A user reported that the following error while visiting a website on a Citrix XenApp server:

I tried adding the site to the Trusted Sites List and adding the url to the Per Site Privacy list:

But this didn’t work, but I noticed that the site was “flickering” a lot so I suspected that HDX Flash Acceleration was the problem.

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Environment
Windows 2003 Enterprise (32 bit), Citrix XenApp 5, RES Workspace Manager 2011, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.7.0i.

Problem
When a opening an Excel workbook from Sharepoint the whole session freezes.

I asked the user to open an Excel workbook from Sharepoint and I noticed the following popup:

So my first thought was that the user somehow clicked this message to the background and IE was waiting for a response.

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Our partner Denamik has released a new version of Denamik LoadGen. The execution of massive load and stress tests is now easier than before. You can now record your own user action scripts from within LoadGen, and setup LoadBots to handle the execution of these scripts. LoadGen allows you to manage LoadBots to create remote sessions and evaluate your IT environment under stress. A built-in reporting facility will give you instant results.

What is new in LoadGen 2.3:

• Rewrite of installation and activation of LoadBots
• Rewrite of internal functions of the DUAF language to speed up interaction with XenApp desktops
• Introducing the possibilities to add your own libraries to DUAF scripts

Feel free to check out Denamik LoadGen 2.3, it’s free up to 15 virtual users.

Earlier this week I was asked to investigate a problem with the Xerox Universal Printer Driver. Users complained that printing to a Xerox printer was much slower than printing to an HP printer.

I received a reference document from a user, a rather complex Excel sheet. When selecting multiple tabs it took almost a minute to generate a print preview in Excel 2007 running on Windows 2003 with XenApp 5.

I was aware of a bug in the Xerox Universal Driver where almost 9.000 files were copied into the user’s profile directory (I wrote about that in an earlier post). But this seemed to be another problem.

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Author : Ingmar Verheij
I’ve built a lab to run some tests on Citrix XenApp. Since this is a lab environment I do not have enough resources to create dedicated machines for each role. Therefore I found it justified to create a virtualized domain controller (dc001.domain.local) with multiple roles and multi-homed (Boooohhh, I know). The machine is not only a domain controller but also has the DNS and DHCP role.

The following network interfaces are present on dc001.domain.local:

• Local Area Connection 1 : 192.168.1.1/24
• Local Area Connection 2:  192.168.2.1/24

The Citrix XenApp server is a dedicated physical machine with a single network interface:

• Local Area Connection 1 : 192.168.1.2/24

After creating a published desktop I’ve tried to connect from a machine in the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet. The session keeps waiting with the message ‘Please wait for the Local Session Manager’.

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Author : Ingmar Verheij

When Microsoft Windows systems are virtualized with VMware ESX or Workstation, WMware Tools is installed. When the VMware tools are installed with the Complete option, the shared folders option is enabled. This feature is not enabled when you install VMware tools with the Typical option.

The shared folder feature is not supported by ESX or GSX server and causes problems on Terminal Servers. The file hgfs.dat is opened by the VMware Tools with exclusive acces, which prevents the profile from getting deleted.

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A customer has a (virtualized) Citrix XenApp farm scaled for 1500 concurrent users. The environment is based on Windows Server 2003 Standard with Citrix XenApp 5 (migration to XenApp 6.x is scheduled).

A business critital web-application is re-developped and requires Microsoft Silverlight. Before implementing Silverlight the impact should be determined. A big concern is a decrease in the capacity of the farm, number of concurrent users the farm can handle.

To determine the impact of Silverlight I’ve done some tests, including a LoadTest.

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VMware has just released a very interesting Best Practices document, Citrix Xenapp on VMWare Best Practices.

The document contains the following chapters:

• Citrix XenApp Architecture on vSphere
• ESX Host Best Practices for Citrix XenApp
• Citrix XenApp on vSphere Best Practices
• Monitoring Performance
• vSphere Enhancements for Deployment and Operations

DeNamiK is proud to present the DeNamiK LoadGen 2.1. With the DeNamiK LoadGen it’s possible to perform the following actions:

• Load test
• Stress test
• Performance test
• Constant monitoring
• Benchmark
• Reporting

With the DeNamiK LoadGen 2.1 there are lots of new features and improvements. Let’s name just a few:

• ICA File support
• Performance Counter module 2.0
• Internal processes are optimized

The DeNamiK User Action Framework for XenApp has been updated:

• More DUAF functions which will help you create more reliable scripts
• Status updates possible from the LoadBots to the Director and to the reports
• XML reports available

Also one of the best changes: the LoadGen moved from .Net Framework 1.1 to:

• DeNamiK LoadGen Director: .Net Framework 3.5
• DeNamiK LoadBots: .Net Framework 2.0

Read the whole article on the website of DeNamiK!

Daniel Nikolic

In the Citrix ICA client, or XenApp Client Online plug-in, the access to your client drives is protected.
The first time you access your client drives the client will ask to allow (or disallow) the access. This message looks like this:

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