Thanks for all who attended my session on PowerShell and XenDesktop 5 at the UK PowerShell UserGroup last night. As promised here are my slides for reference.
PowerShell in XenDesktop 5
View more PowerPoint from jonathanmedd
I’ll be presenting tonight for the UK PowerShell UserGroup on using PowerShell to administer your XenDesktop environment. I’ll be providing some info on how the management of XenDesktop is built on top of PowerShell and how to get started using it. Details from Richard’s site below:
Reminder–UK PowerShell UserGroup–July 2012 meeting When: Wednesday, Jul 4, 2012 8:30 PM (BST) Where: Virtual
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Jonathan Medd will be talking about using PowerShell to administer a XenDesktop environment
I had a need to automate the installation of Citrix XenDesktop DDC including using some of the different available install options.
XenDesktopServerSetup.exe is the command line tool to use. Running XenDesktopServerSetup.exe /? displays most of the options that can be used, however I found a couple missing which are documented here.
The Install-XenDesktopDDC function below will enable you to install XenDesktop with different options. For instance, to install all components, but no SQL Express and see the install steps:
I had a, shall we say urgent, need to get up and running with Citrix XenDesktop 5 in a very short space of time. Having used some of the TrainSignal products before and had a very good experience with them my first thought was to head over to their site and see if they had anything available. Thankfully, they have courses for both XenDesktop 4 and 5 so I was able to get hold of the XenDesktop 5 course.
Some PowerShell cmdlets include switch parameters, i.e. no arguments are typically supplied to them - they are either True / On when they are present and False / Off when they are not. However, it is also possible to explicitly specify them with $true and $false, e.g.
-switchparameter:$true or
-switchparameter:$false
Typically you would not use this when working manually at the console, but what if you needed to automate a task using a switch parameter and set it to be On or Off based on values from a CSV or XML file, i.
WMI in Windows Server is a treasure trove of information and well worth investigating, particularly when needing to run reports against many servers. In addition it is possible for third-parties to make use of WMI and store their own information in there. This is true of a recent requirement I had to monitor Citrix Licensing.
Whilst it’s obviously critical to purchase enough licenses for Citrix that you need, its also important to not have too many lying around not in use, since you’ll be wasting money.
Outlook 2003 is listed as a supported client for Exchange 2010 with the following caveats:
Clients running Outlook 2003 don’t use RPC encryption, which RPC Client Access requires by default. You will either need to turn off the RPC encryption requirement or configure Outlook 2003 to use RPC encryption. However, Outlook 2007 and later versions are automatically compatible with the change to RPC Client Access because they support RPC encryption by default.
I was lucky enough to take on a project initially started and blogged about by my co-host on the Get-Scripting podcast Alan Renouf.
In summary, his posts were mainly around the design decision of whether to go for VM’s with one or two vCPU’s and how many Citrix users you could support per VM. Following on from his initial testing using Citrix Edgesight we ran a pilot with a few different scenarios and it turned out that the best performance with the highest number of Citrix users per VM came out to be a VM with 2 x vCPU’s; a conclusion which didn’t really match the initial testing, I guess you can’t beat real users doing real work and the sometimes crazy things they get up to pushing the boundries of performance.
Whilst monitoring some newly provisioned Citrix servers running on VMware hosts today, I soon became very bored with manually checking how many sessions were on each Citrix VM as the load on each one increased, whilst trying to get it to the optimum level.
I knew it was possible to use Powershell to connect with Citrix servers, but had never really looked into it before. Not surprisingly it turned out to be very straightforward.