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Kraft & Kennedy, Inc. provides technology and strategic consulting services to law firms, corporate legal departments and financial services firms. We can help you analyze, plan, implement and manage business and technology solutions to optimize your organization's functionality and processes.
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For quite a while there has been confusion over how VMware’s Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) feature works with vSphere 4 running on Nehalem (or other modern) processors. Many people were noticing that it appeared that TPS was not actually working anymore and looked for ways to fix the problem.
In my recent post on the effects of ASLR in vSphere the comments turned into a discussion about TPS on modern processors. And there are countless posts about this issue on the VMTN forums where folks are looking for a fix. In reality nothing is broken and there is no need to fix the issue.
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In SharePoint 2007, menus in some master pages opened behind page content and Flash animations. However, there was an easy fix which was to just locate the css style for the dynamic menus, and change the “z-index” property to a high number. This same fix does not work in 2010 however, and to make matters worse, the menus on the default master page in 2010 always open behind Flash videos. (The built-in Silverlight web part in 2010 does not have this problem, but I suspect there are still many people who will have home pages with Flash content.)
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When upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to 2010, you’ll need to upgrade your master pages (if they’re customized) to take advantage of the new features in 2010, such as the ribbon. The first question is to decide if you want to keep the current master page and add all the new controls in, or to start with a new 2010 master page and customize that. We decided to start with a new master page based on the 2010 master page, v4.master, and customize that. Here’s some resources I found useful when creating the new custom master page for our site.
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As many of you may have heard, Autonomy officially released iManage 8.5 SP1 on Monday. This has been an eagerly awaited release for months now, and firms are looking to implement this pretty quickly. Here are the modules that have 8.5 SP1 releases thus far:
- WorkSite Server (with and without Caching)
- WorkSite Clustering Service
- WorkSite IDOL Indexer
- WorkSite Communication Server for Exchange
- FileSite, OffSite, DeskSite, Email Management for Outlook clients
Our initial review is under the fold.
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Wyse unveiled the “Xenith” thin client device last week at Synergy. And unlike Wyse’s other thin client devices for Citrix that run Windows XPe or Windows CE, the “zero” client runs an ultra thin firmware (<5 Mb). This thin firmware means the device boots up instantly and has minimal management. A demo at Synergy last week showed the thing boot up in less than 5 seconds. What else separates the Xenith from traditional thin client devices? Full HDX support including HDX MediaStream (including Flash), HDX Plug-n-Play (USB redirection) and HDX RealTime (bi-directional audio). The expectation being that as Citrix upgrades and improves HDX features in the future, the Xenith’s firmware will be able to be upgraded to provide this support. Firmware and asset management can be done through Wyse Device Manager and availability is expected in June with a price point at around $330.
The Xenith isn’t out yet, but seems very promising with HDX support, thin firmware, minimal management and an attractive price point. If a firm is considering a VDI environment with XenDesktop in the next 6 months, the Wyse Xenith is definitely worth a look.
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In Q4 last year, Citrix made its NetScaler physical appliances available as a virtual appliance. Labeled as the “VPX”, the full featured virtual iteration of the appliance dropped its price point and made it more accessible to SMB customers. Citrix has now made the Access Gateway (CAG) and Branch Repeater physical appliances also available as VPXs. At this point, Citrix has made three of their ‘core’ Networking products available as VPX appliances, which are recapped below.
Citrix NetScaler VPX
- Released last year in Q4. Initially, this virtual appliance was only released for XenServer, but now has full support for ESX. Expected to support Hyper-V in the late summer.
- Licensed by throughput and available in 10 Mbit, 200 Mbit and 1000 Mbit flavors.
- Free “Express” edition with 1 Mbit throughput limitation available for lab and PoC environments.
- Standard NetScaler “Advanced”, “Enterprise” and “Platinum” flavors available.
Citrix Access Gateway VPX
- Released earlier this month. Currently only supports XenServer. Support for ESX and Hyper-V expected in the next 6-12 months.
- Provides same feature as Model 2010 Access Gateway physical appliance.
- Free “Express” edition exists that provides access to 5 concurrent users that are valid for 12 months.
Citrix Branch Repeater VPX
- Released in Q1 of 2010. Currently only supports XenServer. Support for ESX and Hyper-V expected in the next 6-12 months.
- VPX Appliance does not support the following features available in the physical appliance:
- Group Mode
- Ethernet bypass card
- Still requires Citrix Repeater appliance, which is not available in VPX format.
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With Office 2010 being unleashed on the world, many customers are asking when their DMS products will support it. No need to ask around, because we’ve gathered the official stances for some of the major vendors.
- WorkSite iManage 8.5: “We will look to certify/support Office 2010 within 90 days with the current 8.5 Worksite clients and later”
- Open Text eDOCS DM 5.3: “We will release v5.3 beta this summer and the final release is scheduled to be launched in late September”
- Worldox GX2: “Office 2010 integration files should ship within 30 – 45 days of the official general release of Microsoft Office 2010″
- Microsoft SharePoint 2010: “Come on, we’re Microsoft. It’ll work day one!” (Disclaimer: NOT a real quote)
So as of right now, it looks like Worldox may win the horserace to support Office 2010. As soon as official release announcements are made, we will be sure to test functionality in our research lab. Of course, simply supporting integration with the application doesn’t mean that the DMS product will be able to leverage any of the extra features of Office 2010, such as the Backstage view or simultaneous editing (which requires the document live on SharePoint 2010).
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This week at Citrix Summit/Synergy, Citrix finally revealed details behind their much anticipated client (bare metal) hypervisor. To recap, for the folks who are not following, this will finally bring “offline VDI” to XenDesktop. It will also match (and potentially beat) VMware’s current offline VM checkin/check out functionality currently available in View.
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At a few recent client implementations, we have seen noticeable delays synchronizing various changes in mailboxes to Exchange 2010 when running Outlook 2003 in Online Mode. As it turns out, this is a known issue and Microsoft has documented it at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2009942. The following are symptoms of the issue:
- Outgoing messages stay in the Outbox for up to 1 minute
- New messages do not arrive in the mailbox for up to 1 minute
- Items that are deleted or moved between folders may take up to 1 minute for the change to be reflected
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When VMware released vSphere 4 last year, one of the changes they made was a completely re-written software iSCSI initiator. This was done to optimize performance which is great considering how popular iSCSI SANs have become. They also gave the ability to use Round Robin MPIO (mutlipathing) in the software initiator in addition to Fixed Path and MRU which were previously available.
I’m working on a vSphere implementation using Dell EqualLogic SANs and wanted to configure Round Robin on all of my datastores. Dell has a great whitepaper on how to set this up, but unfortunately the document fails to mention one key thing: this doesn’t change the default path selection plugin (PSP) from Fixed to Round Robin. That means that you’ll have to set the multipathing policy to Round Robin on all of your existing datastores and will have to remember to do that on all future datastores. When you’ve got multiple ESX hosts with lots of datastores this can quickly become a pain.
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