nickholmquist.com

The Farm Monitor gadget has been updated to work correctly with Windows 7 Beta.

You can get the updated files here:

  FarmMonitor.gadget (27.8 KiB, 1,068 hits)

I am working to add features to the gadget and would love to hear any suggestions.  I am planning to recode the MFCOM pieces into C# and expose it via  a COM object.  This should give a bit more power for any multi farm processing that needs to be done.

If you have any thoughts/comments please post them here or shoot me an email at “nick  (at) nickholmquist.com”

Tech

So my last post talked about how much the Citrix developer community site has changed since I started using Citrix products.  What is funny is I had completely forgotten about a site I was creating (MFCOMScripting.com – July 2007) before I knew about the Community site Citrix was working on (I think November or so of 2007 is when it debuted).

The goal was to create a site that would contain code examples for each individual object/property that is accessible via MFCOM.  I have always liked the simplicity of DevGuru.com and how they give clear and precicise examples and thought that would translate to making MFCOM easy to use.  I had hoped to include the most popular languages in the examples and obviously accept user submissions for example code.  I also had ideas for a code repository for community donated code, a wiki for ’super scripts’ (when I was more VBScript focused) and a few other little ideas.

Of course as I was working on this as Citrix released their community page and my site seemed unoriginal and pointless.  Therefore it has been sitting dormant.

I only bring this up since I happened to be looking at the list of my domains and realized how easy it is to forget things in the midst of how busy most of us in the IT field are.

MFCOM

I guess I didn’t realize how much of a secret the developer licenses for Citrix XenApp were.  However based on Vishal’s latest post in reference to it, it would seem that many people had no idea they existed!

These licenses, while only 2 ccu’s, are a fantastic way to get started toying around with XenApp and subsequently learning how to write scripts and/or applications to use with it.  This coupled with the XenServer line – which is now free – gives a fantastic opportunity to build a home lab easily (and legally I might add).

I said it at Synergy last year and I will say it again, the SDK’s are a huge plus to using Citrix products.  I appalud Citrix for the opennness they have in regard to their developer community.  I have only been using Citrix products for roughly 3 and a half years and even in that short time I have seen the Citrix Developer Network grow from very basic forums to where it is today- a pretty active community for those who want to improve upon the tools that already exist.

Anyway, I highly recommend checking out Vishal’s blog entry as it is a way to get your feet wet with Citrix products!

Uncategorized

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, 1,068 hits)

Uncategorized

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!

Uncategorized