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 »
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 »
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 »
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”.
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 »