization platforms like VMware that have been around for several years now there are plenty of vendor based and 3rd [...]