Citrix Xen Desktop (DDC) / Provisioning Server (PVS) & vSphere SDK

I’m sure many of you have run into an issue with setting up Citrix Xen Desktop (DDC). As i was setting up a new “Desktop Group” I ran into a problem when trying to configure the vCenter SDK address. The configuration wizard show you an example that looks say ‘For example, https://VirtualCetner.example.com/sdk” which is what you would expect to use and you would also expect it to work. Think again. When you try to setup your vCenter SDK address you will be presented with and error “The hosting infrastructure could not be reached at the specified address.” Citrix takes security serious so unless you plan on replacing the default SSL certificate on your vCenter server you will need to hack out a work around. Now I would agree that in production you should replace the default SSL but if your just trying to spin up a demo or test environment it can be a hassle.

So I searched the web over and over and found a number of threads with many of ways to resolve the issue only none of them seemed to work for me. However a combination of a number of things that I found did. So I’m here to save you the trouble of finding all of various pages with partial solutions. Below you will find exactly what you need to do to make this work.

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DynamicOps Delivers Automated, Space-Efficient Virtual Desktop Solution

“The desktop deployment productivity tools that NetApp and DynamicOps offer significantly increase the value of virtual infrastructures by improving performance, providing essential data management resources, and reducing costs,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions and Alliances, NetApp. “Enterprises and service providers can now offer multiple, cost-effective service level options for virtual desktop deployments by leveraging the unique orchestration of virtual storage capabilities that are part of the new DynamicOps solution.”

The full release can be found at http://www.dynmaicops.com/news/

VMware SRM is it the right choice?

VMware SRM is gaining a lot of traction and many companies are quickly making it the defacto choice for DR in their environments, but is SRM the right choice?  For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to get familiar with SRM (Site Recovery manager), it is a Disaster Recovery automation product from VMware that integrates into vCenter.  Through the use of SRA’s (Storage Replication Adapters) SRM is able to integrate with many storage arrays making it aware of Datastores that are replicated.  Some of it’s most popular fetures include the ability to group servers in to recovery groups giving you the ability to fail groups of servers or a whole datacenter.  It also allows you to perform live failover tests on the  the same groups of servers or an entire site.  These are some of the most popular reasons companies are implementing SRM.  The ability to easily run DR tests without impacting live running systems has made it a huge success.  SRM also allows you to create DR run book automation through the use of linear workflows that you create to perform different steps and tasks involved with failing over from the primary site to a secondary.

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