Centralis Harvester 4.5

Audit, Analyse and Automate your Citrix Farm.  The latest version of Centralis Harvester is certified "Citrix Ready" and makes light work of managing Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 and 4.5 Farms.

Overview

Citrix Presentation Server Farms demand the highest quality of pro-active management and maintenance of standards to ensure users get a consistent experience.  But how can you actually audit, analyse and manage large numbers of servers and published applications effectively?

Award-winning consultancy and Citrix Platinum partner Centralis has been running large-scale Citrix managed services for 10 years.  In order to improve (and prove) the quality of service Centralis developed software to not only automate many of the time-consuming management tasks, but also to report on standards throughout the farm in real-time.

The results are improved standards, faster troubleshooting and a reduction of time spent on maintenance tasks of up to 90%. 

While scripts can automate some tasks, only Centralis^® Harvester™ delivers the combination of a simple, easy to use interface, with menu driven options and highly flexible reporting.

	The amount of time I was able to save using the Centralis Harvester product is incredible! I can not believe that I went without this product for so long.
	Joshua Bublitz, Systems Engineer, California State Parks

"Centralis Harvester 4 is a breath of fresh air as it allows both SMB and Enterprise customers to easily and cost effectively manage and audit Citrix Presentation Server farms in seconds. In terms of farm-wide Citrix audit, reporting and standards, Harvester 4 has defined itself as a top tier solution that also has the ability to pay for itself in weeks! I highly recommend giving it a try"
Douglas A. Brown President and CTO, DABCC, Inc.

Centralis has been developing Citrix management tools for more than five years, selling over 350,000 user licenses worldwide.  Major customers for Harvester include Hoffman La-Roche, Dresdner Kleinwort, Centrica, Standard Life, Arcadia, Fujitsu Siemens, Thames Valley Police, Surrey County Council, the RNLI and a number of Universities and NHS Trusts.

Harvester was originally developed by Centralis as part of their Citrix managed farm service. The software not only significantly reduces the time administrators spend managing the Citrix Presentation Server Farm, it also checks standard settings for every server and published application. Administrators can apply global standards across the farm in one operation, improving the performance of the farm and the experience of the end-user.

"Fujitsu Siemens Computers is using 64bit technology for the internal Citrix Presentation Server Farm. Centralis Harvester has been successfully implemented in order to manage this Enterprise environment easily, to detect inconsistencies and to backup and duplicate the farm configuration. The flexible and fast support is particularly good."
Andreas Schulz, System Engineer, Fujitsu Siemens Computers

Audit

Save complex reports on critical farm settings and standards to be run in seconds and prove compliance across every server and published application in the Citrix farm.  Identify non-compliant settings immediately with exception reports, highlighting areas for action.

	Harvester gives us added confidence our build is correct and as a result has decreased our server time-to-deployment by an enormous margin.
	Roy Farr, Principal Wintel Specialist, Centrica IS

Analyse

Simplify troubleshooting and diagnostics with tools to profile the whole Citrix farm in seconds - including integration with the new Advanced Access Control filters and Published Application assignment under Active Directory. 

Automate

Making the most time consuming and complex tasks simple.  Store Server settings and Published Application lists in XML format - then simply apply them to any number of targets via Harvester.  Take whole farms and back them up or move them to new farms.  Find any setting and change it, on every target, in a single operation.  Roll back changes in seconds by reverting to saved "snapshots".

Overall, customer tests have shown that Harvester not only improves farm-wide standards – on core farm management tasks it is more than ten times faster than using CMC alone!

Harvester 4.5's Main Interface

Key Harvester Features:

Harvester 4.5 is fully compatible with Presentation Server 4.0 & 4.5 (Harvester 2.0 is available for earlier versions), allowing Citrix administrators to quickly and easily carry out core farm administration tasks in a fraction of the time, including:

• Give "read-only" access to helpdesk and support staff - improving diagnostic & reporting capabilities
• Create and run standard reports for SLAs, quality reports and ITIL procedures showing standards compliance across the farm, including hotfixes, printer drivers & load evaluators
• Move published applications between Citrix Presentation Server farms
• Report and change settings for Published Applications across the farm
• Publish standard application sets to a new server 
• Stop the publishing of an application across every server in the farm 
• Report and change server configuration settings across the farm
• Store server configurations in a file to be compared with and applied to other servers
• Find non-standard settings across Published Applications and Citrix Presentation Servers and correct them
• Define a new set of standards and simply apply it across the farm

Core farm administration tasks in a fraction of the time

"In the case of a recent major application upgrade, Harvester allowed us to remove applications quickly and smoothly from servers, ensuring that users could not connect to them whilst still allowing administrators on the servers to complete upgrade work and then add applications back again quickly afterwards using the saved XML files.  The reporting element of the tool is also proving very useful and provides farm-wide information in seconds."
Citrix Administrator, UK Police Force

Harvester 4.5 allows Citrix administrators to quickly and easily carry out complex farm administration tasks in a fraction of the time, including:

• Standards compliance & exception reports
• Published application management
• Server configuration management
• Inter-farm migration tools
• Farm configuration backup & restore

Printer Driver Reporting

Create a list of your standard printer drivers - then create an automated report that runs each day to check every server in the farm and ensure no new drivers have been added.

Harvester 4.5 Report on Printer Drivers by Server

"Without Harvester we'd need substantial manual effort to finalise each build. Harvester saves us valuable time."
Roy Farr, Principal Wintel Specialist, Centrica IS

Server & Published Application Standards

Compare any server or published application with another, or with your standard settings to create exception reports - then use Harvester to reset the exceptions to standard - even across multiple servers.

Harvester 4.5 Report on Server comparison

HotFix Reporting

Check the hotfix settings on any group of servers to make sure they are consistent with your standards.

Harvester 4.5 Report on HotFixes by Server

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