In order to email attachments directly to a ShareFile folder perform the following:

1. Go to the folder on the ShareFile website that you want to email attachments to and select Request Files
2. Select Give me a link I can copy and send using my own email software (optionally select the checkbox if you want to be notified when files are uploaded)
3. DO NOT CHECK THE BOX FOR Require recipients to enter name and email before uploading (helps with tracking)
4. Select the Request Files button
5. You will then receive a URL, copy the last part of the URL (Example, copy the item highlighted to your clipboard: https://danbrinkmann.sharefile.com/r/r46e8f506f563462eb)
6. Open your email client and paste this content from the URL and append with @mail.sharefile.com (Example: r46e8f506f563462eb@mail.sharefile.com)
7. Hit send!

Here is a video posted by ShareFile showing this process if that is more your style – YouTube video: Send Email Attachments Directly to ShareFile

First a joke…but one that I see all to often and not just related to this discussion but in all areas of life.

Start with 5 monkeys locked in a cage.

Hang a banana from the roof on a string and place a set of stairs under it.

Before long the monkeys will go to the stairs and start to climb toward the banana.

As soon as the first monkey touches the stairs, hose the other monkeys with cold water.

After a while another monkey makes an attempt with the same result. All the others are sprayed with cold water.

Pretty soon, when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and goes to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, all of the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm!

Likewise, replace a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked.

Most of the monkeys that are beating him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water.

Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana.

Why not?

Because as far as they know that’s the way it’s always been done around here. And that, my friends, is how company policy begins.

This survey that Chris Wolf (Gartner Analyst) did completely blew me away.

I’m shocked at the number of people when asked about their Virtual Desktop Storage Preferences answered that they would use Enterprise Storage array features (EMC, HDS, HP, NetApp). I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked after spending the last few years working on desktop virtualization solutions but it shows how little people still understand about the workload, requirements, and technologies that desktop virtualization has. It is these same people that are probably also shocked when they look at the costs of deploying a hosted virtual desktop solution.

How do you think Exxon would answer if asked whether you should use an electric car vs one with a combustion engine? That they would reply anything other than a combustion engine would be ludicrous (well until they own the electricity too). So it’s no surprise that when you ask a shared storage vendor what storage architecture they suggest what would be best for you is using their shared storage solution. Recognize that the answer they are giving you is because that is what they sell but may not be what is in the best interests of your company of storage solution for desktop virtualization. There is certainly a place for shared storage solutions in Desktop Virtualization, but it really shouldn’t be the defacto standard.

In my experience the solution that most IT departments are trying to move towards is one that involves a non-persistent virtual desktop, I’m a fan of persistent desktops too, but that in my experience has rarely been the first use case companies focus on to maximize their return in desktop virtualization technology investments.

A non-persistent virtual desktop means that changes to the operating system including OS updates, configuration changes, and applications installations are not retained. After a user logs off, the virtual desktop is refreshed and reverted back to its gold image state. Personalization of the operating system or applications that are desired are stored in the user profile can be maintained separately from the virtual desktop and therefore persisted (on shared storage). What a non-persistent virtual desktop really means for most companies is that if a user installs and application (provided they have the rights to do so) that application will not be persisted. In many cases this is the desired functionality that companies are seeking in deploying a hosted virtual desktop solution.

So what then are you getting by adding a shared storage solution? If the server the desktop is hosted on fails the session is lost and the user has to reconnect regardless of the storage architecture. If the storage on the server the desktop is hosted on fails the session is lost and the user reconnects…again regardless of the storage architecture. So why then are so many companies using shared storage for the VDI environment? I honestly don’t know. My best educated guess is because that’s just what they think IT departments should do.

So where are the gaps when using local disk for desktop virtualization? Since we are using local storage technologies such as live migration/vMotion/XenMotion can’t be used (OK, so shared nothing migrations exist, but you probably won’t use this in production…although if you have 10Gb and local SSD then this might be an option) and therefore load distribution by migrating VM’s to balance load across hypervisor hosts can’t be done. Add to that, the broker does not take in to account the load on the host hypervisor(s) when making placement decisions for a user that needs a non-persistent virtual desktop. Since the virtual machines are using local hard disks there isn’t any ability for the underlying hypervisor cluster to migrate virtual machines from one host to another. So the potential exists that you could be brokering users to a virtual desktop on a host that is saturated while other hosts in the cluster have available capacity.

When Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View make brokering decisions why is their no calculation of host utilization (hypervisor) used in that decision? We need a smarter broker in order to free ourselves of shared disk and therefore the bonds of 40% of our desktop virtualization project going to storage manufacturers. Dell/Quest vWorkspace does this, they call this Connection Time Load Balancing. From their admin guide: Connection-time load balancing distributes user connection requests to a managed computer on the least busy Hyper-V hypervisor. Kudo’s guys!

So there, something to think about, don’t do what everyone else does just because everyone else is doing it. I’m a firm believer that most people are stupid, the last thing I want to do is blindly make the same decision that person did. Shared storage might have a place in your desktop virtualization deployment, but it should not be assumed. Don’t be a f*cking monkey.

I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for my co-workers I’ve had the opportunity to work with at Lewan and the latitude this organization has given me to build the best desktop virtualization practice in Colorado.

Thank you.

If you’ve been paying attention to IT trends you’ve undoubtedly noticed increased focus on follow-me-data solutions, or as it’s been coined, “Enterprise Dropbox”.  I do find it funny that Dropbox has managed to create a Kleenex-like brand association to their product…good for them, it’s easier than saying Follow-me Data.

As someone who has used: SkyDrive, ShareFile, Dropbox, Box, SugarSync, Google Drive in my personal and professional life I thought I’d outline a few bullet points of what I’m looking for in an “Enterprise Dropbox” solution and what I think my customers are also looking for.  The big gap I struggle with today in these solutions is they really only focus on files and folders today, their functionality doesn’t replace my need for Evernote, OneNote, Google Docs, etc. Should these solutions go from merely syncing folders and files to other types of content that are application specific? Consider vendor specific solutions like Apple iCloud that allows you to sync settings, contacts, bookmarks etc. What if Follow-me Data solutions also sync’d things like passwords, calendars, bookmarks, contacts? I think this is an area where Follow-me Data could significantly change how we use personal and corporate devices.

I’ve made a list of features that I think are important for Follow-me Data solutions to address:

• Clients for OSX,Windows, Windows phone, Android, iOS, Blackberry, Linux
• Local Sync/on-demand sync/caching solution with clients above
• Support for Windows SMB shares, home folders with dynamic mapping rules
• Explore and retrieve data from remote FMD client (SkyDrive)
• Selective synchronization of files and folders on a per device level
• Download file/folder without requiring signup
• Versioning of files
• Simultaneous editing and collaboration on files with markup
• Expiration of links and shared files
• Kill pill/remote wipe for shared folders and files
• Integrated DRM capability for files
• Watermarking of protected files
• Secure viewer via web browser for protected data
• Active Directory integration/federation
• 2-factor authentication options
• Encryption options depending on device, folder, user choice
• Authentication and authorization options depending on device, folder, user choice
• Online workspaces for projects or groups to collaborate on documents
• Onsite deployment of solution – no synchronization to cloud storage solutions
• Hosted deployment of solution – cloud storage solution providing all storage
• Integrated protection across multiple sites
• Backup solution integration
• User initiated file/folder restore
• Content awareness of photos, music, video, contacts, bookmarks, browser passwords and integration to client platform
• Email client integration on each client platform
• MAM integration for provisioning, configuration, wipe
• Reporting and auditing
• Rendering of content in web browser for shared/published data via a link (SkyDrive/Google Drive)
• Sharepoint/3rd party CMS content

I thought with this update of the whitepaper it would be a good time to once again focus on items that apply to all virtualized workloads but is critically important to understand when deploying desktop virtualization workloads in which user experience is of the highest importance and you have high over-commitment ratios. From the whitepaper published by VMware I think these paragraphs are the most important for desktop virtualization admins to understand:

When making scheduling decisions, the ratio of the consumed CPU resources to the entitlement is used as the priority of the world. If there is a world that has consumed less than its entitlement, the world is considered high priority and will likely be chosen to run next.

One way to understand prioritizing by the CPU scheduler is to compare it to the CPU scheduling that occurs in UNIX.The key difference between CPU scheduling in UNIX and ESXi involves how a priority is determined. In UNIX, a priority is arbitrarily chosen by the user. If one process is considered more important than others, it is given higher priority. Between two priorities, it is the relative order that matters, not the degree of the difference.

In ESXi, a priority is dynamically re-evaluated based on the consumption and the entitlement. The user controls the entitlement, but the consumption depends on many factors including scheduling, workload behavior, and system load. Also, the degree of the difference between two entitlements dictates how much CPU time should be allocated.

Those sentences are the ones all desktop virtualization administrators should reread until they understand what that means to them. Here’s my translation: “Shares being equal, the more CPU resources you consume (CPU time) the more likely another workload (world) will preempt yours.”

When looking at the workload being done by your users within their hosted virtual desktop it is important to understand the applications and ways in which they will use those apps, the real-time nature of any of the applications being used by them, etc. The main thing I look for are applications that rely on audio or video in order to be effectively used, or is their primary purpose.

These applications are negatively affected when the pCPU is not available and the vCPU must wait for it to become available. When you are overcommitting vCPU to pCPU in ratios like 8 to 1 there is a much higher chance that another vCPU will be waiting for the pCPU. Some interuption and waiting for the pCPU probably won’t be noticed, but if the other 7 vCPU’s are also trying to schedule audio and video you’re going to have serious contention on that pCPU and it will most likely degrade the user experience.

Remember, shares being equal and all vCPU’s having work to be done the CPU scheduler will equally distribute work between the vCPU’s, there is no priority of operating system thread that the vSphere CPU scheduler sees.

What this does is it allows Spotlight to index the files and then make them available to Spotlight or any other quick launch app that uses the index that Spotlight created. So now I can launch my Citrix applications without first launching Citrix Receiver. The subscribed applications also show up in LaunchPad.

The folder with my subscribed applications:

Citrix Receiver showing my subscribed applications:

Below is a video showing me using Spotlight to launch subscribed applications, in this case I’m using it to launch both CloudGateway Enterprise web applications such as MyCitrix and Linkedin as well as published desktops, in this case a physical PC delivered via Citrix RemotePC.

There’s no sitting on the sideline, all you can do if you intend to play in this space is to go all in. In order to do this and stay on top of all the changes I rely on my network and tools. In my daily life these are the tools (listed below) that I use to stay on top of the changing technologies I pay attention to and aggregate quickly to information that I find useful.

• Twitter – by far the best application in my arsenal, I even wrote a blog post on The Impact of Twitter in My Life, Twitter isn’t Facebook, if it feels like it is you’re using it wrong
• Reeder – aggregation of ~750-1000 posts a day that I peruse through
• Pocket – anything I find interesting in Twitter or Reeder I save to read later in Pocket

From Pocket the items I find most interesting I put into a Word document (currently in SkyDrive because ShareFile doesn’t preview the file) that I share with everyone…it’s that Virtualization Resources link in the menu on my blog. I’m about 3 months behind updating that Word doc…but it will get done.

Often at the end of a meeting with a customer I get the comment…”Wow”. Yeah it’s not an accident I know a lot about this stuff, I spend a lot of time, energy, and rely on tools to be the absolute best I can be.

Good luck all…write some more blog posts for me to pocket and add to my Virtualization Resources document.

I recently noticed that my name had a trailing space at the end of my first name, so I logged in to the ShareFile website and edited my info to delete the trailing name. After doing this I noticed shortly afterwards that I had 2 folders on my Mac where there once was 1. One with the trailing space and one without, the newly modified one without the trailing space was syncing correctly.

However when I launched Citrix Receiver and clicked on the Docs tab any files I tried to launch gave me an error that it couldn’t find the file. I suspect it was trying to launch files from the old folder with the trailing space which was now empty as I had deleted the content to do some testing. I uninstalled Citrix Receiver (Citrix ShareFile sync client is integrated) and reinstalled. After going to System Preference and logging in it once again was creating both folders and syncing the one without the trailing space…but Citrix Receiver was still trying to launch files from the old folder with the trailing space.

Once again I uninstalled Citrix Receiver (which also removes the ShareFile components) but this time I deleted a ShareFile folder that was located at ~/Library/Application Support/ShareFile which contained two hidden files (.Device and .Users). Then I installed Citrix Receiver again, setup my ShareFile sync preferences and it was working.

Hope this might help someone else.

Note that we’re using https access to the StoreFront server, modify if needed. It is also expected that you have already created an Access Gateway virtual server and have bound an authentication policy, valid certificate, Secure Ticket Authority (STA) server, and DNS server (Global Access Gateway Settings).

You will also need to go in to the Global Settings on the Access Gateway and under Clientless Access select Configure Domains for Clientless Access and check Allow Domains then OK. The domain names will be present once you have run the configuration.

• STOREFRONT.DOMAIN.LOCAL – FQDN of your StoreFront server, make sure the Netscaler can resolve this name or use an IP address. Double-check the path against your StoreFront configuration (ex: STOREFRONT.DOMAIN.LOCAL/Citrix/StoreWeb)
• DOMAIN.LOCAL – FQDN of your domain
• AG_VS – Name of your Access Gateway Virtual Server you created
• APPCONTROLLER.DOMAIN.LOCAL - FQDN of your App Controller

——-begin config——-

add policy patset StoreFront_cookies
bind policy patset ns_cvpn_default_inet_domains DOMAIN.LOCAL
bind policy patset ns_cvpn_default_inet_domains APPCONTROLLER.DOMAIN.LOCAL
bind policy patset ns_cvpn_default_inet_domains STOREFRONT.DOMAIN.LOCAL
bind policy patset StoreFront_cookies CsrfToken -index 1
bind policy patset StoreFront_cookies ASP.NET_SessionId -index 2
bind policy patset StoreFront_cookies CtxsPluginAssistantState -index 3
bind policy patset StoreFront_cookies CtxsAuthId -index 4
add vpn clientlessAccessProfile SF_cvpn
set vpn clientlessAccessProfile SF_cvpn -URLRewritePolicyLabel ns_cvpn_default_inet_url_label -ClientConsumedCookies StoreFront_cookies
add vpn clientlessAccessPolicy SF_cvpn_pol TRUE SF_cvpn
add vpn sessionAction prof_PNA -defaultAuthorizationAction ALLOW -icaProxy ON -wihome "https://STOREFRONT.DOMAIN.LOCAL/Citrix/Store/PNAgent/config.xml" -ntDomain DOMAIN.LOCAL
add vpn sessionAction prof_cvpn -defaultAuthorizationAction ALLOW -SSO ON -homePage "https://STOREFRONT.DOMAIN.LOCAL/Citrix/StoreWeb" -icaProxy OFF -ntDomain DOMAIN.LOCAL -clientlessVpnMode ON -clientlessModeUrlEncoding TRANSPARENT
add vpn sessionAction prof_native -defaultAuthorizationAction ALLOW -SSO ON -icaProxy OFF -wihome "https://STOREFRONT.DOMAIN.LOCAL/Citrix/StoreWeb" -ntDomain DOMAIN.LOCAL -clientlessVpnMode ON -clientlessModeUrlEncoding TRANSPARENT -storefronturl "https://STOREFRONT.DOMAIN.LOCAL"
add vpn sessionAction prof_AGPlugin -splitTunnel ON -defaultAuthorizationAction ALLOW -icaProxy OFF -wihome "https://STOREFRONT.DOMAIN.LOCAL/Citrix/StoreWeb"
add vpn sessionPolicy pol_PNA "REQ.HTTP.HEADER User-Agent CONTAINS CitrixReceiver && REQ.HTTP.HEADER X-Citrix-Gateway NOTEXISTS" prof_PNA
add vpn sessionPolicy pol_cvpn "REQ.HTTP.HEADER User-Agent NOTCONTAINS CitrixReceiver && REQ.HTTP.HEADER Referer EXISTS" prof_cvpn
add vpn sessionPolicy pol_native "REQ.HTTP.HEADER User-Agent CONTAINS CitrixReceiver && REQ.HTTP.HEADER X-Citrix-Gateway EXISTS" prof_native
add vpn sessionPolicy pol_AGPlugin "REQ.HTTP.HEADER User-Agent NOTCONTAINS CitrixReceiver && REQ.HTTP.HEADER Referer NOTEXISTS" prof_AGPlugin
set vpn parameter -dnsVserverName VS_DNS -defaultAuthorizationAction ALLOW -forceCleanup none -clientOptions all -clientConfiguration all -SSO ON -homePage none -wiPortalMode NORMAL -clientlessModeUrlEncoding TRANSPARENT
bind tunnel global ns_tunnel_cmpall_gzip
bind vpn vserver AG_VS -policy LDAP_POL -priority 100
bind vpn vserver AG_VS -policy pol_PNA -priority 100
bind vpn vserver AG_VS -policy pol_native -priority 110
bind vpn vserver AG_VS -policy pol_cvpn -priority 120
bind vpn vserver AG_VS -policy pol_AGPlugin -priority 130
bind vpn vserver AG_VS -policy SF_cvpn_pol -priority 70 -gotoPriorityExpression END -type REQUEST


——-end config——-

Well, that fancy upgrade isn’t going to be noticed by your users, except that they website probably looks different and Windows start button is gone, if you don’t take into account an upgrade plan for the client software on the endpoints. The Windows and Mac machines can be tricky, and functionality that used to exist like launching apps from the system tray might be gone, but these are all things that can be overcome with time and training.

The hard ones I’ve found are projects that didn’t take into account that the thin clients connecting to the environment might not support that latest version of Citrix Receiver, even worse they might not support a version of Citrix Online Plug-in that is tested or supported against XenApp 6.5. Now we’re going to have a tough conversation, because it’s no longer something we can overcome with training, email blasts, and time…you’re going to have to spend money.

The Citrix stance on support for client software is non-existent from what I can find, but I remember something about supporting the current version and 1 major version back. In the system requirements for Citrix XenApp 6.5 they mention they tested with Online Plug-in 12.1 but some features are not available. My general suggestion is you need to be thinking about how to get to version 12.x…if you can’t get there you need to think about buying new thin clients, changing your client strategy, or accepting the risk. I’ve seen ICA v7.x clients connect to a XenApp 6.5 farm

If you’re using thin clients, they don’t last forever, in fact their useful lifetime is probably not defined by the hardware but rather the software they support (see post on BrianMadden.com). Thin clients add complexity, it’s a world of choices and there is no perfect solution, just don’t forget them in your upgrade budgeting and planning.