Tag Archives: PowerShell

Use Sports-Tracker.com API with PowerShell

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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

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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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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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Query all snapshots from Nutanix-AHV

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Introduction:
While working in a Nutanix-AHV environment I wanted to list all snapshots in the environment. With VMware vSphere you needed to do this with PowerCLI or use the excellent RVTools. In Nutanix Prism you can (to my knowledge) only see the snapshots when opening the virtual machine details.

Going through every VM in this environment would cost precious time that could also be spent drinking coffee, going through Twitter or catching up on some sleep. So I created the following script to list all snapshots in your environment, the virtual machine it belongs to and when it was created.

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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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Deploy Intel Meltdown-Spectre patches with Ivanti Automation

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Introduction:
The beginning of 2018 has been all about the Intel Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities…….and cryptocurrency. These vulnerabilities take advantages of features that modern processors have to operate more efficiently. These features are ‘out-of-order execution’ (Intel Meltdown) and ‘branch prediction’ (Spectre).

Out-of-order execution allows a processor to execute instructions in a non-sequential manner, which will result in less time spent idle. Branch prediction is a feature that predicts what instructions will be executed and where. So in a way it will execute some instructions before they even are received from the running application.

There are several patches/updates that need to be done to mitigate these vulnerabilities. These range from new BIOS/UEFI updates, Firmware updates, driver updates and of course: patches.
There are patches from Microsoft, Red Hat, CentOS, VMware, etc. Basically just about every IT administrator has some work ahead of him/her (or he/she is already done and drinking his/her earned beer). The focus of this blogpost is the patches from Microsoft.

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Unattended StoreFront 3.x deployment with Ivanti Automation

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Introduction:
A while back I needed to automate the deployment of Citrix StoreFront 3.x for a customer I was working for at the time. However it wasn’t perfect. It only did the installation of the software and didn’t do anything with stores, server groups and certificates. Since time was scarce these items were put on hold. However, I put them on my own ToDo-list with the goal to automate an (almost) complete deployment of StoreFront with Ivanti Automation and share it with anyone who would like to use it.

I will give a small walkthrough of the automation steps and why I made certain decisions and of course instructions on how to import and use them.
You can find the download link for the Ivanti Automation building blocks here and also at the bottom of this blog post.

These modules have been tested on Windows Server 2012 R2 and 2016 (with User Experience enabled) and up to StoreFront version 1912.

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