WinSxS and reclaiming space

Written by Marcos Velez:

So, some months back I ran into space issues with an internal web server and came across this monstrosity called the WinSxS folder.  At the time, I did all the research I could and learned all too well this folder is a source of frustration for many, many admins.  I also learned there is little that can be done about it, and that messing with its contents is highly discouraged with the usual warnings that it could screw up your system. 

Beyond many uneducated guesses by frustrated Windows admins, and even murkier recommendations to delete things by means of really shady scripts, there was little a person could do to alleviate the space issues associated with the ever-increasing size of this folder.  If you are running Windows Vista (really!?) you can use vsp1clean.exe, and if you have Windows 7 or Windows 2008, you can run compcln.exe.  But, what do you do if you have Windows 2008 R2?  I finally came across a very good solution that reclaims quite a bit of space (more than the compcln.exe utility) and which is available in all Windows 2008 R2 installations.  It is called DISM, which stands for Deployment Image Servicing and Management.  It is meant to manage and administer Windows images, but it does a great job managing an actual Windows installation already in use.  The following command line will do everything that compcln.exe advertises, and it does so efficiently:

dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded /hidesp

For those interested in reading up some more on DISM, here is the technet reference:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd744256(WS.10).aspx

In any case, some of you may already be familiar with this tool, but it was certainly new to me, and it has helped me tremendously to clean up a few servers.  I hope you find it as useful.

Marcos

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rant: Office 365 Spam “Protection”.

17960 legitimate messages and only 70 flagged for SPAM?  I don’t think so Microsoft.  You can’t, with a straight face, call that mail protection.  You just can’t. It’s laughable.  At this point I would rather see those numbers flip flopped.  At least my systems wouldn’t be at risk by the crowds of viruses casually walking past the Forefront protection.
For my part, I wake up to about 25 – 30 spam messages that I end up deleting from my iPhone as I commute in to work.  Some of the messages that get through are not only clearly SPAM but also especially dangerous for the average user.  Phishing schemes, Trojans and other internet nastiness co-mingling in the inbox just waiting for a careless click. 
That’s it.  Back to deleting SPAM.

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Citrix ShareFile Outlook add-in.

I’ve been messing around with Citrix ShareFile a bit and it’s not bad depending on what you are hoping to use it for. 

If you haven’t heard of it, Citrix ShareFile allows you to securely share, store and access documents within it from any of our ever increasing and diversified devices.  Basically an enterprise replacement for everyone’s personal DropBox accounts in your organization.  I won’t get into which is better but they will definitely be pitted against each other in the file sharing/syncing space.

One of the features I really like is the Outlook integration add-in.   Among other things, you can have the add-in grab any attachment over a certain size, upload them to ShareFile and swap it out for a link to the upload.  Very effective for large files being sent through email.  Especially useful when sending outside your organization when size limits might be in place.  Recipients of multiple attachments within a message get the option to zip them before downloading.

After sending the attachment link, senders can also optionally get notifications if anyone actually downloads the attachment and expire it if necessary.  It’s pretty slick.

If you have ShareFile already, check out this link for the Outlook download.

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Uneven XenDesktop DDC load – Check your VDA policies.

 
So you’ve create a bunch of DDCs so that your connections will be appropriately load balanced but when you check on them in the Desktop Studio,  you see a grossly underbalanced farm!  What’s up?

Be sure to check on the VDA policies and that any DDC registration registry entries are correct and appropriate for the desktop OS. 

Registration location on Desktop OS:  HKLM\Software\Policies\Citrix\VirtualDesktopAgent\ListOfDDCs

HKLM\Software\Citrix or HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Citrix depending on whether the desktop is 32 or 64 bit.  There should also be a space between each of the DDCs listed in the key’s value.
You can verify successful (or failed) registrations in the Client’s Event Viewer.

Even though a single XenDesktop DDC could potentially support your required load without breaking a sweat, an uneven distribution of desktops across brokers can be a symptom of a configuration error that could be breaking your high availability design.

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EMC’s HAVT utility tip

If you’ve launched the High Availability Verification Tool before from Unisphere, you might have seen a similar “does not support high availability” message.  If everything checked out fine and you are now searching frantically on the interwebs for an answer, don’t worry, you are probably just running an iSCSI configuration with your vSphere environment.

This server [ESX HOST] has only one HBA (host bus adapter) and does not support high availability.

You can safely ignore this error.  The issue involves the way the HAVT tests for high availability on a host.  The tool is a hold over from a Fiber Channel only world where 2 HBAs were the minimum requirement for high availability status.  With iSCSI, even when you have two NIC cards in your ESX hosts, the IQN name is the same for both NICs and the array thinks you have only one adapter and therefore unable to support high availability.  

You DO want to check to verify that you are seeing multiple PATHs to the array though from the ESX hosts.  For that, look at the properties of the iSCSI software adapter in Storage Adapters on each ESX hosts' configuration tab to validate that you are able to see the appropriate redundant paths per ESX server [usually 8].

BTW: I really had no reason to include the racks of EMC VNXs at the top of this blog post but come on … Check out those blue lights! How could I not?

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