Virtualization, EUC, and Computing in General
Found an issue on NetScaler 10.5 build 54.9 which allows an SSL-Bridge vServer to be the target LB vServer of an SSL Content Switching vServer. If you leave this configured, it will crash the packet engine and the NetScaler will soft reboot. This is not a supported configuration, but it should also not let you make said configuration in the NetScaler – this is fixed in build 57.7 – if not an earlier build. The … Read more…
The NetScaler can do A LOT – not just Citrix Access Gateway – the URL transformation, rewrite and responder engines are unbelievably powerful. One of the more common requests is to modify a URL so that it can be different for internal\external access or a different URL for a different set of users, even the ability to append a folder path to an existing host so that users don’t need to know the entire path … Read more…
Just a simple one-liner to get a listing of all users that have not logged into their XD desktop in 60 days or more – this is for static desktops or XD PvD. Requires: XenDesktop PowerShell SDK (studio commandlets) AD Powershell commandlets [code language=”powershell”] asnp Citrix* Get-BrokerDesktop -MaxRecordCount 2000 | Where {((Get-Date) – $_.LastConnectionTime).Days -gt 60} | sort LastConnectionTime | Select DNSName,LastConnectionTime,@{Name="UserName";Expression={$UserN = $_.AssociatedUserNames.Replace("DOMAINHERE\",""); $UserObj = Get-ADUser -Filter {Name -eq $UserN}; "$($UserObj.GivenName) $($UserObj.Surname)"}} [/code] Use … Read more…
When you’re deploying lots of systems, anything that can make the deployment more efficient is always welcome – so basically, any automation is always welcome. These scripts I use on both PVS servers and targets – the first script disables all network offloads on the VMXNET3 adapter and the second sets up the persistent data on the writecache volume (obviously the 2nd is only for targets). Here’s the first – this is specific to PVS … Read more…
If you are looking to upgrade a 2008R2 XenApp 6.5 server to XenApp\XenDesktop 7.x, you will more than likely be uninstalling the 6.5 bits prior to installing the 7.x VDA. Currently, project Serenity is still in beta and appears to migrate mostly datastore objects and settings – you still need to manually migrate the user servers. Per this Citrix article (which is a bit outdated) the only noted procedure is to uninstall hotfixes first then … Read more…
This post should really be titled “Folder redirection working great and only showing endpoint drives and NOT showing XenDesktop files in Internet Explorer”. But in all actuality, folder redirection wasn’t involved at all. This issue was presented as only endpoint drives and folders are showing when the user browses a File\Open dialog from an IE page. This is a XenDesktop environment, so the user was expecting to have some mapped drives and content in their … Read more…
During an after hours project, I disabled logons to a few servers in a XenApp 6.5 farm, waited for the users to log off, and thought nothing of it. I then shut the VMs down, completed the maintenance, and powered the VMs back on…only to find that no one was logging on. As an administrator, I had no issue getting logged on, but users were receiving a “The requested session is not available…” type error … Read more…
In Part 1 of this post, we setup a simple content switching vServer to front our Remote Desktop Gateway server. It accomplished two things: Allowed Remote Desktop connections using the Windows RDP client with ‘Connect from Anywhere’ set to the RDG vServer address Allowed applications to be launched from the RDWeb web portal The vServer configuration is not quite complete. You may notice that connections from mobile devices don’t work using the RD client and … Read more…
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…
I recently moved everyone’s U:\ drives from an old crappy ‘NAS’ device…it was setup with 4 disks in RAID5- in the OS…needless to say software RAID5 tends to lead to terrible disk performance…especially when the processor is only a 3.0G P4. The shares are now on a file server VM with TONS of resources, and things are already better. I finally got around to re-configuring the old NAS into something a little more useful – … Read more…