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 »

Local profiles with AppSense Personalization and PowerShell

 AppSense, Citrix, Powershell, Profiles, XenApp, XenDesktop  20 Responses »
Sep 022011
 

In almost all XenApp and XenDesktop environments I build, I solve user virtualization with AppSense Personalization and local profiles.
AppSense Personalization allows you to virtualize and personalize the user desktop without the need of a roaming profile, and by using  AppSense Personalization together with local profiles you get some big advantages over roaming and mandatory profiles:

  • Fast logon and logoff times (no profile has to be loaded over the network)
  • No profile corruption
  • No manual mandatory profile creation
  • No “hung” profiles

The only drawback of using local profiles is that they are not automatically deleted from the server or desktop when the user logs off, but this is where spoofing the state of the local profile with PowerShell comes in. Continue reading »

Better HA for Citrix provisioning: PowerShell conditional reboot script for target devices

 Citrix, Powershell, Provisioning, XenApp, XenDesktop  No Responses »
Aug 292011
 

Citrix has done a good job in helping us make a XenApp or XenDesktop environment based on provisioning high available.
Once your target devices are up, you’re mostly in the green zone:

  • A target device that has acquired license has a grace period.
  • Offline database support allows your SQL server to take a break.
  • 2 or more provisioning servers ensure high availability for your target devices.
  • NIC teaming
  • And so on…

However, when your target devices go into a (scheduled) reboot, you can go into the red zone.

Continue reading »

Event forwarding, a must for Citrix provisioning

 Citrix, Microsoft, Provisioning, XenApp, XenDesktop  No Responses »
Aug 222011
 

“Could you please take a look at the provisioned XenApp and XenDesktop environment ? We had some random freezes yesterday”.
So you log on to a server, open the eventlog and find….. Nothing.
The servers and desktop are running on a read-only vDisk and after a reboot all events are gone.

I’ve seen administrators work around this problem by redirecting the eventlog to the D: drive and although this works just fine, there’s a much better way of doing this, it’s called  event forwarding. Continue reading »

Creating a unique STA ID for XenApp 6 with provisioning

 Citrix, Powershell, Provisioning, XenApp  4 Responses »
Aug 152011
 

With XenApp 6, Citrix removed the need for XenAppPrep when you want to prepare your image for cloning or provisioning.

Citrix published the following documentation in which 3 approaches to preparing for XenApp 6 imaging and provisioning are described: http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/xenapp6-w2k8-install/ps-image-prep.html.

Although the Citrix documentation says otherwise, you may have the same STA ID on all provisioned XenApp servers to which you assigned your vDisk. Even after sealing the image with the XenApp server configuration tool 1.1 and choosing “Prepare this server for imaging and provisioning”.

Continue reading »

Unattended Printer Driver Installation

 Citrix, Microsoft, Printing, Provisioning, XenApp, XenDesktop  1 Response »
Jun 272011
 

In an environment based on provisioned servers and desktops, I personally believe it’s best practice to keep your vDisk (image) as clean as possible, so that also means leaving the printer drivers out and installing them afterwards.

Printer drivers can be installed unattended (at boot time) and this has several big advantages:
- You can exclude a certain printer driver from being installed for troubleshooting purposes.
- Replacing or deinstalling a printer driver was never easier because you are not actually deinstalling: By excluding a certain driver, the driver was simply never there. No more leftover driver files.

Let me show you how… Continue reading »

Installing Trend Micro OfficeScan in a vDisk

 Applications, Citrix, Provisioning, XenApp, XenDesktop  10 Responses »
Jun 252011
 

A default installation of the Trend Micro OfficeScan client in a vDisk of a provisioned device is going to get you in trouble…
The Trend Micro management server expects each client to register with a unique GUID.
When you install the Trend Micro OfficeScan client in a vDisk, all provisioned devices using that vDisk will register with the same GUID and the management server becomes clueless. Continue reading »