New mobile devices are being developed and hit the market one after the other, as a result the software able to manage all these devices is constantly being updated and or tweaked as well. It’s even though by Citrix that by the time we hit 2015 there will be four times more mobile projects than Windows, 37% of the global workforce will be mobile meaning that a total of around 15 billion mobile devices will be connected and thus need to be managed, at least that’s the assumption.
Citrix XenMobile
As you’re probably well aware, Citrix offers us XenMobile to help manage our mobile workforce. During the past year or so XenMobile has matured to an enterprise ready platform and is continuing to be under constant development, it’s one of Citrix’s most comprehensive products within their portfolio till date. Of course other vendors haven’t sit still as well, but I know XenMobile best so I’ll stay within my comfort zone for now.
A struggle even if you know how
During the past year and a half XenMobile has been implemented by hundreds, if not thousands, of consultants and system admins, I guess we’ve all seen the blogs and other articles handling the subject over an over again, but to be honest I have still to come across the first summary stating that it all went smoothly. That’s the downside, it can be very complex to implement and manage if you don’t exactly know what you’re doing and even if you do it’s no walk in the park and you’ll run into some issue every now and again!
Lessons learned, best practices and common pitfalls
I thought it would a good idea to aggregate some of the lessons learned and best practices documented so far. There are several blogs and support articles out there, including my own, which talk about best practices, lessons learned, common pitfalls and other related tips and tricks, either written by community members or Citrix employees. Also see the ‘Resources and reference materials used’ section at the bottom of the document.
I took my own notes and those of others, rewrote them slightly where I though necessary with this guide as the result. So chances are that you have come across some of these notes before, never the less I still think it will be valuable addition to the already extensive library of documentation which exists around XenMobile. Keep in mind that this guide isn’t about new features or releases, it is about installing, configuring and troubleshooting XenMobile and the ‘pain’ that others have experienced in doing so, and as a result helping you to smoothen your XenMobile installation as much as possible! Hopefully it will.
The guide
The guide consist out of 80 + notes which include general tips, lessons learned, several how to’s, recommendations and a bunch of Citrix best practices, and although some might be described in more detail than others that doesn’t mean that they are less important. It’s over fifteen pages long and consists out of 5600 + words, hopefully this guide can, and will, assist you in deploying Citrix XenMobile by highlighting some of the most common pitfalls, which unfortunately, are not known by everybody. Be aware that this guide is far from complete, it is work in progress so to speak. Also, most ‘Notes’ are random, meaning that I didn’t categorized them, not really anyway, since it all tightly integrates and this way you’ll at least browse through the whole document, who knows what you may find. As always, if you have any additions, suggestions, questions, you feel like I left something out etc. just let me know and I’ll see what I can do.
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16 responses to “The ultimate Citrix XenMobile survival guide! Get your copy here!”
I would like to review.
Thanks
Hi Johnchen,
Did you fill in your e-mail address / name? Any ideas on the guide? If so, feel free to send me an e-mail at [email protected]
Thanks!
Regards,
Bas.
Please send me a copy. Thx for putting this together
Hi Lee,
I saw that you also filed in your name and e-mail address, did you receive your copy already? Sometimes it takes a few minutes. If not, let me know and I’ll send it over.
Regards,
Bas.
Could you please share the pdf?
Hi Stan,
You also subscribed, did you receive your copy? Let me know.
Regards,
Bas.
Please send me a copy
Hi Ole,
Did you subscribe? Didn’t you receive a confirmation email? After that the guide should follow (very) shortly. Let me know.
Regards,
Bas.
Thanks for the document. It is indeed good.
Just one query around XenMobile / any EMM solution testing. Have you done / come across someone who has done stress / load / performance testing of XenMobile solution? Eg: testing load generated by say 5-10K devices simultaneously – trying to authenticate, use Worx Web to access intranets, apps initiating micro VPNs etc.. Are there best practice methods available, what about tools for automated testing, load simulation etc… Please throw some light on this.
We are planning a large scale (50K+ devices) deployment using XenMobile. While citirx has provided guidelines on sizing the infra for the solution, and says they have tested all these in their Labs using custom tools/methods, our internal standards and policies does not allow us to put any solution into production without passing QA. I could find any tools or best practices on this on the net..
Another aspect is around testing is simulating various device types with various OSs to test MDX polices.. any info around that will also be very helpful…
Thanks
Ben
Hi Ben,
I don’t know of any tooling at this time and unfortunately I haven’t done any testing myself, not at this scale anyway, but I certainly would like to try and help you find an answer. I’ll first use Twitter to see if anybody can help us out and I’ll also try and contact some of the people at Citrix who might be able to point us in the right direction. With implementations this big I can imagine that Citrix would like to be involved as well. Let’s keep in touch!
Regards,
Bas.
Ben,
There have been some replies through Twitter, if not done already, check out the docs below first, as suspected there is no real (load / stress test) tooling at the moment:
http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/12/09/xenmobile-how-does-it-scale/
and:
http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/xenmobile-90/xmob-deploy-device-manager-sys-reqs-con.html
Let’s see if we can find out more…
To be continued!
What I could gather from the time i posted this, a crude method though and not sure how much of this is true..
Citrix engineering team has some scripts that could generate web requests to simulate various functionality (eg: Authentication requests or micro VPN session requests). These scripts could be customized to reflect configurations of your setup and run in multiple threads at the same time and thus generate the required load. Then check the logs and see how many requests were fully processed and how many failed. Also run performance counters on the server (Eg: XDM server) to see how the server is performing under stress. The issue is that we may not know if the processing failed because it was unable to handle the load or for some other reason :(. May be we can have to run the scripts in a staggered fashion by increasing the load in chunks and correlate the log failures and performance counter peaks. BTW the scripts are not shared publicly :( …
I’ll see what I can do… Maybe I can figure something out. I have a question (with Citrix) pending right now. Who knows… we might get lucky :-)
Hi Bas-
Did you get any info from your Citrix contacts or others?.. I contacted a few mobility application testing vendors but they do not have anything around this.
on the second part of my question. Are there Mobile device emulation solutions where one can enroll a simulated device with MAM solution and then test various aspects like, enrollment times, errors, pushing of apps, policies and various other functionality for different OS and device types under different network types (2G, 3G, LTE, Wifi) etc have you come across any tools for these? can we use regular device emulators and enroll them with MAM/MDM and test these? wherever I check the mobile emulators are for testing mobile websites.. :(
BTW. for your comment below, yes Citrix is involved in this and they have designed and conducted the PoC. This is to conduct an independent testing of the overall setup before moving to prod.
Thanks
Ben
Hi Ben,
No nothing yet, I had a response but that was form a middle person you could say, Citrix engineering has been contacted so I am waiting for an answer. This is with regards to the test scripts by the way. As mentioned, at the moment there is no other tooling available, which is unfortunate, I agree.
I’m afraid there isn’t much more I can do at the moment.
Regards,
Bas.
Hi Ben,
I spoke to one of the Citrix representatives, the scripts are currently being altered so that going forward Citrix partners can also use them. No idea on how long this will take though.
Also good news, take a look at this blog post from Citrix, it has just been released: http://blogs.citrix.com/2014/11/05/tool-for-diagnosing-xenmobile/
It might be what you are looking for.
Lat me know if it helps.
Regards,
Bas.