Edgesight for Loadtesting Semi-Free!

Here's some news. Load testing on Citrix is still a pain in the ass.

Citrix is attempting to round out that chasm of product functionality with a new product called "Edgesight for Load Testing". Actually to say that it's a new product is a fat lie. Like many other products (Edgesight included) Citrix just bought up a company and slapped their logo on their product. So in addition to the name being completely lame, it's also incorrect. This product is in no way related to Edgesight. No doubt future integration is planned, but for now it has about as much to do with Edgesight as notepad does.

According to the press release found here:
"Citrix EdgeSight for Loading Testing 2.5 will be available on June 25, 2007, and suggested retail pricing starts at $7,500. Citrix EdgeSight for NetScaler is available as part of the Citrix NetScaler 8.0 Platinum Edition."

In other words, this shit ain't cheap.

Unless of course you found some way to get a license for some kind of discount.

Recently I took a class on Edgesight 4.5, specifically CTX-1800AI. It's a moderately interesting course, but the cool part is that you get a demo license for Edgesight for Load Testing. So what? Well.. the "demo" license you get is good for 2 years! 2 friggin years! What the hell were these guys thinking?

So why pay 7500 for a product when you can get the same product for around 1200 and some change? Just take the course and conduct a very extensive demo of the product. I think most people would agree that two years is adequate to make a determination as to whether or not you actually want to go forward and pay the full licensing cost.

-CG

Edgesight Licensing Hole

Edgesight is a cool product. There's no doubt about it. But why pay for it if you don't have to?

A little history is probably in order..

Edgesight was actually developed by another company called Reflectant. Citrix bought Reflectant as a means to round out their suite of products. Let's face it, Resource Manager is about as useful as loose bowels. Oh sure, it was probably grand back in the days, but it's a dinosaur by modern standards. Hence the need for Citrix to find something to monitor their stuff.

A little known fact is that shortly after acquiring Reflectant, Citrix promptly told most of the other competing vendors (EG Innovations, etc) to go fuck themselves. Citrix is no longer including these vendors in the development process of the Metaframe product suite. Downright bastardly if you ask me, but many of us have seen the big red dot toss its weight around before for no other apparent reason than just to be catty. They refunded their iForum exhibition fees and did a tremendous job in showing their ass.

So anyways, after Citrix purchased reflectant they were in a rush to re-brand the product and get it out there. As is often the case, certain compromises were made with the product conversion for the sake of some deadline. Long story short is that the licensing in 4.0 and 4.2 is not perfect.

It's so imperfect in fact that it is not enforced by the product. Edgesight is licensed by concurrent connection in the same fashion that MPS is. What is supposed to happen is that the product gathers data on the number of users that you are licensed for and then stops once it hits the ceiling. With version 4.0 and 4.2 this doesn't happen. You could be licensed for 10 users and collect data on 10,000. Pretty sweet.

This little bug is fixed in 4.5, which may explain why Citrix is pushing folks so hard to upgrade even though the improvements are somewhat minor in the newer version.

Sometimes the latest and greatest turns out not to be.

-CG

Edgesight ADM

Yes, it's been a while since the last post. Sorry. Have you looked outside lately? The sun is out. I have a life. That means the give-a-shit quotent regarding things in the office takes a sharp decline. Since I pilfer work hours to update this blog, citrixguy.net falls within the scope of that phenominon.

Anyways, I came up with a basic ADM Template that I thought might be useful for some of you wokies that play with Edgesight. It allows you to set some fundamental settings that make managing your deployment a little less painful. Like most of these things, it's not as pretty as it could be (see also: give-a-shit quotent above), but it gets the job done and gives you something to play with.

There's five parameters I'm setting with this:
- the edgesight app server name
- the app server path
- the app server port
- The Department Name
- The Company Name

If you don't know how to make this work as a GPO, take your hands off the keyboard immediately and go fling yourself in front of the nearest bus. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you are a pus-filled boil on the ass of the IT industry.

All you not so dumb people, please enjoy with my compliments.

-CG

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CLASS MACHINE

CATEGORY "Edgesight Server Configuration"

POLICY "Server Port"

#if VERSION >= 3 EXPLAIN "This policy defines the port on which the Edgesight web server is running. The default is 80" #endif

KEYNAME "SOFTWARE\Citrix\System Monitoring\Agent\EdgeSight\4.00\NetAccess\"

PART "Server Port" EDITTEXT VALUENAME "ServerPort" DEFAULT "80" #if VERSION >= 2 EXPANDABLETEXT #endif END PART

END POLICY ; Server Port

POLICY "Server Path"

KEYNAME "SOFTWARE\Citrix\System Monitoring\Agent\EdgeSight\4.00\NetAccess\"

PART "ServerPath" EDITTEXT KEYNAME "SOFTWARE\Citrix\System Monitoring\Agent\EdgeSight\4.00\NetAccess\" VALUENAME "ServerPath" END PART

END POLICY ; Server Path

POLICY "ServerName"

#if VERSION >= 3 EXPLAIN "This defines the name of the Edgesight server. The default is EATABAGOFDICKS" #endif

KEYNAME "SOFTWARE\Citrix\System Monitoring\Agent\EdgeSight\4.00\NetAccess"

PART "ServerName" EDITTEXT VALUENAME "ServerName" DEFAULT "ENTER YOUR STUPID SERVER NAME HERE" END PART

END POLICY ; ServerName

POLICY "Department"

#if VERSION >= 3 EXPLAIN "This defines the Department name which usually corresponds to the partinular Farm." #endif

KEYNAME "SOFTWARE\Citrix\System Monitoring\Agent\EdgeSight\"

PART "Department" EDITTEXT VALUENAME "Department" DEFAULT "ENTER YOUR DEPARTMENT" END PART

END POLICY ; Department

POLICY "Company"

KEYNAME "SOFTWARE\Citrix\System Monitoring\Agent\EdgeSight\"

PART "Company" EDITTEXT KEYNAME "SOFTWARE\Citrix\System Monitoring\Agent\EdgeSight\" VALUENAME "Company" DEFAULT "ENTER YOUR COMPANY NAME" #if VERSION >= 2 EXPANDABLETEXT #endif END PART

END POLICY ; Company

END CATEGORY ; Edgesight Server Configuration

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