I work a lot with Microsoft Sharepoint, it keeps my files in a central place and gives me the opportunity to reinstall my laptop any time I like.  So with a co-worker we are working on a document that is stored in the MySite folder of our Sharepoint environment.

The document link is shared with at least one other co-worker. If you want to open documents from Sharepoint you have to add the location in Microsoft Excel as a “Trusted” location. So I did.

I went back to Sharepoint and clicked the Microsoft Excel sheet. The integration between Sharepoint and Microsoft Excel is, even though the location is trusted, not working from a Sharepoint point of view. Opening a Microsoft Excel sheet from a trusted location gives the error as shown below. Mind you this happens when you open it from SharePoint.

When however you go to Microsoft Excel and open it from there, there is not problem whatsoever.  It looks like the call from Sharepoint is looking at other things and is not 100% working with Microsoft Office 2013 at this moment.

It’s no big deal, just something you have to keep in mind. I thought it might come in handy for all off you that will try out Microsoft Office 2013 and still have an old Sharepoint implementation in the office.

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At PQR we run Sharepoint 2010 to store all our project documentation centrally, this works well for every consultant has access to the same information all the time.

In the old days you had Groove, then we used Sharepoint Workspaces… neither were really helpfull but the later one most of the time did the job. We had access to an offline copy of the documents when needed.

Office 2013

Now we have Office 2013 and now we are faced with the fact that SharePoint workspaces is gone….

SharePoint Workspaces has been replaced by SkyDrive Pro, hmm that’s something for a name change, like we all are going to use Skydrive.  It took me a few minutes to realize that this replaced SharePoint Workspaces.

Setup a sync

As said before we need our project files locally… Microsoft must have had a different idea by that for it seems we have to reorganize to work with Office 2013. They have changed the way you sync files with Sharepoint, I’ll tell you more about it in this blog.

In the system tray you find SkyDrive Pro

When you choose “Sync a new library” you can add a Sharepoint site to be synced. I’ve removed the actual address for obvious reasons but you get the hang of it.

SkyDrive gives you an overview of libraries available.. select one to be synced.

At this moment I was hoping that I would be gettings a dialog to select a folder, but that wasn’t happening. The sync began right away… so fingers crossed and let’s see where it brings us.

When the syncing is done, you have the option to open the files directly.

Perhaps you also see what is happening, if not hold on…

I opened the library  and checked out the synced files… they were all there.

Still holding on, here it comes..

I noticed that the libraries from one project were in different folders (or should I say libraries??) They are not grouped under the project. I tried to change things somehow but I didn’t find a nice way to do this.. perhaps there is a rough way but I didn’t go there for this is was work related.

There is something else that is freaky … You noticed also I guess that the number of characters in the name is 25 (if I counted right).

If you look at the picture below you see that the Sharepoint site has actual names there. SkyDrive Pro cuts of the name. so we have the customer name and a little bit of the library name.. That’s gonna be nasty with long customer names. Let’s try that out.

I did some testing and it seems that it will cut the customer name at 19 characters. It then   adds a space a minus and another space before it will add three characters of the sharepoint library. I personally don’t like this feature, I don’t like to guess names. Since some years we don’t have a limitation to file or folder names so why start using short names now. Really interested in Microsoft’s view on this.

Stop syncing

Of course after a while after you stopped working for a project  or it’s finished you want the sync to be stopped also.

Again go to the System Tray and click “Stop syncing a folder…”

All the libraries you selected to be synced are displayed there, again not by customer or project but by individual library..

After you select a library you will get a nice warning if you are sure to do this.

Click “YES” if you want to stop syncing or “NO” if you changed your mind.

Context menu

In the context menu a SkyDrive Pro item is added… it’s grayed out by default. I haven’t checked if it will be enabled when you sync one folder.

In the picture above the menu item is already enabled… did the change already. I found this solution before I went to work with Skydrive Pro. Credits for this hack go to here;

http://www.askvg.com/what-is-skydrive-pro-option-and-how-to-remove-it-from-context-menu-after-installing-microsoft-office-2013/

Short version, go to HKCR\AllFilesLaunchSyncCenter\SPFS.ContextMenu and clear the value in “CommandStateHandler”.

Next go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Explorer\CommandStore\Shell\ You will see four entries there, one being SPFS.BrowseOnsharePoint.

If you clear the CommandStateHandler value the item becomes enabled in the context menu.

If you click on Browse on SharePoint you are taken to the Sharepoint site.

Conclusion

We’ll it’s a short insight in how to use Microsoft Office 2013 with Sharepoint 20xx, I surely will miss Sharepoint workspaces where I had an overview of projects and could open a project to see the libraries..

12-09-2012… the day after

The day after I setup SkyDrive Pro I had to write a technical design.. like I do so many days.

Working in Microsoft Word 2013 I was forced to use “Save-As” for the document I was editing was not in out Company style and after converting it, the name changed to doc1.

Clicking on “Save-As” and chose “Browse” I noticed something that I didn’t expect to see.

I entered our sharepoint site on a higher level than expected. I just added three project libraries to be synced and never told Office to use our project site as a location. I expected Word to save to the local folder and sync it from there to Sharepoint. Somehow the integration is set after you create your first sync,.

Below you see that I was able to browse all project, also the ones that are not open for me. I haven’t selected them to see if I can enter them but formerly I just had a list of projects I was assigned to.. that was a whole lot easier… imho.

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Working with Microsoft Windows 7 on a daily basis in project can lead to small but interesting tuning tips.

I was working on a project and was slowly getting frustrated with the time I had to wait before, the customer made available computer, would log me in. Every morning it took me at least one and a half minute before my desktop was available. I know that might seem fast but I can’t stand waiting, so I got annoyed with watching “Welcome” on the screen that long.

What happens at that point?

Most people will not think twice when they wait for the Welcome screen to change into the desktop but I wonder what actually is happening.

So to figure that out I changed the VerboseStatus to 1 (DWord).

You can set at:

HKLM\\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

Now you can see what is happening at logon and logoff… Love it!

User Profile service

When you add the VerboseStatus key and add the value one to it you will see that you’re waiting for the “User Profile service”. I’m sure some of you wonder what that is.

First thing that comes to mind is, hey I have a large profile and now I have to pay for it. That could be it… that would be easy.

In my situation it wasn’t about profiles, we have a local profile for the workstations for they will be redirected to a central VDI/SBC desktop directly afterwards.

Users will never see anything locally and there for don’t need any profile there or for what it matters anywhere.  Also, because of the redirect to VDI/SBC, users don’t need a homefolder either. All they need is a browser to kick in. So there was no reason for anyone to wait for a network related folder.

So we excluded profiles from being the troublemaker.

The Reason

Microsoft Windows 7 will wait for the network, homefolder or profile to be available. Windows does this a bit too long just to make sure everything is ready when you see the desktop.

Is this a default setting?

Windows has a default setting to wait for a number of seconds, 30-45 second I think, to wait for a connection. Of course if your network is crappy you might let the value as it is.

Networks we build or work with are reliable and connection is established within seconds.

Setting the value

On the local computer or in a central GPO you can set the value to control how long Windows has to wait for the network related stuff. The setting is to be found at ”Computer configuration\Administrative Templates\System\User Profile”

In the example below I had set the timeout to 0, Man my computer was fast after that with logon.. Downside was that my network connection was not available at that moment, I was a bit to quick.

I changed it at the customer site to 5 seconds, with that vaule we had all network connection available. As mentioned before users didn’t need homefolders, profiles etc locally all they needed was a network connection to reach the VDI/SBC environment.

The local registry setting can also be set to do some testing…

So Changing this value to 5 seconds speed up the logon. Total logon time took less than 7 seconds. This includes logging in, starting the webbrowser and logging into the Citrix Web Interface.

After this user can logon to a VDI or SBC desktop…which will take another 18 seconds.

I think that’s not so bad for a user environment…

To see the end result click on the link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPJQwOZCZnI&feature=youtu.be

Just thought I should share this with you guys….. hope it helps.

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There are more issues occuring with TrendMicro DeepSecurity, issues not related to the vShield driver. I want to mention one of them here, the other one comes later after I verified it really still is an issue.

Unreachable servers

We experienced random unreachable servers, one minute you would connect to a server the next minute it seemed to have dissapeared.

It freaked us out in the beginning pointing fingers to each other thinking someone f..ed up their work. We noticed that it had something to do with firewalling and therefore TrendMicro.

DSAFILTER_HEAP_MAX_SIZE

After a lot of investigations by the VMware guys they found out that the DSAFILTER_HEAP_MAX_SIZE  was set to default and therefore only 25 virtual machine were managed.

We were building a large new production environment and more than 25 virtual machines were active on the hosts. This resulted in some machine not repsonding to our requests while others worked fine.

Somehow they could reset this allowing all machines to be accesible, but soon after accesibility would drop random. we had to stop building and figure out how to fix this.

You would expect that TrendMicro DeepSecurity dynamically would determine the number of virtual machines on the host and change the heapsize according to that number. It doesn’t, you have to cacculate a number yourself and change it on forehand.

The product should dynamically change the value, it doesn’t do anything dynamically, except block virtual machine, so we had to do it manually.

Calculating numbers

If you want to know why calculating the heapsize is not a fix, look at the difference between the numbers ofVMware and TrendMicro in the following blog:

http://blocksandbytes.com/2012/03/09/deep-security-8-and-dsafilter_heap_max_size/

A small quote from the site: (VMware value)

• The article that states that the DSAFILTER_HEAP_MAX_SIZE should be roughly 1MB per each VM planned. This results in most customers setting a value for the HEAP_MAX_SIZE of around 40 – 50MB. This is a 1/10th of what it should be according to Trend Engineering for DS 8 (512MB)!

(I would love to say who wrote this blog but I can’t find his name anywhere.. so if it’s your blog please let me know and I give you credits.)

If you follow VMware you end up with (following the blog now) 50MB where as TrendMicro advices (if you do it manually) to go for 512MB.

There’s a lot of air between those numbers.

Actually, I don’t want to know those numbers, I want the product to be figuring this out. I don’t want to change a number each time our environment grows and if I set the number high what is the impact?

What is next?

For now we have set the DSAFILTER_HEAP_MAX_SIZE to 512 to make sure we don’t run into issues when we deploy new virtual machines.

A feature request is sent to Trend Micro asking them to look closely to the product and make sure it will determine the number of virtual machine dynamically and raise or lower the DSAFILTER_HEAP_MAX_SIZE.

Is is gonna happen anytime soon? I don’t know, really don’t know…

Hopefully a lot of the VMworld visitors and the Trend Micro guys will read this blog and talk about it.

If it’s fixed I’ll tweet about it…

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Implementing new technology can be tricky, during a project we encountered some strange behavior with VMware vShield for endpoints & TrendMicro Deep Security.

At first we were in the dark about the whereabouts of issues we were experiencing. the issues we noticed were performance related.  Logon times were slow and starting applications like word could take up to 30 seconds. In a pilot environment we never noticed these troubles, issues seemed to appear out of the blue.

The first thing you do when troubleshooting this kind of performance issues is looking at the differences. One main difference with the pilot environment was that Trend Micro Deep Security anti-malware had been switched on. We noticed strange behavior also once in the pilot when we tested this, it broke the RDS licensing process.

The Environment

Issues we experienced were;

• Copying between virtual machines was slow;
• Copying inside the virtual machine was slow;
• Starting applications was slow.

Problem identified

New Driver

Logon times

Startup times test

Starting MS Word 

Hopefully with 5.1 the new VMware tools will be integrated and Trend Micro Deep security can be used again without issues.

We’re waiting……….

p.s. one more thing i need to add, the numbers you see here are not the defenitive numbers, the reason is that we had these issues while building the production environment. we had to do tuning etc and couldn’t run on a ideal environment. The numbers should go down when we finish tuning… still we need a stable driver to get these numbers

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Working on several projects at once you encounter many different issues that are interesting to investigate. Some of those issues however seem to be unknown to Citrix so far. The issue I’m describing below is one of those, when “googling” you find only a few hints towards the same issue and I think two posts in the fora about this with no solution what so ever.

First let’s clarify what is the case;

Client side flash rendering is a good thing and something that helps improve the users experience, no doubt about that. When however you have a site that doesn’t work properly with client side rendering you want to render that specific one on the server.

Citrix has also seen that and added a policy “Flash URL Compatibility list” to the Citrix policies. This policy allows you to add URL with or without wildcards to exclude those site from being rendered the default way.

Now when you have client side rendering active and you dare to add one URL in that “Flash URL Compatibility list” and make it active, client side rendering stops working.

So what’s the environment we looked at?

• Windows 2008 R2
• Citrix XenApp 6.5
• Citrix Receiver 3.2
• Internet Explorer 9.0.8112.16421 (Update 9.06)
• Citrix HDX Mediastrwam for Flash – Server  version 2.0.1.0

If you look at the picture above you notice both the ActvieX and the plugin are installed. Keep that in mind….

What have we done so far to test this?

Policy:

A user policy that adds exclusions for certain sites, is added to the farm and filtered based on a few users just to see it’s behavior. The site that is added is http://producten.hema.nl (this is just a example, the customer site was added but I’ve changed that over here). The site itself is not of any importance, the policy behavior is the case.

We’re running IE9 and yes I know you need to add some register settings to make it work. Been there, done that.

IE9 fix:

For a 64-bit operating system

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Citrix\HdxMediaStreamForFlash\Server\PseudoServer

Added the entry: IEBrowserMaximumMajorVersion / DWORD value = 00000009.

What kind of behavior do you see and how do you know client side is broken?

When you browse to the site entered in the list, server side rendering of the site is active. (you can disable the question about optimization as we did)

When you open another TAB in the same browser and e.g. browse to youtube.nl (Big Buck Bunny 1080HD) you will notice this also is rendered on the server.

Even if you open a new IE instance everything is rendered at the server, client side rendering is disabled for some reason.

HDX monitor

When you check the log files with HDX monitor it has several entries like this.

The site URL cannot be obtained from the browser to check against the dynamic blacklist

How can you see that client side rendering is not running on the client?

On the client the process PseudoContainer2.exe is never active when this URL compatibility policy is active. You can check this by opening the taskmanager and search for the proces, it’s not there.

Is there a workaround?

Yes there is, disabling the URL compatibility or having an empty URL list is a workaround to get client side rendering working. This however will have all sites client side rendered. So basically there is no workaround.

Is this a bug?

I looks like a bug, acts like a bug and feels like a bug, but perhaps I’ve done something incredible stupid and it’s not a but. At the moment it certainly looks like a bug.

hope someone tells me that I’m wrong and what I should do to fix it, untill then we’re in the dark waiting for a Citrix fix.

Update:

@BramWolfs did a check up for me and added http;//youtube.com/* to the URL compatibility list. Youtube therefore was rendered server side. Other sites he opened were still rendered client side. Asked him to check his Flash version etc  because perhaps that’s a difference we need to look at.

It looks so far that the difference is found in whether or not you have the plugin and the activeX or jus the activeX installed.

We have a demo R&D environment called Virtuall where we run demo’s for customers and do some R&D work for ourselfs. We tested the issue there also but couldn’t reproduce it. Looking at the server and the installed software one difference was spotted straight away confirming what Bram had tweeted already and does as I’m typing.

He and we in virtuall have only the ActiveX installed, no plugin. The proof is in the pudding, so here’s the picture

Now the only thing to do is see how we can change things so that we break it… I think it’s to simple to assume adding the plugin will break it.

Will keep you posted.

Update 26-06-2012:

A few days ago we received a private hotfix for this issue after Citrix was able to experience the issue internally also.

the hotfix included two DLL. PseudoServerinProc1.dll and PseudoServerInProc2.dll which we installed on a test server.

The fix has been installed on a test server and indeed did solve the issue.

However with this solving of the issue one other issue was introduced, Internet Explorer is less stable after this private hotfix. serveral users testing this hotfix have reported IE to crash.

Hopefully Citrix can find why this is happening and solve it…

Again I’ll keep you posted.

Hotfix available

For XenApp a hotfix is released… http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX134011

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Have you ever been in contact with VMware support or any kind of support desk, they always ask you for log files, log files and more and more log files.

I’ve been there before and every time I wondered when looking through those files what the lines meant and if I could find information myself that would solve my issue.

On a Friday afternoon a few months ago, @SvenH and me (@RobBeekmans) were sitting with some collegues talking about this and decided to start building a session for internal use.

Working for PQR also means you like to share thing with the world, so after just a few weeks the session evolved into a presentation for the VMUG and we even talked about VMworld. Sitting at the office I decided, without consulting Sven, to submit the session. I think the session is interesting for every one in the field having to deal with troubleshooting.

So we had a schedule, first stop was 1st of June second one later this year at VMworld Barcelona (hopefully).

I started out with creating a simple (..) overview of all communication that goes on in the daily life of a VMware View environment. A small piece of that drawing is shown below.

With that I could see which log files are accessed and work from there.

Finishing that took me some evenings but is fun.. gives you insight in the architecture and communication lines as well as the log files.

Sven on the other hand was working on a presentation for VMUG and later on for VMworld. the VMUG presentation is available for every one to take a look at.

VMware View troubleshooting session VMUG Belgium

You can see where we are going with our presentation, in the coming months more and more information and details will be added so a good deep dive troubleshooting session will be ready for VMworld.

If you are interested in troubleshooting in general of VMware View in particulair please vote for our session.

Session 1458 Troubleshooting VMware View 5 deep dive 

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At a project we faced issues with streamed Citrix XenApp 6.5 servers and therefore we started to do some testing.

These issues were mostly because of to many network printers connecting for each user. When a user would log on they received 40 printers generating 1GB of data on the C: drive so effectively ending up in the provisioning server cache location. All other users on that XenApp server were infected when a users logs on. Another issue we had to deal with was a non-optimal storage environment due to several reasons. For both reasons we decided to take a step aside of best practices and look towards different caching solutions.

Not to take credits here, I have to say that my collegae Erik van Veenendaal started this when getting frustrated with the performance of the environment. He can tell everything I write here in very very much details. He was at Briforum London so if you missed him…. you missed out on a great discussion.

So first about the pilot environment;

• Cisco UCS, blades with 2 Intel Xeon HexaCores at 3,07GHz and 192GB RAM
• SAN connection is 2 x 1Gbit per host in the pilot.
• Citrix XenApp 6.5 and Provisioning server 5.6 going to 6.1
• RES Workspace Manager 2011 SR4
• RES Automation Manager
• Microsoft App-v
• VMware vSphere 4.1

So a very basic environment many of you work with on a daily bases.

What did we test and what are we still testing:

• Cache to RAM and what that does with stability, BSOD etc etc
• Pagefile location, C: or D:
• Pagefile size
• Fixed pagefile versus system managed pagefile together with the previous tests
• Memory reservation for the virtual machine so that the .vswp file is not created. this would prevent overcommiting of memory. (only VMware???)

Some results: (all the time cache to RAM is used)

Disk queue length

When the  Cache is set to disk the disk queue length was 50 – 70, when changing to “Cache to RAM” the disk queue length vanished, and more important users stopped complaining.

PageFile

When you use “Cache to disk” and you have a system managed pagefile, this pagefile will end up on your persistent disk (if you have one).

With “Cache to RAM” this behavior is different and the pagefile when it’s system managed ends up on C: and therefore end up in RAM. A result of this test was that we noticed that when the pagefile is system managed and caching is set to RAM the cache will fill up damn fast and thus creating issues.

What we did to solve this was create a fixed page file on the D: disk (SAN). The pagefile will be  16GB+1% and usage is about 25%. The Cache at that time was about 1,3GB when 20 users were working on the server. What they were doing I don’t know, we didn’t instruct them, they just did what they normally do.

Another test we did, we love tests, is; We created a fixed page file on C:. This page file is still in RAM, doing this we see the usage of that page file is 90-95%. performance is great everything is stable and users are happy.  the cache size of course was 1GB higher here so about 2,6GB with 20 users. So this looks like a good solution… it looks like one, but is it????

We are discussing internally about the size of the page file and whether or not 95% usages of a pagefile is bad. for now we set the page file on D: (SAN) and set it to 16GB+1% according to best practices.

RAM disk

…and on we go…

For a small test we tested a RAM disk (Primo Ramdisk server edition). we removed the virtual harddrive of the server and created a RAM disk in private mode. After that we set cache to hard disk as the caching method and did some tests. The positive thing about this is that you won’t receive a BSOD and still the cache is send to RAM.

We haven’t tested it further for obvious reasons… curious to know what Citrix might think about this possibility and if they aver tested it.

Questions

Some things we still wonder about and are having internal discussions about are related to the persistent disk. With App-v 5.0 more and more you could use shared cache and you rely less and less on the cache on the persistent disk. That having said, taken in consideration that if the pagefile fixed on C: with those high usage numbers turn out fine, then why would you not invest in memory instead of disks….

With App-v 5, as I understood it, it will write more to Windows cache locations and therefore you need to scale your environment to that for it will end up in the PVS cache.for me this is still a big question mark that will need time to figure out.

A pagefile of 16GB+1% is in my opinion crazy and should be reduced. We have tested this with lower values and seen that it resulted in BSOD when it was system managed and available RAM was only 8GB. With a fixed pagefile on D: or C: to let’s say 4GB and enough memory assigned to the server this should be fine….

 Production ready or not?

The discussion I had with Alex at E2EVc was about if this solution would be production ready. His message was clear, don’t do it for you will run into several issues with stability and applications.

Looking at our pilot environment I can say that at this moment we run 4 XenApp 6.5 servers on one blade with over 80 users working happily. We haven’t had any real issue with this caching method. Having this said I also need to point out that we won’t go into production like this before having a good discussion with the customer and Citrix about the support and best practices.

Currently we are doing VSI load tests with Citrix XenApp on a different host, there we run 5 XenApp servers on one blade, all with Cache to RAM. the tests show that disk queue length is simply not there and that CPU suddenly is an issue again…. We’ll rerun the test in different configuration one of which will be cache to device disk to see what setup is preferable..

I’m interested in your views and comments…

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So, what’s up with those relay servers? Until now every agent connected directly to the datastore to get the latest and greatest based on refreshing and caching settings for the agents.

A downturn of this is that all agents are connecting to the datastore and therefore causing load. Also when your environment reaches beyond one location the communication to that datastore might not be optimal.

RES Software Workspace Manager 2012 has a solution for this, it’s called Relay servers. How does this work? With a relay server the agents, if you configure them right, will not connect to the datastore but to the relay servers. The datastore is only used to update the relay servers and recieve updates from those relay servers.

Will this make your life easier? Yes it will, for now you get a high available environment next to the solution you had already with the earlier versions. with 2011 and earlier the agents itself had a local cache and didn’t depend on the datastore for their operational tasks. With the addition of Relay servers this has expanded to a second layer adding more high availability.

The first layer of defense is the datastore, this datastore will send updates to multiple Relay servers which will send the updates to the agents. If the datastore goes down the Relay servers will hold the latest updates from the datastore and keep on servicing the agents. If one Relay server goes down the agents will contact any other Relay server in order to get updates, this Realy server will get it’s update from the datastore.

I haven’t been able to test and figure out what will happen if all Relay servers go down but the datastore is up. I don’t know if the agent revert back to their old behavior and connect to the datastore automatically or just work with their local cache.

The image shown above is the setup from within the new console, a Relay server is connected to the datastore and running over port 1941. The default port is 1943 but that was already in use because I also had RES workspace Manager running on the same server. 1941 had a nice historic sound to it…

How to setup a Relay server.

The basic setup (next-next-finish) is not described here, I’m sure most of you can do that drunk and asleep. There nothing freaky or weird about it other than the requirement of .Net Framework 4.

Connecting the Relay server with the current Workspace Manager environment is described here. click Next to start.

You have the choice to create a chain of Relay servers or just connect to the datastore directly.

Choose you database server and the database and you’re good to go.

The default cache location is in the ProgramData folder, of course you are free to change it. The cache size is not that large, of course that depends on your enviromennt.

Just to make sure you know what you setup, a small overview. If you click to fast, no worries you can start over easily. I left out the Finish screen, but Yes there is a Finish also.

In the new 2012 console the settings of the Realy servers is set on a global level or per servers. On a global level you can set the timing to poll for changes and when to update the servers.

Per server you can overrule the global setting, but it’s recommended you don’t do this for  the obvious reasons.

Like said before, there is a cache, default location in the ProgramData, with all the settings ect of the environment. My environment was enmpty so my cache also was kinda empty… If you have  demo environment try it and you’ll see all your application icons, background images etc in your Relay server cache.

This was a first preview of RES Workspace Manager Realy servers… hopefully you can benefit from this post.

- Rob

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For a few weeks now I’ve been playing around with RES software Hyperdrive.  Before that I worked with Citrix Sharefile or Dropbox but because we got the chance I decided to try out Hyperdrive.

Setup

The setup is an CentOS appliance that connects into the Active directory and backend storage… there’s not much more to it essentially. I won’t discuss the installation anymore and go into the working of HyperDrive because that is more interesting imho.

Components

RES Hyperdrive consists of some components;

• RES Hyperdrive appliance
• RES Hyperdrive Windows client
• RES HyperDrive MAC client

Working with RES Hyperdrive

In the same message you can see more about the permissions you have on that Fileserver.

Following the link in the message brings you to the Hyperdrive webpage from where you can download the client.

I’m (still) on a Windows machine, so I picked the Windows version. Installation goes smoothly and before you know it you are using RES Hyperdrive.

When I first connected my personal Hyperdrive wasn’t there, only the Consultant Fileserver was accessible. First thing I did was create a personal Fileserver.

Management

Management of the RES Hyperdrive and the Fileservers (Folders/Shares are called Fileservers) can be done from the client or the web page. both work the same and it’s up to you to find the one you like most.

Adding a File server from the web page is done by clicking on the  +. a pop-up appears that gives you the possibility to choose for a Team or a personal Fileserver.

Adding a Fileserver from the client is done by clicking “FileServer” in the menu and choose “New Fileserver” from there.

The end result is the same, a new Fileserver is created and ready to be used.

Synchronizing

Because RES Hyperdrive is an on premises solution, synchronizing is very important. For every Fileserver you can set the synchronizing option seperatly.

Dashboard settings, like proxy, notifier interval or language can be set on a higher lever but mostly will remain default. These options can be found under “Tools/Options”.

Theft

If my laptop was to be stolen that would be pretty annoying for all my Hyperdrive files are also cached locally. To prevent anyone from  using my Hyperdrive I can go the the web page a report my laptop to be stolen.

By clicking on the X I report that this laptop no longer has access to the Fileservers and I report it stolen or lost. When the thief starts my laptop and somehow gains access with my password (welcome…lol) they are asked to enter a password for the RES Hyperdrive. If they fail to enter that password they cannot access the data. All locally cached data is removed from the laptop.

Guest permissions

With shared folders you need to set permissions for access to that folder. on our consultant folder we all have the same permissions but that’s because we’re all consultants. In other companies that might be different. Permissions can be set from the client. Clicking on the Fileserver and choosing “Guest permissions/ FileServer Team Member” allows you to set the correct permissions.

 Invites

A shared folder is no good when you work on it alone. therefore you need to invite people. Clicking on the shared Fileserver and choosing “Invite Guests” allows you to invite people.

When you invite guests you can determine what they are allowed to do on that Fileserver.

If you look on your personal Fileserver you will notice there is no invite option…

Mail via Outlook

When you send large documents to multiple receipients that would cause this document to be sent to all these people with all of them reading it. Placing that same document on a Fileserver and sending a link to those same people will allow them to download it if they are really interested. It shows in recent tests that not all people will download the document.

Adding a document shows a HyperDrive pop-up.

The options allow you to make the document more secure limiting download, expiring the document and even protecting it with a password.

Clicking OK, tranfers the document to a hyperlink that is inserted in the mail as many of my customers have experienced already.

View files

To view who has access your files you can set the notifiy when sending and if you want an more clear overview open the web page and check out the status.

What is left…

Ignore on filesize

With every product there still are some things that need improvement. RES bought the technique or the product and created something real RES from it.. it ain’t finished, one thing that I would like to see implemented is a file limit on files that are a certain size. You can however create patterns to ignore files or like I’ve done ignore certain file types. You can’t limit them on size and that the next thing we are looking for.

Cache

Another thing that doesn’t seem to be included yet is the ability to not cache at all… looking at some customer desktops where they run non-persistent VDI environments you don’t want the cache to be synced every freaking time you log on.

There has to be a no-cache option for these scenario’s, online windows desktops that are non-persistent.

Quota

Another option I haven’t seen so far is quota management… depending on your storage environment you might want to control the amount of data stored in the Hyperdrive.

This is a small quick overview of the RES Hyperdrive, hope it helps you get a better insight of the product.

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