Farm Monitor Gadget for XenApp
So I have been toying around with this idea for a long time. I actually started this project roughly 1 year ago but never got around to actually finishing it.... until now!
The function is simple; A very basic vista gadget that uses MFCOM and pulls back a few stats from a single farm.
The use case is mostly a novelty but I thought it would be fun to create!
Enough with the background, onto the gadget!
Requirements:
OS: Vista
Citrix XenApp SDK: 4.0,4.5,5.0
Server: Windows 200x
Citrix XenApp: 4.0, 4.5, 5.0
Download the gadget using the link at the bottom of this post. Once downloaded simply open the file and it will prompt to install.
Once installed you should see the gadget appear in your lists of gadgets:
It does require the XenApp SDK from Citrix which can be download here.
Once you have the gadget and the SDK installed you can add it to your sidebar. From there open the settings menu (wrench icon when hovered over the gadget), input the name of a server in the XenApp farm you want to monitor and select your refresh interval. Depending on the size of the farm the lower settings may take too long to return values before the next refresh occurs. If this happens adjust the setting with what works best.
Please keep in mind that the gadget must be running within the context of a user that is a XenApp farm admin AND has the proper DCOM permissions on the server you configure within the settings.
Updates
I am working to update the gadget which will make it a bit more useful. Expect to see flyouts for each stat section.
- Servers flyout: Will show a list of all servers in the farm and allow quick export of the list
- Sessions flyout: Will show a list of the session in the farm along with basic details.
- Farm Load flyout: Will show Farm load by Server and/or Zone
Also working to pull back the total license count and the licenses in use. This is a bit more difficult since this requires some parsing of the data to properly ensure only XenApp licenses are returned.
Future Gadgets
- Quick User Search : Allow a quick search for a user in the farm
- XenServer Gadget: Pull back basic stats for XenServer
Future Applications
Don't want to give away all of the secrets but I am working on a number of other useful (free) utilities, more on this soon!
Download
FarmMonitor.gadget:
FarmMonitor.gadget (27.8 KiB, 1,306 hits)
It’s been a while..
So I haven't posted in a while as my free time has dwindled to nothing. In December my wife and I welcomed twins into the family. We already have a 4 year old daughter so needless to say it has been very busy around the house.
I have some interesting projects (at least I think so) I am working on in my free time at home but that amounts to about 30 minutes a week if I'm lucky.
I'm hoping to be able to post some things shortly but I guess we'll see!
XenServer IDE performance issue – Resolved
As I said in my previous post after setting up XenServer I had problems with horrible perfomance using an IDE drive. After investigating I found it was because the OS was using a generic ide driver. Because of this you could not turn DMA/UDMA on for the drive which resulted in pathetic read/write times.
/dev/hdd:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 0 (off)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 19457/255/63, sectors = 312581808, start = 0
I found an article related to previous versions of XenServer that detailed how to modify the boot loader to get a workaround for the problem. However, it appears in XenServer 5 the was changed and I was unable to get this to work in the updated location. For those who are looking it is under /boot/ and the conf file is extlinux.conf.
After trying a lot of different things I finally had to rebuild the initrd image file that is used in the boot loader to include the specific driver for my controller. In my case this was an ATI controller.
Once I did that I could then enable DMA and performance was not an issue after that.
10 to Xen on a budget?
So a number of months ago when I found out about XenServer Express I got excited. My lab at home was a mix of old pc's converted to pretty weak servers and it made for some tough testing. I immediately began trying to convince the wife to allow me to build a new box so I could have an easier, more seamless setup.
I began to spec out what I needed and looked at the HCL for XenServer. Unfortunately finding clear support for most non-server based hardware was slim. During this time VMWare released ESXi which intrigued me more. The HCL for VMWare is even more strict that that of XenServer.
Due to budget reasons I was just able to scrounge together enough cash to build a very wallet friendly build. While not extremely powerful it will do what I need. I went more for what I could afford that what fit directly in line with either products HCLs, it was a gamble but if all else failed I could just use VMWare Server....
I already had an old server tower,an optical drive, and a 160gb 7200 RPM IDE HD, so all I needed were the basic other pieces of hardware. CPU, Memory, Motherboard, PSU, NIC, and a Video card. Since nearly 100% of the motherboards these days come with integrated NICs that was one less thing to buy seperately. I also made sure in my search to find a motherboard with on-board video.
I ended up settling on the following components and ordered them from good ole' Newegg.
BIOSTAR TFORCE TA780G M2+ AM2+/AM2 AMD 780G Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Brisbane 2.6GHz Socket AM2 65W Dual-Core Processor Model ADO5000DOBOX - Retail
CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TWIN2X2048-6400 - Retail
Thermaltake TR2 W0070RUC 430W ATX Power Supply - Retail
The CPU is a 64bit dual core and supports AMD-V technology which covered one of the basic requirements for both hypervisors. The CPU and Mobo actually came together in a combo deal that worked out best for price as it knocked 15 bucks off. It did not hurt that this particular motherboard had some of the better reviews of the sub $100 boards. I could have actually gone for an OEM cpu but I decided that grabbing a retail I would save $25 on a heatsink/fan. While the stock coolers are not the best I decided for this build it would not be an issue.
Corsair has been my memory of choice for a long time and it worked out in the budget. If you are wondering why I only went with 2gb of memory for this it all boiled down to budget. I did make sure I picked a motherboard that at least had 4 slots so I can throw another 2gb in later(or more).
The PSU came as one of the most reviewed/best rated so that was a quick decision. Both the Memory and PSU came with a mail-in rebate that totaled $25.
All in all the total cost for these parts came to be 218.45 with shipping and handling. Take away the $25 in mail-in rebates and the price drops to 193.45, under $200!
One of the issues I have with XenServer and building a budget machine is that the memory can't be shared, aka no memory overcommit. Once you carve out 512mb of RAM for one VM, and that VM is running, that RAM is gone. VMWare has what I feel is a more mature memory architecture so that you can share among the VMs. In an enterprise environment this may or may not be the best route but when you are dealing with a budget machine, a limited amount of memory and guests that will for the most part be idle most of the time, it makes sense to squeeze as much as possible out of the hardware. That being said I actually decided to try and get ESXi up and running on the hardware first.
Once I had all the parts thrown together and the BIOS configured to my liking I stuck the ESXi image in and was met with the following error:
I wasn't sure if this was due to the IDE drive or an incompatibility with the motherboard. I thought maybe that Virtualization was not enabled in the BIOS but from the looks of it that was not the issue. I spent some time trying to get it running but in the end I was running short on 'lab time' so I had to move on. I threw in the XenServer 5.0 cd and let it roll. It did hang on the first run but once I rebooted and tried again it installed the hypervisor and I was met with the XenServer console.
From that point I installed XenCenter and am currently getting some VMs configured. Again, while I truly would have rather went the ESXi route since it opened the door for more guests running on a single box I am happy to get something up and running.
So far the only problem I am having is with poor performance with what appears to be the IDE drive. I am going to play around with some configuratiosn to see if I can get it running more smoothly.
Eventually I will throw more memory into the machine, overclock it a bit and get some SATA II drives. For now, for a $200 build I think it is going to work out fantasticly!
It took a little longer than 10 to Xen, more like 15 to Xen...but I'll blame that on the 'budget'!
Citrix Synergy Updates… Finally
It was a fun filled week of technology and I loved every minute of it. I'm going to give a quick recap of what the week consisted of:
Monday - Attended CSEIT where there was a great session on Citrix Troubleshooting.
Tuesday - Keynote speech by Mark Templeton announcing a few new products, one of which was XenDesktop. I have reservations about classifying this as a 'one stop fix' since to me no technology can cover all aspects of business needs. I more or less agree with what Shawn Bass said on Tuesday while speaking at 'Geek Speak Live' where he stated that VDI is not a bad idea it just isn't right for every situation.
Tuesday was the first night of Geek Speak Live. This was a fantastic event that had a number of CTP's speaking about whatever they wanted. The room was packed and the conversations contained no marketing BS..Wonderful stuff!. Check out Citrix Underground for videos from each of the Geek Speak events(and more)
Wednesday - Yet more keynote speakers about new products and the industry. Checked out a number of product vendors and attended a lot of Citrix sessions. One theme I noticed from a lot of the product vendors were that there were many that focused on virtualization and XenSource in particular. I assume since Xen was(and still is to a degree) open source for so long that companies already had many products created and just hitched their wagons to the Synergy cart. Visited more vendors and discussed their products more in depth. Continued to attend various sessions, a number of which were immediately helpful. This was the second night for Geek Speak Live and then after that, Geek Speak Barcamp. This was the event that I was going to talk about MFCOM in the Enterprise and thefantastic things you can do with it. Unfortunately as the night went on more and more attendees trickled off. The word was that a company gave away free Houston Astros tickets. By the time it got to where I was to speak there was no one left but Citrix employees. What could I have told them about MFCOM?! Half of the people in attendance were those who likely had a hand in creating it!
We ended up talking to a number of Citrix folks about how the event was going, what we thought of Geek Speak Live and any ideas we had for the future. It turned out to be a great night!
Thursday - More Citrix presentations on various products and wrapped up talking to some final vendors. I had an MFCOM workshop with Dr. SDK himself! Unfortunately by the time I talked to Fred and was out of the session I had missed most of the Geek Speak Live for Thursday. I had some personal business I had to talk to my wife about and then I headed to the final night party. Dana Carvey was the entertainment and it was a fantastic show. He didn't hold back at all!
Friday - Most people flew out on Friday morning since the conference was officially over but I had stayed to attend two other hands-on workshops.
All in all it was a great event, although I have nothing to compare to since it was my first 'Tech Conference'
I highly recommend checking out the Citrix Synergy underground site since it has a lot of great content.
Finally, a special thanks goes out to Vishal G. who had asked if I wanted to 'speak' at the barcamp event. It was a great opportunity, even if the audience consisted of Citrix employees!