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Published: Tuesday, 30 June 2020

With the COVID-19 crisis the use of video meeting “products” became even more important than it already was in 2020. Logically the higher demand also caused that such functionality also needed to be started within a Citrix session. Beside the big ones like Zoom and Teams, there are also lot of other platforms. Although the use of webcam in Citrix is not rocket science, I noticed several questions/issues at customers. In this article I will dive into the requirements and configuration required to use a webcam within a Citrix session.

Read more: Using a webcam within a Citrix session

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Published: Wednesday, 04 July 2018

In the earlier articles I wrote down how to install unattended the XenDesktop components. The article was based on the versions of XenDesktop 7.6 till XenDesktop 7.15 (dependent of the article).

It has been a while that I updated this article series. In this (small) article I will describe the uninstallation options for the most current version out there 7.15 CU2 and 7.18 (CR).

Read more: Unattended Installation scripts XenDesktop 7.x Part 7

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Published: Tuesday, 31 October 2017

XenServer is primarily being used as a hypervisor platform for XenDesktop VDIs. Although the installation of XenServer 7 is not really difficult it would be nice when installing multiple XenServer hosts that you can automate the installation part. In this article I will describe the possibilities of creating an (almost) unattended installation of XenServer 7.x I will both touch XenServer 7.0 (which we made of a customer. Long story about certification processes of software being used) and the latest version 7.2 (which also applies to 7.1).

Read more: Unattended Installation XenServer 7.x

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Published: Wednesday, 20 September 2017

In the earlier articles I wrote down how to install unattended the XenDesktop components. The article was based on the versions of XenDesktop 7.6 till XenDesktop 7.13 (dependent of the article). Currently Citrix is releasing every quarter a new version, so it’s time to update the articles with the new installation information of later release(s) based on XenDesktop/XenApp 7.14 and XenDesktop/XenApp 7.15.

Read more: Unattended Installation scripts XenDesktop 7.x Part 6

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Published: Thursday, 16 March 2017

In the earlier articles I wrote down how to install unattended the XenDesktop components. The article was based on the versions of XenDesktop 7.6 till XenDesktop 7.11 (dependent of the article). Currently Citrix is releasing every quarter a new version, so it’s time to update the articles with the new installation information of later release(s) based on XenDesktop/XenApp 7.12 and XenDesktop/XenApp 7.13.

Read more: Unattended Installation scripts XenDesktop 7.x Part 5

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Published: Thursday, 12 January 2017

Citrix released the Linux VDA back together with the XenDesktop 7.6. At the moment of writing the article Citrix released version 1.4 of the Linux VDA. For previous version Citrix released a PDF with the installation and configuration steps, for 1.4 this is currently only available in the edocs. Unfortunate both available options are not fully complete, are missing some steps (for some environments) and/or are using not the best commands or steps. Luckily I was at a customer with lots of Linux knowledge and we got is sorted pretty quickly. In this article I will write down the steps we configured the Linux VDA.

Read more: Installing and configuring Citrix XenDesktop Linux VDA

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Published: Thursday, 22 September 2016

In the earlier articles I wrote down how to install unattended the XenDesktop components. The article was based on the versions of XenDesktop 7.6 till XenDesktop 7.8 (dependent of the article). Currently Citrix is releasing every quarter a new version, so it’s time to update the articles with the new installation information of later release(s) based on XenDesktop/XenApp 7.9 and XenDesktop/XenApp 7.11.

Read more: Unattended Installation scripts XenDesktop 7.x Part 4

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Published: Wednesday, 07 September 2016

Citrix Single Sign-On or Pass-through is already for a really long time. The configuration is not changed a lot in this years, however when I was configuring this at a customer it took me again some time before it was running. The configuration with the latest Receivers is changed a bit and there is not (I could not find it) total step by step guide for setting-up the Single Sign On (SSON). In this article I will write down the steps to set-up SSON including a granular way within an Enterprise organization using Citrix Receiver 4.x and XenApp/XenDesktop 7.x.

Read more: Configure Single Sign On (SSON) for Citrix Receiver

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Published: Thursday, 12 May 2016

In the second part I shared the scripts and RES One Automation Building Blocks to install unattended a PVS based XenDesktop 7.6 Server VDA. In part 1 the scripts for the Delivery Controller were shared. In this part three article I will show/share the unattended scripts for StoreFront and Director.

Read more: Unattended Installation scripts XenDesktop 7.x Part 3

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Published: Thursday, 21 April 2016

In part 1 I shared my unattended script for installing the Citrix XenDesktop Delivery Controller component including a small script to join an existing XenDesktop site. In this article I will share my scripts for the Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA) including the PVS Target Device software, VDA Optimization and Default User Profile Optimization. Those scripts are also available as a RES One Automation Building Block.

Read more: Unattended Installation scripts XenDesktop 7.x Part 2 (including RES One Automation Building Blocks)

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Published: Tuesday, 09 February 2016

As many people already stated it’s important that you automate repeating tasks as much as possible. Therefore I already published articles in which I shared scripts to install unattended Citrix products like Citrix XenApp 6.5 and Citrix Provisioning Services 6.1. With the release of XenDesktop 7.x I see a shift that only the VDA component is installed unattended and most times the Delivery Controller, StoreFront are installed manually. Also several people already published blogs about the (basic) silent parameters of the XenDesktop installation. So you can wonder why I’m also publishing the scripts. Mainly because I also added additional installation checks including additional hotfixes and updates. I also have RES One Automation blocks available for the installation part of the VDA (including PVS Target Device software) and that part is not yet (much) available in other posts.

Read more: Unattended Installation scripts XenDesktop 7.x Part 1

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Published: Wednesday, 08 July 2015

Multi faction authentication (nowadays multifactor authentication) is becoming majority in the upcoming years. One of my favorite product is SMS Passcode, which is on the market for years. SMS Passcode offers multi factor authentication for a big range of available products/solutions in the market. Besides it is really easy to implement, within a few hours the environment is up and running. The default delivering method is sending a SMS via your own GSM modems. However within several datacenters the connection of GSM modem is difficult. Therefore SMS Passcode has the possibility to use an external SMS provider an alternative. However when you the companies offering a Desktop/Application as a Service the cost of the SMS (both with GSM model as SMS service provider) can be a bottleneck as the users don’t belong to the same organization (and cannot have a company subscription). However for this challenge SMS Passcode has a solution together with Acision (formerly named as MindMatics). In this article I will describe the solution and how to configure it.

Read more: Multi Factor authentication with SMS Passcode without sending an (actual) SMS

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Published: Wednesday, 07 January 2015

At one of my customers we build a XenApp 6.5 environment, where the XenApp Session Hosts were running on local storage of the Hypervisor (VMware ESX 5.5). At this customer the hypervisor and Citrix XenApp were maintained by separate teams. The hypervisor team was used to use shared storage and the vMotion capabilities of ESX for their maintenance tasks on the ESX host during daily operations. However now the virtual machines were running local storage this technique could not be used anymore and the hypervisor team found it difficult to fulfill their maintenance tasks.

After some discussion we agreed that the process should be as easy as possible (without less inference of the XenApp team) and that it should be possible to do the maintenance during daily operations. The first step was adding additional capacity, so maintenance during the business hours was possible. Secondly I wrote a set of small simple scripts that the maintenance can be done without less interaction between the teams and user impact is minimal. In this article I would like to share those scripts with you including explaining what they are doing.

Read more: XenApp 6.x Maintenance Shutdown and Start-up Scripts

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Published: Wednesday, 17 December 2014

Updated on 22 December 2015 with some small adjustments (removing old files and wait timeout to check if the server is online again)

Some years ago I already published a reboot script for XenApp 6.5. Also Citrix did a good job to make the reboot possibilities within the Citrix policies more flexible and robust. The only real disadvantage is the possibility to disable the logon possibilities 60 minutes before the real actual reboot take place. However this can be overwritten using a specific registry key, which is not well known or documented (HKLM\Software\Policies\Citrix\IMA\Restart Options\Disable Logons\RebootDisableLogonMinutes. When migrating from XenApp 6.5 to XenApp/ XenDesktop 7.x you will probably be a bit disappointed. In this article I will starting describe the reboot possibilities in XenApp/XenDesktop 7.x out of the box, followed by explaining a script that I have written to satisfy more requirements.

Read more: Reboot Script for XenApp/XenDesktop 7.x (for 24x7 environments)

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Published: Tuesday, 27 May 2014

In the article series Unattended Installation Citrix Provisioning Services I already touched the PowerShell possibilities of PVS showing how to configure farm and server settings via PowerShell. In the same project I already wrote some additional PowerShell scripts to partly automate some tasks within the PVS infrastructure, so no mistakes could be made. Although they are not rocket science I decided to share them, as some commands are not fully obvious when reading the PowerShell Guide.

Read more: Citrix Provisioning Services PowerShell scripts

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Published: Tuesday, 18 March 2014

In the previous Unattended Installation Citrix Provisioning Services articles I explained how PVS can be installed automated via scripts. In this part I’m going to describe some of the peculiarities I have encountered with the unattended installation of Citrix Provisioning Services.

Read more: Unattended Installation Citrix Provisioning Services Part 4

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Published: Wednesday, 11 December 2013

In larger infrastructures there is already a monitor product available like HP Open View, Tivoli Monitoring and Microsoft System Operations Manager. Many Citrix administrators have a kind of love-hate relationship with such products. They provide lots of interesting information, but can be overwhelming and last but not least the required agent is not easy to install and/or stable. At one of my project the monitoring team was not confident that the agent of that product was suitable to install on the Citrix XenApp Session Host as those were provided by Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS). Logically we would like to have monitoring of these servers in place, so we needed to find a solution which can be used together with the monitor product. Finally the solution leads to a general way to monitor Citrix XenApp server without installing a monitor agent on the Citrix XenApp Session Host.

Read more: Monitoring Citrix XenApp without installing a monitor agent

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Published: Friday, 11 October 2013

In the previous Unattended Installation Citrix Provisioning Services articles I explained how PVS can be installed automated via scripts. In most cases these articles are enough for most infrastructures. However if you would like to set-up more PVS environments it would be nice if could reuse the scripts and/or the answerfiles by making them variable. For one of my customers this was the case and I did that using PowerShell (their default scripting language). So actually this third part is more a PowerShell for dummies articles (I do not have much PowerShell knowledge, but this assignment showed me how powerful PowerShell is) than about the unattended installation but it gives a good insight in the possibilities.

Read more: Unattended Installation Citrix Provisioning Services 6.1 Part 3

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Published: Wednesday, 25 September 2013

With Citrix Provisioning Services the client (called target device) need to use “something” to connect to the PVS server to start the streaming process of the operating systems within the vDisk to target device. The default connection is using the PXE technique combined with TFTP, but Citrix also offers another technique called Boot Device Manager (BDM). In this article I will go both options using pros and cons (through my eyes) and how you can work around the cons (of both techniques). At the end I will give my vision which technique to use (in which scenarios).

Read more: Citrix Provisioning Services: To PXE or not to PXE

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Published: Wednesday, 10 July 2013

Unattended installation of Front-End products like Citrix XenApp 6.5 or Windows 7 is really commodity nowadays. Unattended installations of back-end components are done less, which is actually logically. Such components are not installed in large amounts and are only executed once (per version). However more and more back-end components can be installed silently, mainly for the large enterprises. For such environments where the amounts of servers are higher, the efforts to set-up an unattended installation are worth doing those actions in comparison with manually install those servers. Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) offers unattended installation and configuration and at one of my project we needed to install more than 10 Provisioning Services servers. This is definitely a use case to use the unattended possibilities of Citrix Provisioning Services. In this article I will explain how you can install Citrix Provisioning Services unattended including my experiences with it so far.

Read more: Unattended installation Citrix Provisioning Services 6.1 Part 1

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Published: Tuesday, 19 February 2013

Although User Environment Management (UEM) becomes more and more important in almost every company it is getting easier to convince the IT people and management of purchasing the UEM. However there are still people who just see such a product as a logon script replacement, which can also be done using scripting or Group Policy Preferences. I’m not writing this article to discuss or argue about that statement as you can do actually a lot of the same configuration with scripts or Group Policy Preferences for the basic set-up like printer assignment, network mappings and so on. However UEM products offer much more other functionalities like Profile Management, E-mail management, Trouble Shooting tools, Performance Management and additional Security Management. This last one can be a real important added value for lot of companies, but is often not taken into account by the decision to use/purchase a UEM product. In this article I will focus on the security part showing/describing the features available in RES Workspace Manager 2012 (most of those features are also available in other UEM products as well) and provide you with use cases where those features were implemented and created an added value for that company.

Read more: Using RES Workspace Manager to secure your environment

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Published: Tuesday, 04 September 2012

When I checked the statistics of the VanBragt.Net Virtualization website I noticed that several connections were based on search for Citrix Load Balancing. That brought me to the idea to write some more about it. In the same time in one of my project the Load Balancing part came into the picture so I can also share/use my personal experiences in the article. This article will describe when and why you would like to use Citrix Load Balancing and how you need to configure it.

Before we really start the article handles Citrix Load Balancing Policies which should not be confused with Citrix Load Evaluators which are often also called Citrix Load Balancing. The Load Evaluators are used to divide users equally over servers based on user load and/or used resources. However Load Balancing Policies are a step before that process by specifying which group of servers should be used to start the session on.

Update: As Andrew stated in the comments this component will only work when connecting via Access Gateway, Web Interface of Cloud Gateway. Old methods (like TCP via HTTP) often used on Thin Clients will ignore the configuration.

Read more: Citrix Load Balancing Policies XenApp 6.x explained

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Published: Thursday, 21 June 2012

In the first part I started with the unattended installation of Citrix XenApp 6.5. In that part I showed the preperations, the command and parameters of the installation of the XenApp components. In this part I will continue with the initial setup of the actual XenApp component.

Read more: Unattended installation of Citrix XenApp 6.5 Part 2

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Published: Wednesday, 25 April 2012

Some long time ago I wrote an article in which I explain the unattended parameters of Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 (a.k.a. XenApp 5 for Windows 2003 nowadays). With the new releases Citrix changed the method of installing Citrix XenApp, so logically the way the unattended installation is performed also changed. In this article I'm showing and describing how you can perform an unattended installation of Citrix XenApp 6.5.

Read more: Unattended installation of Citrix XenApp 6.5 Part 1

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Published: Wednesday, 14 March 2012

As described in an earlier published article PDI: Physical Desktop Infrastructure real Thin Clients are getting richer featured. While this is needed to satisfy the requirements of the Remote Based Products like Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop en VMware View, this has also some side effects:

• Real Thin Clients are getting more expensive, in such way prices are currently compatible with normal PCs.
• Thin Clients nowadays need to be fully managed, because much more features are available and should be updated. Also nowadays several ThinClient Operating Systems really needs updates for fixes and security vulnerabilities. So the big advantage of lower maintenance tasks in comparison with traditional PCs is disappeared mostly.
• With current techniques like VDI additional Microsoft licenses are required when using a Thin Client OS, where traditional Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/7 PCs don't have that requirement.
• Still the newest techniques/features (especially within Citrix products) are available at first in the Windows client of the product.

Read more: How to: Build a ThinBased-PC with Windows 7/XP

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Published: Tuesday, 10 January 2012

In situations where the users connects to a Full Desktop I personally like to use the Web Interface as a logon point, so we can centrally manage the connections to the XenApp environment and the user are shown a nice logon screen (especially when using Thin Client that are not in the domain).  When deploying this full desktop you would not like to bother the end-user with too many steps for connecting to the Citrix environment. Therefore after providing the username and password the session should start immediately. In this article I will show how this can be accomplished even when more Published Applications (for example applications running on silo servers) are available or you would like to publish the Desktop as a Published Application.

Read more: How To: Autostart a Published Application/Desktop with more Published Applications/Desktops

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Published: Thursday, 15 September 2011

Updated 21-12-2011
I found that on several systems a failed ping does not set errorlevel to 1, so hostsavailable won't be updated and the script can fail. I now updated the script with another solution, so a failed ping will end in a failed host in the script.

Introduction

In XenApp 6.5 (which is released at 24 August 2011) the way a Server-based Load Evaluator could be assigned to a server has changed in comparison with previous XenApp version. Till 6.5 it was possible to assign a Load Evaluator directly to a server out of the console or using MFCOM/PowerShell. In 6.5 this option is removed and Load Evaluators can only be assigned using Citrix policies. This has advantage that always the correct Load Evaluator is assigned to a server; however I (and many others) used Load Evaluators to get servers out of the standard load balancing (with keeping the possibility to pick a up a disconnected session or to connect via RDP as an administrator) for troubleshooting, maintenance and reboots. Especially with reboots this works beautifully assigning a Load Evaluator based on scheduling (with the least possible active time as possible at the most quit moment on the farm). 

In this article I will describe how the same result can be achieved, while using the new techniques in XenApp 6.5.

Read more: How to: Rebootscript XenApp 6.5