Hello,

Is there anybody out there that is using the Citrix Access Gateway Advanced edtion who is incredibly frustrated with the naff built in reporting utilities? 

Knowing who accessed what and when is pretty important stuff don’t you think?  But have you actually tried to produce a report for your security team yet with all that information in there?  Not unless you have exported the event log entries and have managed to take multiple screen shots of the event log consolidator… Nice but no thanks…

A quick Google of “Access Gateway Reporting” returns a product called ‘Clear 2 View’ which claims to fill the void of historical and advanced reporting which is a much needed (a no brainer to be honest) feature of the Access Gateway product range.  

Here is how to install it:

Everything I am about to demonstrate to you here is free. You won’t have to spend a penny on software to build this architecture, the end result here is a centralised storage system that can be used for iSCSI or NAS storage hosting to all your ESX clients to enable the use of VMotion, HA and DRS services.

VMware ESXi is free and can be downloaded here. Openfiler NAS/iSCSI appliance is free and can be downloaded here

Let us begin.

First of all, we will build or iSCSI or NAS device using ‘Openfiler’. You can download Openfiler from the link above, it is an easy installation (very similar to VMware ESX actually). Here are the required steps to get Openfiler up and running:

 Citrix Access Gateway Advanced Edition is a great product, lots of my time is spent designing, implementing and integrating this product usually with a Citrix XenApp backend which includes Web Interface.

One question seems to always pop up though.  Is it resilient and what happens if a component of the infrastructure fails?

Let us take a look at the components required to build the infrastructure and what might happen if one fails.  We will start at the front end and work backwards from there (as this is what the client hits first).

I know this has been done to death over the past few years, but since Citrix are due to release Citrix XenApp 5.0 on Terminal Services 2008 soon I thought it may be worth while posting an article on the key infrastructure benefits that Citrix XenApp has to offer.  If you are new to the application delivery market place and want to learn a little more about how these 2 products differ then this article may assist you in your future decision making.

Currently, this article analyses the key infrastructure differences between the latest application delivery platform from Citrix (XenApp 4.5 - was renamed recently from Presentation Server 4.5) and Microsoft Terminal Services 2008.  Later this year this article will be updated to include the new features of Citrix XenApp 5.0.  I have published this article before, but forgot we were now using the ‘XenApp’ name… whoops.  A quick google search will return all the history you need to know about the renaming history of this product, or you can check out Brian Madden’s site which provide you with an absolute bible of information, news and sometimes controversial opinions on everything you need to know about the application delivery and virtual infrastructure market place.