Lewan Technology Blog

Often times I’m called in to perform a health check of a VMware Horizon environment due to a performance or operational issue. These issues make the environment unstable and effect user productivity. There are various things we can do in the environment to optimize the persistent or non-persistent virtual desktops, but first we need to make sure the virtual desktop infrastructure is configured properly.

Proper configuration entails proper server sizing. More often than not, these servers are not sized properly. Under-sizing causes performance issues and over-sizing wastes resources.

The VMware Horizon Access Point greatly reduces the amount of resources needed for the redundant or non-redundant Horizon Environment.

Previously when deploying Security Server, a single Security Server needed to be sized as a Connection Server which is 4vCPU and 12GB of RAM. If you combine that with the Connection Server that the Security Server is paired with, the Connection Server is once again 4vCPU and 12GB of RAM. If this was a redundant environment your Connection Server and Security Server infrastructure tallies up to 24vCPU and 72Gb of RAM (2 Internal Connection Servers, 2 External Connection Servers and 2 Security Servers all sized at 4vCPU and 12GB of RAM).

Citrix and Microsoft appear to be re-kindling their partnership and Azure could soon be the Citrix preferred cloud hosting solution. Check out this video at the 13:00 minute mark.

One basic task I found very underwhelming in the Microsoft Azure Resource Manager (ARM) portal was the backup. If you're thinking about taking a snapshot of a server as a precaution before you make any updates—sorry—snapshots don’t exist. You'll have to replace snapshots with backup and restore. I’ll break this down into the three parts: Backup, Recover, and Restore.

I recently ran into a snag where my Citrix XenApp Session Host was created in my Azure Premium Storage account. When you capture an image as a template, Azure places the template in the same storage account in which the server is currently running.

The Template folder is hidden by default in the ARM portal. You can use Azure Storage Explorer to navigate and see the Templates folder to get the template path and vhd name. However, the Storage Explorer doesn’t show the Template folder in the Premium Storage account. I can only guess that this is a bug. 

Here’s a work around by running a few PowerShell commands. Now I’m able to see the Template folder right from the ARM portal. 

Microsoft Windows Server recommends that you Validate Preseeded Files for DFS Replication during setup of Distributed File System (DFS) Replication. But when you validate file hashes on either your source or destination server you may get the following error:

Get-DfsrFileHash : Could not calculate the file hash. Error code 0x00000005

There isn't much information on error 0x00000005, however there is a simple fix I've found.

In a perfect world—in any Citrix XenDesktop deployment—all of the applications install, license and run perfectly on a non-persistent desktop. Unfortunately, the world is not perfect and there are applications out there that, for whatever reason, will not work properly on a non-persistent desktop.

Like many organizations, you may want to enforce a Default Retention Policy for your users to comply with company policy, government regulations or legal needs. However, many help desks skip over retention policy setup during the new user process. Luckily there is a to set the default retention policy for all new mailboxes.

One of our clients recently migrated their email from Microsoft Exchange to Microsoft Office 365 and after the fact realized they hadn't migrated their employee retention policy settings. We were unsure of which users had a one year retention policy or two year retention policy.

The good news is, this information isn't totally lost.