Category Archives: Automation

Unattended Citrix PVS vDisk Creation

NOTE: This blog was also posted on community.citrix.com (link) on April 3rd, 2024.

Working on your image (but different)
When building vDisk/golden-images for Provisioning Services I usually recommend automating this process. This will ensure that every image is created in the same order and make errors a lot less likely.
At the end of this image-build you would need to create an vDisk from this installation. This will copy the entire installation to a VHD(X) file and imported to your Provisioning Services environment.
You can then ‘provision’ (stream) that vDisk to all your session hosts.

The automation of the image itself is a lot more common nowadays then it was a couple of years ago, but the final conversion to vDisk is still done manually most of the time.
For a customer I created a PowerShell script that also automates this last part and I thought it would be a good one to share with the community. To show it can be done and also to persuade administrators to keep the ‘automate everything’-mindset.

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Use Sports-Tracker.com API with PowerShell

Introduction
Since the whole ‘COVID-era’, I, like most of us IT-folk, work a lot more from home and only go to the office 1 or 2 days a week. When working from home I usually go to the gym around the end of the morning. It is around 4.8 kilometer from my house and I try to go by bicycle whenever I can (I am Dutch after all), so I do my warmup on the go. And when I say bicycle, I mean my old 90’s Trek Mountainbike which may or may not fall apart while riding it.

Old mountainbike

Why do I go to the gym at all? A bit of discipline, a bit of staying in shape, a bit of self-confidence. For every bike-ride over there I turn on the Sports-Tracker app to log the distance and time it takes. Looking at the results I was wondering how many kilometers I have done these last three years. Now of course I can use the app or the website for that, but where is the fun in that if I might be able to do it through an API.

This blog will describe how I found out how the API works an how you can grab the data from PowerShell.

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Unattended StoreFront March 2021 - Featured image

Unattended Citrix StoreFront Installation and Configuration

NOTE: This blog was also posted on MyCUGC.org (link) on March 3rd, 2021.

About three years ago, I posted a blog about how to perform an unattended installation and configuration of Citrix StoreFront with Ivanti Automation. It did the installation, the creation of a new store and it added a second StoreFront server to the server group.

Since most organizations are stepping away from (still awesome) tools like Ivanti Automation and are moving towards solutions like Puppet, Ansible, Chocolatey, Packer, plain PowerShell, etc., I wanted to create a PowerShell script that does the same, but does not require an automation tool.

In this short blog, I will post how it works, how you can use it and of course the scripts themselves. Keep in mind that this is just an example, it is not a definitive solution for deploying StoreFront. Also, these scripts are not signed with a certificate because you need to enter your environment specific variables.

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Citrix Cloud Blog - October 2019

Automating Citrix Cloud & Windows Virtual Desktop

NOTE: This blog was also posted on MyCUGC.org (link) on October 16th, 2019.

(See the script in action! Watch the webinar recording (YouTube) for a demo and discussion around the script.)

Introduction

The year 2019 has been all about Windows Virtual Desktop. If you are even slightly active in the IT circles on social media, you have definitely read about it. The most interesting part about it is the fact that it finally turns Windows 10 into a multi-user OS. Of course, there are other benefits (access to FSLogix!), but that’s not what this blog is about, nor is it about Citrix’s reaction to it in the form of Citrix Managed Desktop. As the title suggests, it’s about automation. It’s about another challenge to automate something that isn’t automated (yet) out of the box.

This time, we will be trying to automate the Azure deployment of a Citrix Cloud Connector machine together with a Windows 10 multi-user VM, all the way until it is ready to accept user sessions. We will walk you through the challenges we had, the issues we ran into and why we are even doing this (short answer: because we can).

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