Posted inWorkspace Environment Management

Upgrading Norskale VUEM to Citrix Workspace Environment Management

Guest article by Hal Lange

I was working with a customer that was an original Norskale customer.  They were running VUEM 3.1   I started the process of upgrading to Citrix Workspace Environment Management (WEM).  I upgraded all the components and it seemed to have no issues.  I started trying to connect the clients and weird issues started to appear.  The client would keep saying unable to connect to the broker environment.  The logs showed errors regarding the VUEM Agent Monitor Sync is erroring.  When running the AgentCacheUitlity, it would produce an error regarding VUEM Agent Monitor Cache failed.  The cache would show that things were being downloaded and the agent performance optimizations would still apply and work.

Posted inActive Directory PowerShell

Finding Service with Account Name Using Microsoft PowerShell V1.0

A few months back, I worked on a project where the customer needed to find all services on all servers that used a specific Active Directory (AD) account name. The problem was, they had no idea how the account name had been entered, nor did they know which server or what service used the account. I created a hard-coded script to search all computers in Active Directory for a partial account name. I finally made the time to make the script more useful and generic.

Posted inCitrix Virtual Apps and Desktops XenApp 6.0 XenApp 6.5

Group Policy Settings Reference for Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop

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.

Posted inCitrix Virtual Apps and Desktops PowerShell XenApp/XenDesktop 7.0 - 7.7

Unable to Delete Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop 7.xx Hosting Connection or Resource “There is currently an active background action”

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.