OK, so I know that this isn’t really related to application delivery or virtual infrastructure, but it has been a pain in the ass for a long time.

Lots of people I know in my industry have turned to the Apple Macbook, especially now that VMware Fusion, Microsoft Office 2008, Omni Graffle, Microsoft’s RDP client and the Citrix ICA client have been available for a while.

However, myself and most of my colleagues have all experienced the ‘bluetooth not available error’ which seems to come and go which is incredibly frustrating if most of your peripherals are bluetooth enabled.

Something I have wanted to develop for a while, is an easier mechanism for exporting the whole data store contents of a Citrix XenApp farm, on the fly, with the click of a button.

Michael Rose, Research Analyst at IDC, discusses the rise of best practices for virtual desktop infrastructures in this executive interview sponsored by Citrix Systems.

We will be publishing a number of posts over the next couple of months which will provide newcomers  to the application delivery and virtual infrastructure space with a better understanding of the products, benefits and usage scenarios.

What is SmartAuditor?

At the very basic level, it is a recording of an ICA session for playback later. This could be used for troubleshooting (record a user that has intermittent issues for platback later when the issue arises) or compliance (record all users of the HR application to have proof of what session did what). This is 1st rev some of the things you may wish for are not included (Record session on the fly after session has started, searchable files, or the fact you have to disable session sharing to get the thing to work…).

Citrix have now released (finally) Access Gateway Advanced beta support for Vista with the latest hotfix AAC450W003.

Many customers have waited a long time to provide all the functionality of Citrix Access Gateway Advanced to Vista clients, hopefully it will be out of beta soon and into production.http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX117123 

Here are some focus points you can use when troubleshooting Citrix streamed applications that are not visable or will not launch. 

Streamed applications are not displayed to the user 

 Check your Web Interface configuration and ICA clients 

• Open your Web Interface site, choose ‘Manage Application Types’ and ensure you have the right setting applied.
• Ensure you have the latest streaming client installed (currently version 1.1) on either the client if streaming to the client or on your Citrix XenApp server if you are streaming directly to the server.
• Ensure you are using the very latest version of the Program Neighbourhood Agent or the Citrix ICA Web Client (depending on how you are launching the applications.
• The full Program Neighbourhood client isn’t supported, streamed applications have to be delivered through Web Interface either via a Web Interface site or PN agent site.

Another demonstration from Citrix as they evolve the ICA protocol to support the delivery of intense graphics over a remote ICA session, Quake 3 is demonstrated towards the end of the video.