XenMobile : Require Device Manager Enrollment

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Citrix XenMobile Device Manager (MDM Edition) and the App Controller (App Edition) can be deployed separately or combined to form the Enterprise Edition. In the Enterprise Edition a connections needs to be configured between the Device Manager server and the App Controller so they can communicate with each other. Detailed information to Enabling Connections Between Device Manager and App Controller can be found through eDocs

A user who enrols a new mobile device is asked if Worx Homes needs to secure the device.

Enroll : Worx Home can secure your iPad in addition to your work apps. Do you want to enroll you device?

Enroll

At first I thought pressing “Yes” would be the only correct choice, when enrolling a mobile device, but some time ago I noticed pressing “No”  would also enroll the mobile device. The outcome would be quite different, but in both cases Worx Home worked. Pressing yes enrolled the mobile device within the Device Manager and App Controller, where pressing no only enrolled the  mobile device without the App Controller.

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Citrix XenMobile : Lessons learned in real life

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During the implementation of various XenMobile sites I notice several customers run into the same problems. Problems and question which are being asked at the support forums as well. Sharing my “Lessons learned” hopefully helps others while doing deployments of Citrix XenMobile.

Pre-Installation Checklist

In many cases a pre-installation checklist is a nice to have, but not really necessary for installing a product. In case of Citrix XenMobile this is an absolute must have, before starting the project. There are many dependencies, without it you are not able to do a efficient installation.

Make use of the Pre-Installation Checklist Citrix offers !

Test Hardware
Get hold of a test device, it’s not convenient to use your own production device during the test / installation fase. Several XDM deployments use different ROOT CA’s, which are not able to work next to each other. First you have to deleted your current profiles, before you can re-enroll the device to a different environment. Durings configuration and tests I would also like to test the geo-fencing options, including a full-wipe of the device. Not something you would want to test on your own production device.

Get a test device for every platform you need to support

Apple Mac OS X
To manage iOS and Android applications from within the AppController, applications (.ipa/apk) need to be wrapped. For wrapping applications Citrix provides the MDX Toolkit, which unfortunately only runs on Mac OS X. The MDX Toolkit doesn’t work on a virtualized Mac OS X, you need real Apple hardware for this.

The MDX Toolkit requires a Mac Mini, MacBook Air, or other Mac Device

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How to load balance the Device Manager in XenMobile

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Lately, more and more customers are asking for a solution to manage their mobile devices. While discussing the Citrix XenMobile architecture question regarding High Availability (HA) and Load balancing (LB) are crucial for a solid design. How to configure the Citrix AppController for HA & LB is pretty straightforward and well documented. The Citrix Device Manager however is a different ball game and the documentation isn’t very clear. A full architecture with High Availability should look something like this:

Image

The eDocs states:

Configure the Windows servers as a cluster, while the installation instructions tell you to configure a Tomcat cluster

The Citrix Reference Architecture for XenMobile 8.7 doesn’t mentions a Windows Cluster.

can be configured with multiple servers load-balanced behind a NetScaler appliance or another hardware load-balancing solution. The Device Managers work in an active-active configuration. In this environment, ports 80, 443, and 8443 are load-balanced. For SSL connections (ports 443 and 8443), make sure to turn on SSL session persistence in the load balancing rules. XDM requires a shared SQL server and NTP configured on each server.

At first I was a bit confused about all the different parts of information, what information is correct and what information is not? I contacted Citrix hoping to get a straightforward answer. Citrix came up with the following high level guidelines:

  1. Install for example two standalone XDM server (No MS Clustering)
  2. Place a network load balancer in front of the XDM server. In my case this will be a Netscaler (NS).
  3. Install/Configure the first XDM server and LB on the NS with only one XDM server active
  4. Test if the setup works as a expected
  5. Install/Configure the second XDM server and cluster (Yes, a Tomcat cluster) the two XDM servers as described in the installation guide (forget the part about the MS clustering).
  6. Configure the NS LB to support both XDM servers (Don’t forget session persistence)
  7. Retest if the setup still works as expected

Following this guidelines I was able create a fully working load balanced configuration for the XDM servers. For information about scaling a XenMobile environment take a look at this Citrix Blog!

XenMobile Console : Cannot load labels files

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During a XenMobile training last  month I got a error message while logging on to the XenMobile 8.6 Device Manager Console. Didn’t pay much attention to it then, because i assumed something went wrong during the install of Citrix XenMobile Device Manager, a simple reinstall of XDM resolved the error message. Prior to upgrading an existing XenMobile 8.6 production environment to 8.7 I got the same error message again “Cannot load labels files”

XD87-022

 

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How to Upgrade XenMobile with XDM 8.7 & XAC 2.10

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Recently Citrix released XenMobile 8.7 which includes updates and enhancements to the following components: App Controller, Device Manager, WorxHome, and WorxMail. The complete overview can be found in Citrix eDocs. In addition to the support of the Dutch language in WorxHome & WorxMail we have several users equipped with a Windows 8.1 RT tab, which couldn’t be managed by the previous version 8.6. We decided to be a early adaptor and upgrade our existing environment! The recommended upgrade order for the several components is:

  1. Netscaler (NS)
  2. XenMobile Device Manager (XDM)
  3. XenMobile Netscaler Connector (XNC)
  4. XenMobile AppController (XAC)
  5. MDX Toolkit to wrap .ipa & .apk files (WorxMail/WorxWeb)

This article will only cover upgrading XenMobile Device Manager 8.7 & XenMobile AppController 2.10.

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