Integrating VOIP 1: What would be best Citrix policy for SoftPhone

I had been testing softphone for a while now and was trying to find out what would be best Citrix policies for these softphone. I will be writing couple of series with regard to softphone, hence bear with me please :) .

We have tested following softphone on Virtual Hosted Desktop (VHD) and the mostly because of Call center manager setup which most of the organization have. Most organization uses MAC based extension registration and what does it mean in terms of virtualization, say if you are using Hosted Shared Desktop (XenApp) then it won't be possible to host softphone on XA. Even it is IP based extension registration it can be managed because Windows 2008 R2 allows you to have virtual IP . This changes are very difficult for voice team hence hosting such VOIP based application on XA does not work.

Soft Phone which we have tested so far

1.    Nortel
2.    Avaya
3.    Cisco
4.    Genesys
5.    CosmoDesk

All of them worked perfectly fine with Windows 7 as well as XP . Voice quality was perfect and close to that of physical desktop. To get the result  following set of  standard  XD policies had been used

Other then these policies many other factor contribute to this voice quality and some of them are

1. End device thin client /thick client

2. Receiver version used

3. End device operating system.

4. Headset used.

5. Voice codec used.

I will discuss some of the factor in my next posting. Till then thank you

Disk Size cannot be alter as it is used by running VM

We had an issue where VM were deleted but VHD where not able to delete . Button were grayed out

Virtual disk properties shows that it has two read only disk

Also VHD properties had following message "Disk size cannot be altered as the disk is already being updated or is in use by running VM

Finally to remove this we had enabled hidden object under view

 

Those two read only disk can be stopped now and also can be deleted

This operation can not be performed because the specific virtual disk could not be found

You will get the error message while starting the VM on XenServer "This operation can not be performed because the specific virtual disk could not be found"

After ejecting the mounted ISO VM booted normally

Citrix Personal vDisk (565) dynamic expansion

Citrix has released latest version of PVD (Personal vDisk ) 565 which support dynamic expansion . What does it mean to you? Say you have created PVD of 10GB and for some reason you ran out of space

Space distribution is shown below

Now lets expand this P: drive from 10GB  to 15GB

And this is how space distribution changes

 

Now say C: drive is full

Reboot  the VM and C: drive is expanded automatically

 

This has been explained here

XenApp shadowing does not logoff user session

When helpdesk team close the shadowing session ICA shadowing session does not logoff from the server. Because of this reason no more shadowing will be allowed on this server by same users. Let's find out how does it happen . I am shadowing "citrix.test" using user "citrix.test" . This is what shown under App control center

When this session is terminated via Ctrl+ *

This will still be shown under App Center as disconnected

This disconnected session does not logoff  shadowing session gracefully. After looking at task manager it has been found that couple of process which was still running with PID

we were not able to kill Symantec Service Framework service even using local admin or domain admin

Created GPO and deliver following key using "Create" option

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Citrix\wfshell\TWI

Value Name:LogoffCheckSysModules
Type:REG_SZ
String: ccSvcHst.exe

as explained in CTX891671. After this registry changes Ctrl + * use to close the shadowing session.