Category Archives: Citrix XenDesktop

Unattended Citrix PVS vDisk Creation

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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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Show Citrix hosting connection usage

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Background information
Recently I was at a customer operates an Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops farm that connects to multiple hypervisors (VMware vSphere and Nutanix AHV) to be used with Machine Creation Services. With migrations and new hardware, the site now has multiple hypervisor connections to the same hypervisor and even more hypervisor resources (hosting units) in each connection. To perform a clean up we wanted to create an overview for each resource/hosting unit to see which machine catalogs (provisioning schemes) use these resources, with the goal of removing the ones that are not used (anymore).

To get this overview we have created a PowerShell script that does exactly that. This short blogpost will describe the script and how you use it.
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Dutch CUGC: April 2024 Meeting Recap

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NOTE: Usually I post these recaps on MyCUGC.org. But with the move from MyCUGC to the new Citrix Community (link) only technical blogs are posted.

Spring is here and along with it another edition of the bi-annual meetup of the Dutch Citrix User Group (DuCUG). And what an edition it was. Great sessions with lots of Citrix-related updates, know-how and experiences. As with earlier recaps, I wrote this blog to share what this event is like and what each session was about. Maybe I can convince some of you to attend. 😉
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DuCUG September 2022 Entrance

Dutch CUGC: September 2022 Meeting Recap

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NOTE: This blog was also posted on MyCUGC.org (link) on October 6th, 2022.

Last week (September 28th, 2022) there was another meetup of the Dutch Citrix User Group (DuCUG). This bi-annual event in the Netherlands has a focus on all-things Citrix (and anything related). This edition was once again fantastic and that’s why I want to share this recap with the rest of CUGC.

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Unattended StoreFront March 2021 - Featured image

Unattended Citrix StoreFront Installation and Configuration

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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

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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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Citrix Synergy June 2019 Entrance

Citrix Synergy 2019 Revisited – Extended Edition

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NOTE: This blog was also posted on MyCUGC.org (link) on June 5, 2019.

Most people reading this probably will not need an introduction to Citrix Synergy. When it comes to one of our favorite vendors, this is their biggest event of the year. With lots of interesting sessions, labs, sponsors and the ability to try out new features at the Citrix booth, it is a fantastic way to stay current in the End User Computing-market.

There are a lot of post-event blog posts about Citrix Synergy 2019, and none of them can be definitive, simply because there is so much to see, hear, learn, experience, etc. that nobody is able to do that by themselves. So therefore, here is my recap of Citrix Synergy 2019.

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Automating the Citrix App Layer

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Introduction:
If your daily job has anything to do with virtual workspaces, you definitely have heard something about app layering. App layering is seen as the replacement for the ‘old’ application virtualization solutions like Microsoft App-V and VMware ThinApp.
While app layering is a good solution for most of the usual issues that come with running many applications on the same machines, it still takes a lot of time to create all those layers.
So together with automation-aficionado Chris Twiest we asked ourselves the question:
‘Is it possible to automate app layer creation?’

This blog will focus on the automation of creating app layers with Citrix App Layering, while Chris Twiest focused on doing the same with VMware App Volumes, the result of which you can find here. This blog is also a precursor to our presentation at the Expert 2 Expert Virtualization Conference in Athens (link).

EDIT Dec 19th 2018: Click here for a YouTube video of the presentation.

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Citrix XenDesktop 7.x VDI deployment with PowerShell using vSphere, local storage and PVS

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Introduction:
At a customer a while back we had an Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 environment. VMware vSphere 6.0 was used as hypervisor, Citrix Provisioning Services 7.9 for deployment and Microsoft Windows 10 as OS for the virtual desktops. Since these desktops were non-persistent we were able to use the local solid state storage in the hypervisors. This did however present some challenges when it came to the deployment of the virtual desktops. We (my colleague Leon van Efferen and myself) ended up with a PowerShell script that did just about everything.

In this post I will explain what the script does and what you need to do to use it in your own XenDesktop/PVS/vSphere environment. You can find the actual script at the end of the post.
Keep in mind that the customer used VMware vSphere (XenServer or Hyper-V were a big no-no for unknown reasons) and therefore the script only contains the commands for vSphere (PowerCLI 6.x). If you would like to use it for other hypervisors, feel free to alter it in any way and present it as your own on your own blogsite.

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