Project Mobius Beta 1
One of the most popular ways to migrate from one Citrix Presentation Server farm
to a new Citrix Presentation Server farm is to build the farms in parallel and use
Web Interface to aggregate the two separate farms’ published applications. This
is a great strategy and I have used parallel farms many times in the past to migrate
users to a new farm. One of the challenges of this strategy is duplicating published
applications and policies from the old farm to the new farm. Traditionally, you
would need to either manually create each published application in the new farm
or use scripting to export/import published applications. This is where Project
Mobius comes in. Project Mobius is a Microsoft Windows application that allows you
to drag and drop published applications and/or folders from one Citrix Presentation
Server farm to one or more separate Citrix Presentation Server farms. Project Mobius
currently only has capabilities to migrate published applications, but the capability
to migrate policies is slated for a future release.
Download
Project Mobius Beta 1
Installation
Project Mobius requires Microsoft .Net Framework version 2.0.
Project Mobius utilizes MFCOM to perform application migration. Thus, Project Mobius
must be run from either a Citrix Presentation Server or a workstation that has the
Citrix Presentation Server SDK installed and registered for DCOM (utilizing mfreg.exe).
Project Mobius does not require an install. Simply copy Mobius.exe as well as Interop.MetaFrameCOM.dll
to a location on your Presentation Server (or workstation).
Tested Platforms
The MFCOM interfaces and methods used in the source code for Project Mobius should
be compatible with Citrix MetaFrame XP 1.0 and above. However, Project Mobius has specifically
been tested on the following platforms:
- Citrix MetaFrame XP FR3
- Citrix Presentation Server 3.0
- Citrix Presentation Server 4.0
- Citrix Presentation Server 4.5
Using Project Mobius
Step 1 - Click File -> Connect to Farm. Then, specify any Citrix Presentation/MetaFrame Server in any farm you want to manage. Project Mobius uses the specified server
to enumerate all published applications and folders in a given farm. Repeat
this step for any additional farms you want to manage. (Tip: you may also
right click on the Enterprise Farms tree node or click the Connect to Farm icon
to connect to a farm.
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Step 2 - Highlight a folder in the left hand tree view containing the published applications and
folders you want to migrate. Drag and drop the published applications and
folders from the right hand side to the appropriate location in any farm on the
left hand side. (Tip: you may use Ctrl or Shift to select multiple published applications
or folders).
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Optional - Farms that have a large number of applications may take several
minutes to enumerate all published applications. This is due to the fact that
Project Mobius has to use the LoadData() method of the IMetaFrameApplication interface
for each published application in order to retrieve the application object and bind
the object to the tree view. This can be time consuming as each call to LoadData
retrieves all properties for a published application. To mitigate this time
consuming process, click on Tools -> Options. Then, select Enable dynamic
population. This option will only load published applications for the selected
folder. Each time you highlight a new folder, Project Mobius will dynamically
retrieve the published applications within the folder.
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Trivial Information
For those of you still reading and wondering why this piece of software is called Project Mobius, let me explain.
Citrix code names Presentation Server after rivers (Hudson = Presentation Server 3.0; Colorado = Presentation Server 4.0; Ohio = Presentation Server 4.5; etc.).
I was pondering what to name this project and I decided to name products after wakeboard tricks. One wakeboard trick that has a cool sounding name in my opinion is called a Mobius. A Mobius is a back side roll (flip)
with a 360 degree handle pass rotation. If you want to see what it looks like,
check out this video. So, all in all, this project has no hidden tie
in to the wakeboarding Mobius. I just think it is a cool name (and
trick).
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