The Ultimate KMS Reference Guide

Since Microsoft likes to put all of the KMS client keys and command line tools in 37 different places and change the links around AND call them two different things (KMS client keys and Generic Volume License Keys), I’ve decided to put all of that together into a single page – more for my reference, but I’ll share. <update April 2019> Since there are so many more editions with different KMS keys, it may be … Read more…

XenDeskop and PVS: You Must Restart Your Computer…

Most XenDesktop deployments are not rolled out all at once – they are usually done in phases: demo, pilot, test, initial, major, and completion. And more often then not, these phases span months if not years depending on the size of the project. Or sometimes hardware is purchased at different times and happens to be before and after a release of new processor tech. The below error can be a bit hard to track down: … Read more…

Load Balancing Remote Desktop Gateway with Citrix NetScaler

It may seem a bit ironic to use a Citrix NetScaler to load balance plain vanilla RDS, but the NetScaler wasn’t always a Citrix product and it certainly has a thousand more uses than just an Access Gateway appliance. So today we’ll be using it to load balance and content switch our Remote Desktop Gateway server(s). First, I’ll assume that you’ve already got RD Gateway up and working with a publicly trusted cert. Next, we … Read more…

The Provisioning Server WriteCache Delete “Problem”

Prior to PVS 7, the most common WriteCache methods were Cache on device HDD and the much better performing Cache in device RAM. Both of these legacy cache methods had some positives and negatives: Cache on device HDD:   Performance less than or equal to the underlying storage. For physical targets, this could be physical disks, but more commonly, for VMs, this was whatever storage contained the virtual disk. The amount of storage available for caching … Read more…

XenApp Session Printers: Allow Users to Change their Default Printer

So we don’t normally like to give users options or choices…and right clicking is also normally not allowed in XenApp sessions. At some point in XenApp 6.0 (give or take) the printing system changed such that logoff scripts could no longer see what the users’ default session printer was because they had already been unloaded by the logoff process. So how do we make this work? The logoff script is out, so we now have … Read more…

Dealing with Citrix StoreFront on IE7

Ok so the title is a little bit misleading…because the StoreFront logon won’t even render on anything less than IE8. And sure, you’re thinking “Who still has IE7?” Or IE6 for that matter?? There are some really old XPe thin clients out there that have 7Mb of free space on them…ask me how I know. Now to the misleading part: We’re actually going to cheat a bit and use a WI site – since WI … Read more…