Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Who’s going to Microsoft TechEd NA?

May 24, 2010

Who’s going to TechEd 2010 in the Big Easy?  Email me if you are!

dan.brinkmann@lewan.com

(twitter) http://www.twitter.com/dbrinkmann

Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d … you probably would be better off setting your money on fire

May 14, 2010

I’ve been using this device since late last year and the problems are numerous…random lockups, never successfully restarts, data corruption out of the blue, network disconnects…

Now I might think that it was just me, just my network, some weird gremlin issue in my house but there are so many similar posts on their forum site with no resolution that I doubt it’s just me. I’ve even gone so far as to call their support to which I always get the same answer, pull the power and wait 20 hours for it to rebuild the disk…if you’re lucky.

So this post doesn’t represent the views of the company I work for but don’t waste your money on this product and I would seriously question any of their “business” solutions.

I’ve been asking these question for years, maybe HP is onto something in storage

May 11, 2010

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/27/hp_3_layer_storage/

They’ve had most of the components for years and recently acquired some of the missing pieces of the puzzle, but conceptually, this makes so much sense to me.  I had harped on HP to buy DataDomain, LeftHand, PolyServe and others literally 5 years ago and it seemed obvious to me that you could bake all these pieces into a seamless strategy by providing access a variety of “access methods” to storage utilizing standard hardware and virtualization technology.  I just read this post from the Register and I felt like I was reading an old article I left in the drawer from years ago.  We’ll have to see if/how this will all work out, but they need to do something to rejuvenate their storage lineup.

Tuning HDX MediaStream for Server Rendered Delivery

March 28, 2010

HDX MediaStream is our name for a set of Citrix technologies for delivering video and audio content from virtual desktops and hosted applications. The foundation of HDX MediaStream is the ability to deliver any media format from any media player over any network connection to any device. (Did I use the "any" word enough?) That’s what Server-Rendered Multimedia Delivery is all about. Then, on top of this solid foundation, we look for opportunities to achieve higher server scalability by offloading media processing to the user device when possible. For example, since Adobe Flash content is so prevalent and the Flash Player consumes quite a lot of CPU, last year we introduced HDX MediaStream Flash Redirection to complement our existing Windows Media Redirection.

Even for Flash and Windows Media, server-rendered multimedia delivery comes into play when network latency is too high for Flash redirection or effective bandwidth is too low for Windows media redirection. The SmartRendering feature of HDX Adaptive Orchestration selects the appropriate technology based on the dynamic network conditions at hand. Likewise, SmartRendering recognizes if the user device is not capable of client-side rendering.

Server-side multimedia delivery also supports alternative media formats and players such as QuickTime and Silverlight. The user experience for these media formats over a high bandwidth connection is very similar to client-side rendering, "just like local". XenDesktop 4 supports an out-of-the-box frame rate of 24 fps (just like at the cinema) and can be adjusted to deliver a full 30 fps if required for certain demanding use cases.

So, how do you get the best performance out of server-rendered multimedia delivery? Here are my top three tips:
1. Configure Progressive Display to compress images in motion.
2. Use Branch Repeater when delivering video to remote locations.
3. Use the new High Definition audio codec

http://community.citrix.com/display/ocb/2010/03/22/Tuning+HDX+MediaStream+server-rendered+multimedia+delivery

Virtual Desktop Training slidedeck

March 16, 2010

For those of you who have attended our Virtual Desktop training and are waiting for the slidedecks I told you I would post here I haven’t forgot, I’m just waiting for our 3rd and final event to complete before I post them…otherwise it won’t be a surprise for the last group.  So keep checking and expect the slides after March 24.

The Mobile Hypervisor

March 11, 2010

Wow, great article…it really makes you think.  IT orgs spend so much time and money securing company data and all of our phones are the perfect place to pick off all sorts of confidential data….yikes!

http://www.simonbramfitt.com/2010/03/the-mobile-hypervisors-killer-app-has-arrived-and-its-not-what-you-think.html

Getting disk offset information with Powershell

March 7, 2010

Disk partition alignment is important, let Lewan tell you why.  Powershell rocks!

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jonathan_kehayias/archive/2010/03/01/getting-partition-offset-information-with-powershell.aspx

Choosing a thin client OS for XenDesktop

March 6, 2010
Feature Windows
XPe
Linux Wyse ThinOS with TCX Comments
Flash Redirection Yes No No Wyse ThinOS with TCX supports flash acceleration which is not as desirable as flash redirection.
Multimedia Redirection Yes Yes Yes All clients support multimedia redirection for video codecs such as wmv, mpeg and avi.
USB Remoting Yes Yes Yes All clients support isochronous USB remoting such as Webcams and offer USB PDA sycronization.  Wyse ThinOS utilizes the TCX software.
VOIP – Optimized Speech codec Yes Yes No XPe and Linux client support the new Citrix speech codec.  Wyse ThinOS uses TCX Rich Sound which is less desirable.
WAN – Branch Repeater Client Yes No No Only XPe clients support the Branch Repeater Client, but the Linux client supports HDX IntelliCache WAN Optimization.   Wyse has a Virtual Desktop Accelerator for software WAN acceleration. 
HDX 3D Graphics Yes Yes No The Linux client does not support decoding of GPU-compressed data streams.

http://community.citrix.com/display/ocb/2010/03/01/Choosing+a+Thin+Client+OS+for+XenDesktop

Cannot Reattach XenServer Storage Repository

February 28, 2010

I’ve recently encountered a situation when reattaching a forgotten (or otherwise unknown) LVMoHBA or LVMoISCSI SR where you are presented with a dialog which tells you that a previous SR has been found and that you need to select either to “Reattach” or to “Format” the device in order to proceed.

Here’s the rub (and the problem) – the buttons you need to press aren’t present.

This has occurred to me using XenCenter 5.5.2, on Windows 7. I expect it could also occur on Windows 2008, particularly on the R2 version. It might occur with other revs of XenCenter.

Here’s the work around – Run XenCenter 5.5.2 (or whatever is right for your environment) on Windows XP or Server 2003. The dialog will display properly and you will be able to complete the reattach process.

1 million IOPS and iSCSI

February 25, 2010

Just an article telling everyone something we at Lewan already know…a properly designed iSCSI storage environment performs great.

http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2010/02/25/Guest-post_3A00_-Intel-discusses-iSCSI-and-1-million-IOPs.aspx