CITRIX CONNECTION QUALITY INDICATOR

Hello fellow Citrix Admins,

If you are involved in supporting a Citrix environment, you know that one of the complaints you are sure to hear at some point is that “Citrix is slow”. Meanwhile, no one else seems to be having an issue. In many cases, the user might be connecting from some far-flung place on the globe and the connection speed and quality is less than optimal. The problem is trying to prove to the user that there is a line issue. Enter the Citrix Connection Quality Indicator, a simple Citrix utility that sits in the user’s system tray and provides a nice indicator of the users connection speed, like this:

This tool gives the user instant feedback when there is a degradation in performance to the point that the user’s experience is impacted. This will help the user understand that the performance issue they are experiencing might be temporary and is being caused by their local Internet connection, not the server. This should reduce the amount of calls to the helpdesk for connectivity issues.

For the curious user that is interested in seeing more information, or to assist with further troubleshooting by the Help Desk, a simple click on the icon will provide more details.

In addition, critical messages, errors and warnings are all logged to the event log as well as a text file, so you have another utility in your toolbelt for post-complaint analysis!

To download this tool, head on over to the Citrix knowledgebase and grab your copy here: https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX220774

COOL UTILITY: NETROUTEVIEW

I have always wondered why someone hasn’t come up with a graphical tool to modify the routing table; seems like it should be easy enough. Have a look below, in Nirsoft’s usual way, the interface is clean and requires no installation.
Definitely worthy of being added to your tool belt.
- Aaron

Description
NetRouteView is a GUI alternative to the standard route utility (Route.exe) of Windows operating system. It displays the list of all routes on your current network, including the destination, mask, gateway, interface IP address, metric value, type, protocol, age (in seconds), interface name, and the MAC address.
NetRouteView also allows you to easily add new routes, as well as to remove or modify existing static routes.

CHECK YOUR DNS WITH DNSDATAVIEW

DNS is critical to proper Virtual Infrastructure operations.  Whether its client to server or server to server communications, it is important that all parts involved are using the correct DNS settings and are also registered with the appropriate DNS servers.  Unlike Windows, ESX servers will not auto-register their IP addresses with the DNS servers.  (Windows machines will typically update the DNS servers in an Active Directory when you join them to the domain – Since ESX servers are not Windows servers, they are never joined to the domain).  You will have to manually add the ESX hosts to your DNS servers for proper resolution.  Without it, expect weird vMotion, DRS and HA issues.  Even simple things like adding the host to VirtualCenter or connecting to a virtual machine console will be problematic with screwy DNS. 

Updating your DNS servers is also another good way to make sure that the IP address is not already in use.  Many smaller shops (and some bigger ones too) do not have proper IP address management programs so DNS might be their last line of defense.  Be aware that some ESX hosts might have multiple IP addresses that don’t always ping back.  Adding these supporting IP addresses (vMotion, iSCSI) into DNS will at least show an administrator that they should double-check before using them.  I’ve been to countless clients where pinging an IP was the method to determine IP availability. :)

Finally, Aaron Silber sent me over a nice GUI alternative to NSLookup when dealing with DNS and IP address resolution.

Check out the free download from NirSoft here.