Into the certification saddle again. Soothing cream at the ready...

Finally, I've made time and found energy to concentrate on updating my IT certification.  I'm in sore need of it - my MCSE is in NT4, My CCNA has been out of date for god only knows how long, and the Citrix was Metaframe XP2.  Ye-es, I'm out of date.  And what I have been conscious of is that the tech knowledge that I have on tap is not perhaps all it should be, and because of that I enjoyed my last job less.  (I'm currently "resting", by the way.  More on this later.)


So I'm hitting the books again.  I'm working towards updating my MCSE to 2003 level rather than 2008 (I've barely touched 2008 so far), figuring I can take the upgrade exam later if I really want to.  I also had a set of books for the core four exams, so that helped too.  I'm also using practice exams from www.transcenders.com, who have never failed me in the past.  In my experience, the transcenders are bloody hard - if you're passing all the practice exams well, the real thing is a relative cakewalk.

So that's the core of what I do dealt with.  How about the nice-to-haves?

Cisco stuff?  It's been good knowledge to have, and occasionally it's useful.  I wouldn't say I've ever used it regularly, and the 2003 networking side seems to have been expanded enough to include enough of the additional TCP/IP stuff I got out of taking it last time around.

I've done quite a bit of VMWare stuff in my last job, so thought that maybe the VCP program would be useful.  But you have to attend the course, or you can't even take the exam.  This boils my piss for several reasons.

VMWare say - Oh, you have to do the coursework too.  It's a pre-requisite, you know. 

I say - Balls. Absolute, unalloyed, bollocks. 

This is about money, pure and simple.  This is about nice cosy tie-ins with training providers, where employers with money to spare (and how many of them are there these days?) cheerfully hand over three thousand bucks so that one of their employees can spend five days having the manual read to them.

I've been managing VM farms for yonks, and left most of them in a better state than when I arrived.  There's not a lot they haven't chucked at me.  What am I going to learn in the four days that it takes the new boy in the corner whose organization might be going virtual next year to get up to speed?  (No offence to the new boy - I've been him before)

Who's to say too, that I don't learn best self-studying?  And haven't VMWare figured anything from Microsoft, Cisco's approach?  Have they not figured that one of the reasons organizations stick with Microsoft and Cisco is because it's easy to get support?   That having a good, accessible certification program that's not treated as just another cash cow is in fact, actually an insurance for tomorrow? 

Like this tomorrow, for example, where Microsoft and Citrix offer virtualization products too.  Hyper-V is covered in the MCITP certification, there's a separate CCA for XenServer. 

And unlike VMWare, and the father-and son sack race at Mr Burn's house, attendance is not mandatory.

I wonder what virtualization solution I'll be implementing next?

It's been a while...

A long time since I posted last. It's been a long time too, since I last built a Citrix farm, but even though the name's changed and we're three versions on from the last time I built one, the good bits about the install are still good and the bad bits are still crap. Although I think we can add the main GUI for the install list to the bad pile: it looks like Mr Citrix's three year old got hold of the crayons.

One of the other niggles I've always had with Citrix has been building the new farm directly onto SQL during the install process, and I can report that hasn't changed. It doesn't seem to matter how careful I am setting up and testing ODBC connections, even whether or not I set the ODBC connection up using the SA account (not recommended, just out of experimental curiosity to see if it was a rights issue) - I'll always get an error.

And when you get that error, you'll get it again if you try and confirm the farm membership using CHFARM, at least if you go straight from a failed SQL install to another attempted SQL install. The solution here's to run CHFARM, set up a local Access based farm, then run the CHFARM operation again, having first taken care to flatten your SQL database. I don't know why it should be that way - it just always has been...

A day of deep joy...

How I love sysadmining while surrounded by morons. Today's a prime example. We have an accountancy application which is, like most of these things, just about OK when used in the environment which it was designed for. Local domain, fat client, normal, networked printer. Even then, it's needed a fair bit of tweaking to get it right - it prints from an environment variable, for example, because thats the way it does it. It's one of them.

Someone tried to put it on citrix and we had a nightmare with it. We couldn't get it to print properly at all, despite the application vendor's being on site for a couple of days and dialling in god knows how many times. So I made sure that the people who needed to use it got full-fat clients, quick sharp. Everyone happy.

Except some genius has decided that it would be just too great for someone at a related institute across town to be able to dial into our accounting application through citrix. And our interface to the outside world, I might add, is rubbish. Not in terms of speed, but reliability of service of certain things. We have other people who connect through citrix, for example. Sometimes their printer auto-creation works, sometimes it doesn't. Depends on the wind. Sometimes it takes five minutes to log into NFuse (that's how far behind we are); sometimes, seconds. Reboot router, phone up ISP and complain. Right now, those are our options. So it's not going to work. In a month of Sundays. Even if it did work in the first place, which it doesn't.

Obviously, someone's ego's going to be bruised when it becomes apparent that this is going to have be er, altered. No guesse for who's going to end up wearing it, though. Be nice if I got asked at the start, for once.

Citrix finding a new raison d'etre?

I talked before about Citrix being a company in need of a new killer app. Virtualization, it seems, is where Citrix are putting their money on their new future being.

They paid out $500m for open-source virtualization company XenSource, and have been aggressive in pushing their new baby. They've also got an interesting take on the cloud / no cloud thing. They reckon companies need internal clouds first - hosted of course, on Citrix virtualization / application delivery boxes - to be ready to take advantage of the opportunities when the bridges to the real cloud fall into place. They've developed Citrix Cloud Center too, to push to the third-party cloud vendors, just so you're in no doubt they're serious.

Now they're collaborating with Intel, creating a bare-metal hypervisor based on the Xen one, probably aimed at delivering virtualized desktops, which will have the considerable bonus of being fully encryted.

Now all they need to do is get the Xen hypervisor integrated with HP's industry leading System Insight Manager. Fortunately, it's apparently "on the list."

Just when I thought they looked dead and buried, Citrix suddenly looks like it might not be takeover fodder after all.

Expanding a Point

I thought I'd expand on one of yesterday's postings; that which alluded to Citrix's killer app status slipping as the competition have caught up.

I've always been a fan of the possibilities of thin-client computing. The picture that Citrix paint - and deliver, to be fair, in many places - of an IT infrastructure with a smaller TCO, a smaller carbon footprint and centralized administration: who isn't waiting to be converted?

So when I came here and found a legacy Citrix environment - Metaframe XP FR3, two years out of support but still happily chugging along, supporting a couple of hundred users quite happily - one of the first things I looked at was updating this and asking the questions: What else can I do with this? Can we expand our thin-client useage, save money on our clients and our power bill, reduce our carbon footprint and be responsible global citizens? And unfortunately, to all of those questions, the answers were not enough and no.

Citrix do quite a good job of pointing out the cost / benefits of a thin-client network. But who, I ask, can afford to chuck their existing fat clients in the bin, and start again? Who can afford to run two networks side-by-side - because that's what we found we would almost need to do. Yes, we could look to savings three years down the track, when our current desktop refresh cycle reached it's end. But for a public sector organisation, especially one in up to its neck in the financial mire - three years is forever.

The real killers though, are Microsoft and Procurve. Microsoft because their new Windows Server 2008 does everything XP FR3 did (albeit without the crap that no-one used, like application billing). Procurve have finally been unleashed by HP and allowed to compete with Cisco, who have started making grumbling noises sounding like Cisco are going to kcick off their own range of Blade Servers, but that's bye-the-bye. Net result: when our network infrastructure reached the end of its lease, we were able to deliver gigabit to the desktop at two-thirds the cost of the Cisco offering - which offered less.

So the extra bandwidth that Terminal Services - or whatever Microsoft are calling it now - is going to consume doesn't matter any more. Citrix is looking pretty dead.

The final nail in the coffin is the ability of the machines now reaching the end of their lives, ones which we traditionally stuck a Citrix client on and punted to the backroom staff, so they could still have a reasonable user experience on old hardware. With 2ghz P4's now coming into retirement - where's the need?

Where next for Apple?

Steve Jobs is taking time out, as you probably know. I wonder where that leaves Apple? Even more so than Microsoft when Bill Gates was in charge, Apple is Steve Jobs. Apple's shortcomings and strengths are also, therefore, tied up in him. So what might be on the cards for Apple if the new hand on the tiller keeps their own lookout and doesn't simply use Steve's binoculars?

I said yesterday that Apple's server offerings are awful, and I meant it. Microsoft's building all sorts of fun stuff into the Windows Server family these days - virtualization, remote application delivery with Terminal Server 2008, CRM; loads of good stuff. Plus of course, all the tried and tested backoffice stuff that we've been using for years.

Someone else is getting into virtualization now - Citrix are finally looking serious about gettnig into the game, and about time too, given that Terminal Server 2008 does everything that the Presentation Server releases of only a couple of years ago did. Whether it does enough to distinguish itslef from either the ubiquitous VMWare or Microsoft's own offerings is another matter. Citrix is looking like a company in need of a space.

Have Apple got that? They've got the iPhone, and the iPod, and the Mac, and Citrix is all about accessing the same applications across different platforms. If the downturn goes on and domestic customers find themselves unable to justify that new Mac, Apple's going to need business customers. For that, it needs something to put on its servers...