Posts Tagged ‘Citrix’

new tools-section

August 31st, 2009

For backup reasons I’ve uploaded a few of my often used vss-files to the server and linked those in the new tools – section. Here you can find hardware Visio shapes for server, storage and network systems and some software Visio shapes for Citrix application delivery infrastructure.

shrinking xenserver-vm harddisks

August 7th, 2009

[For the german/original version - please click here.]

After having done a p2v-migration you sometimes have a vm with a huge harddisk and want to resize it. Unfortunately shrinking of xenserver-vm harddisks is not supported by Citrix [1]. But with the following workaround you can help yourself very easily.

  1. add a harddisk with target-size to your vm
  2. boot your vm from the gparted-live-iso [2]
  3. copy and resize the source-partition to the target harddisk
  4. mark the target-harddisk as active

screenshot-resizing-and-copy

This works with most virtualization products…

[1] http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx116114
[2] http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

PS: For resizing vhd-files there is the following tool.

http://vmtoolkit.com/files/folders/converters/entry87.aspx

SmartAccess in real world scenarios…

July 14th, 2009

[For the german/original version - please click here.]

Because many of our customers do not really know what SmartAccess could do for them, i’ll describe some real world use-cases here:

Citrix SmartAccess needs the following components to work:

  • Citrix Access Gateway Advanced or Enterprise Edition
  • Citrix Webinterface 5.x
  • Citrix XenApp 4.x or higher

And it can do the following functions for you:

  • constrain published applications by result of endpoint analysis
  • switch off ica-features (for example file-transfer, printing or clipboard) by result of endpoint analysis
  • secure ssl-vpn access by result of endpoint analysis

These functions allow you to implement a secure and flexible access to your network. So the mobile users will win flexibility + productivity without compromising the security of your network. In the following figure you can see an example use-case with CAG as ica-proxy and endpoint analysis.

In this scenario the state of the antivirus client and the state of the windows firewall is checked. Citrix is delivering some so called expressions for some av-clients and a few personal firewalls but mostly you have to configure these expressions to your own needs. Therefor you can use timestamps of files, the state of services and processes and network-parameter like mac-
addresses.
The second scenario uses the same expressions but decides between ica-proxy and the more powerful ssl-vpn access.

Therefor the result of the enpoint analysis is only beeing interpreted at the CAG itself – It’s not interpreted at the XenApp-Server, like it is done in the scenario before. So the CAG itself just decides wether the user can use ica-proxy only or a more powerful ssl-vpn-connection.

The combination of the two scenarios could lead to the following scenario:

Furthermore you can use SmartAccess in combination with XenDesktop as well.
If you interested in SmartAccess now – Don’t hesitate to contact us!