FUTURE OF WORK: The complicated new face of personal computing

Citrix overhauls virtual desktop products for 'personal cloud'

• Improving usability of virtual desktops, Citrix will preview an upgraded version of its HDX technology. With three times faster performance, Wasson said virtual desktop technology will deliver better multi-tasking, graphics support, real-time collaboration, and delivery of rich multimedia to branch offices.

With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, users often have several devices to connect to corporate networks. But unless you use only cloud-based services and trust your security to someone else, enterprises need robust technology in the data center to deliver applications and secure the network.

Two new Citrix technologies target these needs:

• NetScaler Cloud Gateway, to be available in physical and virtual appliances, sits at the "front door" of the data center, connecting Web applications and Windows apps to any device in a secure manner, while providing single sign-on to users, Wasson said. The Gateway will also monitor a customer's licenses and service-level agreements.

for CCNA Training and CCNA Certification and more Cisco exams log in to Certkingdom.com

• NetScaler Cloud Bridge, a companion piece, sits at the "back door" of the network to provide a secure connection between the data center and cloud services. WAN optimization improves data flow and reduces use of bandwidth, and lets you split up the components of an application between data center and cloud. For example, a customer could run most of an application in a cloud service but keep Active Directory and sensitive data in-house for security reasons.

A sale date for Cloud Gateway is not available yet, but the software will be available on NetScaler VPX, a software-based virtual appliance that starts at $2,000, or on NetScaler MPX, a hardware appliance that starts at $12,000. Cloud Gateway will also be available for a NetScaler services package that starts at $90,000.

Cloud Bridge will ship next month with pricing starting at $5,000 as a standalone appliance, or as part of the NetScaler Platinum edition.

Rounding out Citrix's Synergy announcements are a few pieces that bolster the company's virtual desktop software:

• An acquisition of virtual desktop vendor Kaviza, which targets small and midsized businesses with VDI that doesn't require load balancers, connection brokers or attached storage. Wasson said this will move VDI "downmarket" to the masses.

• XenDesktop 5, which was released a few months ago, is being updated with Citrix's IntelliCache to reduce the need for network-attached storage by running more processes on the server. (XenDesktop costs $95 to $350 per user or device.)

• A free online service called "Success Accelerator" will give customers guidance in deploying Citrix virtual desktop products.

Citrix's desktop products put it in a good position against rival VMware, which has lagged behind Citrix in delivering features such as profile management, virtual desktops on the iPad and a bare-metal hypervisor.

One problem for Citrix is that many potential virtual desktop customers still use VMware to virtualize the servers that are likely to host desktop images. Although Citrix points out that the Amazon and Rackspace clouds run on the Xen hypervisor, VMware boasts a customer base that includes 96% of the Fortune 1000.

Windows debugging made easy

Looking through the results, the engineer found an Exchange search function was consuming many of the cycles. The sluggishness was caused by the fact that a number of users had humongous mailboxes, which when they searched through them, would spike the server load. The admin instructed the users to reduce the size of their mailboxes, or organize them better. As a result of such tidying up on the users' part, server performance improved.

for CCNA Training and CCNA Certification and more Cisco exams log in to Certkingdom.com

In a third case, Russinovich's wife had complained that the Windows Photo Gallery would hang after showing a movie. The bug was particularly annoying to her, as she was showing friends some home movies. A friend of hers even quipped, "This never happens with a Mac."

Russinovich reran the Photo Gallery software while capturing all the processes in Process Monitor. "When in doubt run Process Monitor," he advised. He matched the time of the hang with all the processes running at that time. While most of the processes were routine, he found an unusual system call, ironically enough, to an Apple QuickTime object, which was the source of program hang. "Sure enough, it was from that company that doesn't know how to write Windows software," he joked.

Russinovich also showed the audience how to rid a machine of a bad case of malware. This example also came from a user submission, detailing how the infected computer had a particularly thorough piece of malware that blocked all attempts to run any sort of diagnostic, anti-virus or system administration tools.

One way around the block, Russinovich advised, consisted of running another program he had written called Desktops, which lets the user set up four virtual desktops for the computer. The user can then switch among the desktops, each of which ran independently of the others. While not a diagnostic tool per se, Desktops could be used to repair the malware-riddled computer. The malware monitored any activity on the main desktop, but it was unaware of the other desktops, one of which Russinovich used to run anti-virus tools.

Finally, no debugging session would be complete without diagnosing the infamous Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error. Despite the severity of the problem, "It is incredibly easy to do crash analysis" on a BSOD, he said. Russinovich explained that such a crash happens when something goes wrong within the operating system's kernel memory space, such as a device driver that tries to access memory allotted to another program. Because Windows' first priority is "to protect data," it will shut down as soon as a program acts outside allotted memory space, he said.

After a system crash, Microsoft will offer an analysis upon reboot of the machine, which can point to drivers that need to be updated or other fixes. Even if this help message proves unhelpful, the administrator can check for the crash dump file that Windows produces when it crashes, Russinovich said. This is either found in the Windows directory, or in a subdirectory called Minidump. A program called Windows Debugger can examine the file and provide more information about what possibly caused the crash.