The Accidental Citrix Admin - The site for those who find themselves supporting Citrix involuntarily or accidentally
Recently a customer had a need to change the Published Name property of a Private Desktop in Citrix XenDesktop. By default, the Published Name property is Null. This article will show you some tidbits I picked up and two lines of PowerShell you can use to change the published name property of either all or a subset of private desktops.
You have moved to a new/updated/upgraded hypervisor or added new/updated/upgraded storage. Then you go to delete either the entire old hosting connection or just an old resource connection and received the dreaded popup:
ARGH!!! What to do?
In testing Citrix App Layering (Unidesk) in my lab, I wanted to install an SSL certificate on the Enterprise Layering Management (ELM) appliance. My first try didn’t go well, so I thought I would document the process I followed on the second try, which did work.
Five weeks ago, on the same day, I received three emails asking if I had a spreadsheet listing all the Citrix policy settings like Microsoft supplies. I replied I did not and had been asking Citrix for such an Excel file since March 2012. Someone pointed me to this Citrix article on Citrix Policy Reference but it has not been updated in three years. It also contains no data for any version of XenApp or XenDesktop 7.x. I reached out to several people at Citrix to see if such a file existed and all promised to get back to me. No one ever responded. So I started my own Excel file based on what little I had from the documentation scripts. There was so much missing information that I reached back out to my Citrix contacts because surely this information is sitting on some developer’s computer somewhere at Citrix. After pestering my Citrix contacts, I, again, never received a single response. I decided to take matters into my own hands and start a community project.
A few weeks ago, the town I live in had extremely severe thunderstorms roll through. When the tornado sirens went off and all our mobile devices started screaming “Warning: tornado sighted in your immediate area. Take shelter immediately!”, I did not bother doing a proper shutdown of all my lab equipment. The tornado did extensive damage in our town but missed our house by about a mile or two as the crow flies. We were without power most of the night. The power outage lasted longer than the batteries in all my battery backup systems. Needless to say, all my XenServer, vSphere, and vCenter hosts did an ungraceful power off. My two Synology NAS units have USB connections to their UPS and are configured for proper shutdowns in the event of power loss. For the past few weeks, I thought all was well in my lab, but that wasn’t the case I found out.
Printers and printer drivers aren’t an exiting technology as the latest HDX Features in XenApp 7.12 and so on. But every Citrix admin out there has ran into issues with printers and printer drivers at one point or another. And we’ve all been felt the same need at least once: how do I get those print drivers out there without breaking everything?
Sure, XenApp 6.5 has had a driver replication feature for a long time, but that isn’t without flaws… So I wanted something different, something where I was in control.
On a recent project, I needed to set up high availability for the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (CVAD) databases. The customer wanted to use Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Standard and I was tasked with implementing the new Basic Availability Groups. This article details the steps I took to implement Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Standard Basic Availability Groups for CVAD.
On a recent project, I needed to create two Citrix Director servers. One for Citrix XenApp 6.5 and the other for XenApp 7.6. I looked for an article from Citrix on making the Director site the default page in IIS and did not find anything. So I have ripped off, I mean borrowed heavily from, the Citrix article How to Make StoreFront the Default Page within IIS to do what I needed done.