Farm Nanny, a Citrix XenApp farm monitor application

 Applications, Citrix, XenApp  21 Responses »
May 012012
 

Although Citrix EdgeSight is completely packed with features, it is a little top-heavy and personally I still miss the good old Citrix resource manager because it was a quick and easy way to get an overview of what’s going on with your farm and servers.
Sure there are a lot of PowerShell scripts to be found which give you an overview of your farm, but those scripts are just snap-shots of your environment.
What you really need is something that monitors your Citrix XenApp farm in real-time

After some digging around in the Citrix XenApp SDK, I decided to make my own Citrix XenApp farm monitor: Farm Nanny!

Farm Nanny is a Citrix XenApp farm monitoring application for XenApp 6 and XenApp 6.5 which will help you with troubleshooting, health checks and resource monitoring. Continue reading »

Installing Symantec Endpoint Protection in a Citrix Provisioning Services vDisk using PowerShell

 Applications, Citrix, Powershell, Provisioning, XenApp, XenDesktop  No Responses »
Apr 052012
 

If you install Symantec Enterprise Protection in a Citrix Provisioning Services vDisk in standard mode, you will notice that your clients will create duplicate entries in the Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager at every reboot.
Just like most other centrally managed anti-virus products (see my other post on Trend Micro OfficeScan), Symantec uses hardware id’s to uniquely identify clients and this causes issues with read-only vDisks. Continue reading »

Multiple languages, regional options and keyboard layouts with Citrix and AppSense

 AppSense, Citrix, Microsoft, XenApp  6 Responses »
Jan 302012
 

Lately I’ve been implementing a new Citrix XenApp 6.5 environment for a large international customer.
Because the environment will be used by people from all over the world, the customer requested to have multiple language packs installed and all users should get their correct language settings, regional options and keyboards at logon according to their active directory security group memberships.
I remember from back in the days on windows 2003 this could be a nightmare, but on windows 2008 R2 with a few registry keys in AppSense and some GPO’s it’s quite easy to get this right. Continue reading »

Change the text size in a remote desktop session

 Applications, Citrix, Microsoft, XenApp  16 Responses »
Dec 212011
 

When connected to a Windows 2008 R2 remote desktop session, you cannot change the size of the text on your screen (font size / DPI settings).
If you go to “Control Panel” – “Display” you see the message: “the display settings can’t be changed from a remote session.”.

Especially for users with large screens and large resolutions, this can be a real problem. Continue reading »

Personalizing the default printer when using Citrix session printers and AppSense Personalization

 AppSense, Citrix, Printing  1 Response »
Dec 142011
 

Personalizing Citrix session printers for your users will not work out of the box with AppSense Personalization.
As described in http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX107415, session printers are deleted at logoff and therefore AppSense Personalization will not capture the user’s default printer.

To personalize the user’s default printer with AppSense Personalization you have to apply a small workaround. Continue reading »

AppSense Personalization additional registry keys overview

 AppSense  6 Responses »
Nov 292011
 

Although AppSense Personalization works almost “out of the box”, there are still a couple of user settings which do not persist after a log off.

I revisited my old list of registry keys and hiving actions and tested them out with AppSense Environment Manager 8.2 on a Windows 7 client machine.
The list below is an overview of the settings that did not persist. Add the registry keys you need to your session data (or desktop settings, if you have an older version of AppSense) to make the setting persist. Continue reading »

PowerShell Robocopy script with e-mail notification

 Microsoft, Powershell  15 Responses »
Nov 252011
 

I wrote this PowerShell script to synchronize two folders with robocopy (each located on another physical hard disk) so I have a backup in case one hard disk fails.
The script will send the robocopy output log file as an attachment to the specified e-mail address. Continue reading »

AppSense Environment Manager Browser Interface – Personalization administration through a web browser

 AppSense  No Responses »
Nov 212011
 

With the release of AppSense environment manager 8.2, AppSense introduced the AppSense environment manager browser interface.
The environment manager browser interface lets you do the basic AppSense personalization administration tasks (for example application archive rollback and deletion of the application settings) through a web browser without having to install the full environment manager console. This allows you to delegate personalization administration to your helpdesk staff because the environment manager browser interface does not have all the advanced features the full environment manager console does.

Let’s start with setting up the AppSense environment manager browser interface. Continue reading »

Building a VMware ESXi 5.0 Whitebox home lab

 VMware  17 Responses »
Sep 262011
 

My old ESXi 4.1 whitebox was nearly begging me to retire him. The maximum of 8gb memory on the Asus P5k mainboard and the 2 sata disks (no raid) spinning at 7200rpm were not keeping up anymore.

After doing the mandatory research on the whitebox HCL sites, I decided to order the following:

Continue reading »

PowerShell print server inventory script

 Microsoft, Powershell, Printing  23 Responses »
Sep 132011
 

Getting information from all installed printers on a print server can be an impossible task without third-party tooling or scripts. PowerShell can make this really easy.

I created a PowerShell script which lists all installed printers and gathers information like the printer name, driver, share name, location and the IP address (the actual IP address, not the portname without the “IP” prefix). Continue reading »

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