CommVault Simpana 10 SP9 Released

Amid the holiday season you might have missed the Service Pack 9 release from CommVault so here’s a reminder, it’s out. And if you’re in a XenServer shop, it’s likely a worthwhile upgrade. A big complaint of our customers was the discontinued XenServer support in earlier service pack levels of v10. Well, it’s back. You always had the option to deploy in-guest agents but in SP9 the Virtual Server Agent supports the XenServer hypervisor so you can capture full VM images. Based on the excitement I saw coming out of Citrix’s XenServer 6.5 announcements earlier this month, I think it’s a good call to bring support for this platform into CommVault again.

Another feature I’m excited for is the Live Sync Replication of Virtual Machines. This feature is still considered “Early Release” but I’m excited all the same. With Live Sync, you’ll be able to leverage your CV infrastructure to replicate VM’s from one site to another. These features exist within vSphere and other 3rd party tools but it’ll be great to have all your data protection tools within one pane of glass with CommVault.

Read more about SP9 features here: http://documentation.commvault.com/commvault/v10/others/new_features/newsletters/newsletter_sp9.pdf

If you’re ready for an upgrade, drop us a line as we can help speed you through the process. If you’re running v9 or v8, we can help you validate that the rest of your environment is ready for the leap to v10.

IWAN: ­ What can IWAN do for your Business?

Traditionally businesses take on huge investments in their WAN and at many times the cost of upgrading to keep up with the network demands or moving to a new provider is painful and typically becomes a long drown out project that ties up business time, money and resources.  This is where IWAN helps; this solution is transparent to the underlying network that is runs on.  Thus, making the corporate network an overlay to the underlying ISP’s network(s).  At the same time simplifying the overall WAN architecture and providing a flexible, consistent management domain that allows businesses to be provider agnostic and bring branch offices online in days rather than weeks.

Today private backbone networks in general are high-cost networks that get sold due to them providing a consistent end-to-end reliable network. They also fall short in many aspects that are critical to businesses. Businesses are almost always constrained with provider’s time and WAN provisioning, effectively making the business move slower. Now with improvements in the reliability, performance, and relative cost of Internet connections lead many organizations to leverage the Internet to address these challenges by connecting branches directly to the Internet, to supplement the WAN; and by using the Internet as the WAN. This is an example of how IWAN(Intelligent WAN) has great potential to solve many business issues and creating a more flexible architecture to meet business needs.

Cisco’s IWAN strategy is a new concept that many businesses are looking at to make the business more flexible and agile.  IWAN helps business improve efficiency in all aspects of the business.  From simplifying the network, streamline operations, deployment and management of their WAN while at the same time provide huge savings by right sizing the branch office WAN to provide intelligent active/active connectivity to the Internet and corporate network.  Today’s workforce and their associated applications depend more and more on the network with each application carrying key network metrics and thresholds that define the QoE (quality of experience) to users.   This is where the IWAN is able to dynamically steer applications across links when performance fallout out of threshold.  This is one of many key components that make up the IWAN strategy.  Below I outline some more benefits that encompass the overall IWAN strategy that business can leverage to overcome limitations in their current architecture.

Intelligent WAN Deployments: Balancing Cost with SLA

Here is a great article giving more information on how Cisco’s IWAN strategy could be your future WAN backbone.  http://www.provenmethod.com/iwan-cisco-betting-internet-will-future-wan-backbone/

Key Business Outcomes that IWAN can bring:

• Transport Independent Design
  • Fast to deploy.  (Faster-to-Market) Provider agnostic providing a consistent operational model.
  • IWAN allows you to get up and running fast and still maintain a single management routing domain to simply design and operational support. This design supports multiple internet delivery options including 4G, satellite, etc. so that business operations can be brought up day 1.
  • Makes network more flexible, reliable and more effective in meeting the business needs.

• Distributed Secure Internet Access
  • Local internet access without backhauling to corporate
  • Increased performance and productivity.
  • Branch workers using SaaS Apps and apps run slowly and users get frustrated because they share bandwidth with all traffic on the network and gets hair-pined through the DC to enforce security and compliance centrally.  With IWAN CWS (Cloud Web Services) can allow to enforce security and allowing Internet traffic go directly off at the Internet taking load off the internal WAN.  You are able to centralize policy and enforcement but in the cloud and now you have faster app performance witch allows for happier users and increase productivity.

• Intelligent Path Control
  • Allowing the network to adapt to Applications performance needs bringing a reliable and consistent user experience.
  • IWAN PfR able to detect brown-outs (packet drops) Meeting normally interrupted and meeting rescheduled.  With IWAN it provides alternate paths dynamical to keep Video conference working and provide consistent Video experience.   Meeting is not canceled and due to intelligent WAN detecting poor quality and moves traffic to another link.  Increases productivity.

• Optimizing Applications Performance
  • Application acceleration and bandwidth optimization to give users LAN like speeds.
  • (MediaNet) enabled  media-aware network so that the network can intelligently apply critical network services to provide a consistent media rich experience to the users.
    • Accelerating deployment of applications, minimizing complexity and ongoing operational costs, increasing visibility into the network, and helping to scale the infrastructure for the best quality of experience (QoE), by ensuring predictability, performance, quality, and security
    • Can detect and optimize different media and application types (telepresence, video surveillance, desktop collaboration, and streaming media) to deliver the best experience
    • Network-aware: Can detect and respond to changes in device, connection, and service availability
• Simplify network approach and increase operational efficiencies.

Documenting a Citrix Environment – The easy way

Do you ever find yourself thinking – “I wish I had better documentation of my Citrix environment” or “I which my documentation was more up to date?”

Well, it turns out the internet – or more specifically Carl Webster @CarlWebster – has a solution for you.

Carl has written a large number of scripts for documenting these environments (and many of the surrounding technologies like Active Directory, DHCP, VMware vSphere, NetScaler, XenServer etc.  Best of all he gives these scripts away for free.

Take a look at http://carlwebster.com/where-to-get-copies-of-the-documentation-scripts/ and I’ll bet you’ll be amazed at how fast you can have some fantastic documentation.

Citrix Summit 2015

Citrix Summit is an annual conference where partners gather to hear the latest technical and sales information.  This year it was held in exciting Las Vegas at the sprawling Venetian conference center.  Coverage of Summit is always tricky because, while it is a partner only event and mostly covered by NDA, there are aspects that are already public.  This article will strive to keep the balance and leave what happened in Vegas–well, safely behind in Vegas.

This year Lewan sent four engineers to take part in the festivities. We came back with our heads full of announcements, product updates, and experience with what is coming next.  It is going to be an exciting year for Citrix customers.

The Annoucements

Mark Templeton is back at the helm as CEO.  This is excellent news as the 20 year veteran of Citrix is beloved by both employees and the industry.

Citrix acquires Sanbolic.  Sanbolic allows customer deployments to be geo-distributed across multiple locations and to scale in a linear and predictable manner.  We will have to wait and see what this means for Citrix’s product portfolio.

WorkspacePod Powered by HP is announced.  The solution is integrated Citrix infrastructure software with HP’s Moonshot platform.  HP considers this integrated compute, storage, networking, plus GPU to be the next step beyond hyper-converged infrastructure and they have labeled it ultra-converged.  Time will tell if this moniker will be adopted by the industry.  A tech preview is expected to be available Q1 of this year.

Product Updates

Workspace Cloud is announced.  Formerly Workspace Services, Workspace Cloud is a revolutionary new way to deliver Windows and mobile apps, data, and desktops.  I say revolutionary because it is clearly a new way of thinking.  I had several discussions over the week with some people hesitant on how this would incorporate in their environment and others who cannot wait for it to be released.  This is by no means a desktop as a service (DaaS) play.  Citrix is very specific with the choice of the word workspace.  To quote Mark T, “the desktop is to the PC-era as Workspace is to the Cloud-era“.

XenMobile 10 is announced.  XenMobile 10 represents a big step forward for the product in areas like security (FIPS 140.2) and flexibility. Users get updated Worx apps and a new self service portal for tracking, locking, and wiping lost or stolen devices.  Our hands-on experience makes us believe the people most excited about this release should be the administrators as significant steps have been made to make this product easier to deploy and use.

XenServer 6.5 is announced.  Major improvements have been made to the hypervisor in the areas of performance.  The new 64-bit kernel architecture has resulted in dramatic improvements in networking and storage performance.  I do not have the numbers in front of me but I remember my jaw dropping in the keynote because some of them had triple digit percentage improvements.  The timing could not be better with the uptick in XenServer deployments in 2014 due to industry leading support of NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology.

Improvements to XenApp and XenDesktop are coming.  Citrix is hard at work improving their flagship products.  Enhancements are coming to Microsoft Lync optimization and session recording will be added to Director.  If the last one sounds a lot like SmartAuditor, it is because I believe it will be replacing that functionality.

XenApp and XenDesktop technology previews are coming.  DesktopPlayer for Windows will be a welcome addition for offline virtual desktop and BYO Windows users.  Linux fans rejoice, a virtual desktop agent is coming.  The most exciting thing I witnessed (at the conference 😉 ) was the integration of Framehawk into Citrix’s already amazing HDX protocol.  Framehawk is the special sauce that overcomes very challenging network conditions like high latency (often seen in cellular) or packet loss (often seen in poor Wi-Fi).  Check out the pre-Citrix acquisition video from a few years ago below to see why I am excited.

The demo lab is already being prepared to make room for all of this awesome tech.  All of these updates are bound to set the stage for an exciting week in Orlando at Citrix Synergy in May.  For more information, do not hesitate to contact us.

Brian Olsen @sagelikebrian

The importance of deleting old stuff—another lesson from the Sony attack

The importance of deleting old stuff—another lesson from the Sony attack | Ars Technica – http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/01/the-importance-of-deleting-old-stuff-another-lesson-from-the-sony-attack/#p3

Don’t forget…Windows Server 2003 support ends in about 6 months :-)

Please contact us if you need help upgrading or migrating to our cloud infrastructure.  We’re here to help.

A problem we’re going to face here shortly in the Cisco UC world. Time to prepare…The Coming Certificate SAN Nightmare – How it Affects Jabber and Cisco UC

A good blog post on a problem we’re going to face here shortly in the Cisco UC world.  Time to prepare…  If you need help, give us a ring.

https://ciscocollab.wordpress.com/2014/11/13/the-coming-certificate-san-nightmare-how-it-affects-collab-edge/

Cisco Collab Engineering Tips Mike White The Coming Certificate SAN Nightmare – How it Affects Jabber and Cisco UC The coming storm is here: The public CAs are no longer signing certificates with subject alternative names (SAN) for internal server names — (https://www.digicert.com/internal-names.htm). An excerpt: An internal name is a domain or IP address that is part of a private network. Common examples of internal names are: Any server name with a non-public domain name suffix. For example, http://www.contoso.local or server1.contoso.internal. NetBIOS names or short hostnames, anything without a public domain. For example, Web1, ExchCAS1, or Frodo. Any IPv4 address in the RFC 1918 range. Any IPv6 address in the RFC 4193 range. Why do we care?  Jabber authenticates TLS encryption using certificates for services from CUCM, CUC, IM&P, etc.   Historically these have typically been deployed with IP addresses only, or internal domains (e.g. domain.local, etc.).  Because of this you can no longer get a certificate for the Expressway-C box that has SANs with IPs or internal names.  Jabber requires valid certificates for login now. See the Expressway Certificate guide p.7 for Expressway-C here – http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/expressway/config_guide/X8-2/Cisco-Expressway-Certificate-Creation-and-Use-Deployment-Guide-X8-2.pdf Without a certificate with proper SANs, Jabber will either throw an invalid cert error, or will completely deny login to UC services. Using Collab Edge MRA,  Jabber authenticates to the Expressway-E server and uses it’s certifciate.  Internally Jabber communicates directly with each component. Dealing with the issue for Collab Edge MRA Basically we have two options to work around the SAN issue: 1) Change the domain name of the UC components to a valid public domain name that the public CA will sign for.  This doesn’t mean the server has to be accessible from the internet by any means or that it is an existing domain name your company is using. Option 1a:  Deploy a new public domain name for UC services internally.  For example if your domain name was domain.com you might see if domain.info or domain.net or something similar is available to register and use as the internal UC domain name.  The domain wouldn’t need to resolve externally at all. If you do this, then you need to take in to consideration that the MRA deployment becomes a multi-domain (or split-domain) deployment which requires some special treatment like the VoiceServicesDomain option.  (See my previous post about multi-domain deployments.) Configuration example here – http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/unified-communications/expressway-series/117811-configure-vcs-00.html Options 1b:  The seemingly easier deployment would be to just match your public domain name that you use for email (e.g. domain.com) for your UC components (not suggesting all internal servers — file, print or otherwise, need to be in this domain).  This makes services discovery nice and clean. The challenge to this method is usually the need to deploy a split DNS for internal and external name resolution.  (The internal DNS server also serving the domain.com zone and having the A records for internal services, where the external DNS server have A records for external services.) 2) Create certs using your own internal CA, like Microsoft AD Certificate Services, or OpenSSL, etc.  There are no restrictions on SANs with your own certificate server.  I detail how to use OpenSSL to sign certs in an earlier post. The major constraint to this deployment option is the need to get the trusted cert from your CA server on to all devices that will use MRA.  AD does it for your Windows machines automatically, but mobile devices will need to have this certificate installed.  Using an MDM like Meraki MDM (freemium service) or others to push the certificates would be the way I’d attempt to deploy the certificates The Implications of changing the domain name of CUCM/CUC/IM&P Anyone who’s attempted to change the hostname of a CallManager knows the trainwreck and ensuing TAC calls that will ensue. I’ve personally not tried to change the domain name of a CallManager or CUC in recent memory, but doing so for IM&P/CUP is relatively straightforward. The hostname/domain name change procedure is here for CUCM/IM&P – http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucm/install/10_0_1/ipchange/CUCM_BK_C3782AAB_00_change-ipaddress-hostname-100.html The name change procedure is here for CUC – http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/connection/9x/upgrade/guide/9xcucrugx/9xcucrug060.html I’d do this with a healthy amount of trepidation.  🙂

VMTurbo, a unique way to better control your virtualized environments

Been trying out this VMTurbo stuff and it’s definitely a unique approach versus traditional systems management. It’s more actionable and automated versus telling me a bunch of information that I would have to decipher and deal with.  Both approaches have merit but it depends on how you’d like to control your virtualization environment that makes the difference.  Give it a try and let me know your thoughts.

What Is Control Watch Video

Why You Need Control Watch Video

How We Give Control Watch Video

Give it a try: VMTurbo Download

the disk is full trying to write to macintosh hd – Microsoft Word 2011 for Mac

From our internal blog.

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Experienced this issue today. Apparently updating a word document with “track changes” can cause Word to error saying that the Macintosh HD is full. (Which it is NOT). http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-macword/the-disk-is-full-trying-to-write-to-macintosh-hd/8284db3c-bfa1-4aec-ad51-a97f5c134e48

the disk is full trying to write to macintosh hd Word for Mac 2011 keeps giving me the following message: “the disk is full trying to write to macintosh hd”, followed by a message saying that autorecover cannot save the file to the chosen location.

Handy article for environments doing NFS (NetApp, Ilio, Flex-IO, USX..) –

Handy article for environments doing NFS (NetApp, Ilio, Flex-IO, USX..) – http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2239