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