Tag: Citrix

Creating a Citrix Farm inventory report without snap-ins

Floris 2 Comments

There are a few excellent scripts out there which can create an inventory report of your Citrix Farm. However, these scripts usually make use of the Citrix PowerShell snap-ins. Most of the data in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (formerly known as XenApp and XenDesktop) is available through the Monitoring Service which is available on the Citrix Delivery Controllers. By using OData queries, most data can be retrieved without using any snap-ins or modules. I did some investigation and created a script which does exactly this.

I’m looking for any input and feedback on this script. So if you have any feedback or run into any problems, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email.

To download the PowerShell script I created, press the “Download Now” button:

Download Now!

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Troubleshooting vGPU on XenServer

Floris 5 Comments

vGPU on XenServer is awsome technology. But as with any other software, it can happen that you run into issues. For example, when starting a VM which has a vGPU profile assigned, the VM can fail with the dreaded “vgpu exited unexpectedly” error. To be more precise, such an error could read:

Internal error: xenopsd internal error: Device.Ioemu_failed("vgpu exited unexpectedly")

In XenCenter, the log tab will display the following entry:

vGPU error displayed when starting VM
vGPU error displayed when starting VM

In this article, I’ll describe some steps troubleshoot vGPU issues and possible solutions to fix failing vGPU-enabled VMs.

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Fullscreen applications with HDX 3D Pro – Part 2

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In my previous post about full screen applications in HDX 3D Pro, I explained possible solutions to the “Full Screen Applications are not supported in Citrix HDX 3D Pro” message. In short, the issue is due to the fact that the application does not use the same resolution as your HDX session.

Full Screen Applications are not supported in Citrix HDX 3D Pro
Full Screen Applications are not supported in Citrix HDX 3D Pro

In the mean time, Citrix release XenDesktop 7.6. The XenDesktop HDX 3D Pro VDA now contains an experimental fix to support full screen applications in any resolution. This fix is explained by Rachel Berry (Product Manager HDX Graphics for XenDesktop/XenApp, twitter @rhbBSE) on the Citrix Blog: http://blogs.citrix.com/2014/10/24/hdx-3d-pro-experimental-support-for-full-screen-apps/

Enable support for full screen applications

As described in Rachel’s blog post, you have to modify the registry on the machine where your VDA is installed. Insert the following value:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\HDX3D\BitmapRemotingConfig]
“HKLM_EnableFSA”=dword:00000001

To check this feature out, I’ve upgraded my lab environment to 7.6 (both DDC and VDA) and injected the registry value.

Note that this configuration is experimental and currently not officially supported by Citrix.

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Performance impact of HDX 3D Pro in virtual desktop environments

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Implementing GPUs in your virtual desktop environment (for example vGPU or GPU pass-though) allows better use of graphical intensive applications (like Catia, AutoCAD, Photoshop, etc.). These applications have an impact on utilization (CPU, memory, disk I/O) in your infrastructure. Not only the applications will impact your infrastructure, sending the graphical intensive data over the LAN or WAN will at least impact your network and the CPU on the end-point and inside your virtual desktop. In this article I will explain the impact on network level.

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Fullscreen applications with HDX 3D Pro

Floris Leave a comment

If you’ve been working with GPU deployment in your virtual desktop environment (XenDesktop or XenApp), you probably also installed HDX 3D Pro. Leveraging the GPU, you can use more graphic-intensive applications. Some of these graphic-intensive applications sometimes launch in fullscreen mode by default (think of benchmarking tools or videogames). The result of starting an application in fullscreen mode could be the following error:

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Citrix HDX 3D Pro Warning!
---------------------------
Full Screen Applications are not supported in Citrix HDX 3D Pro.
Press Ok to exit.
---------------------------
OK 
---------------------------

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Gathering Performance Data in XenServer for external parsing

Floris 2 Comments

If you’re used to working with VMware, you probably know about the nifty little utility esxtop. This tool allows you to view real-time performance data on a ESX host. It also allows you to gather performance metrics in batch mode, which allows you to analyze the data in eg. Excel or ESXplot.

For those who are working with XenServer, a similar utility is available called xentop. The xentop utility allows you to monitor real-time performance metrics, like esxtop does. However, gathering data like in esxtop is a challenge.

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Disconnecting a Citrix Session with CTXDiscon

Floris 1 Comment

Windows has a command line tool which allows you to disconnect any RDS Session. The command line tool is “TSDISCON”, available in the System32 folder. Now, if you have connected using XenApp or XenDesktop, this tools does work. However, the Citrix Client will not know that the session has been disconnected, thus the Citrix Client window will remain active on the client’s end device.

There is no built-in tool from Citrix which has the same functionality as TSDISCON has. So I compiled a little tool which allows you to disconnect your Citrix sessions.

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Monitoring XenApp with WMI – Part 2: Citrix Servers

Floris 3 Comments

In part 1 of this series I talked about the basics of the Citrix WMI providers. In this part, I will talk about getting all information about a XenApp server, like which farm it belongs to, what applications are published, etc.

Again, I will be using PowerShell to get the WMI classes. I will assume that you are logged in to the XenApp server to do the WMI calls. But all of these calls can be done from another server (as long as you have the correct permissions and WMI isn’t blocked by a firewall). See part 1 to get more information about remote WMI calls.

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ICAConnect version 1.2

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I’ve update my command line tool to connect to XenApp server, ICAConnect. The new version has two new features:

  • Support 32bit color depth
    My fine colleague, Dennis Geerlings, has updated the option to connect to a XenApp server using 32bit colors. To use this, just use the “/color 32bit” switch.
  • Support seamless windows
    I’ve added support for seamless connections. Just use the “/seamless” switch to start an application in seamless mode.

Head over to the Tools section to grab the new version of ICAConnect. If you have any questions or feature requests, feel free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail.

Monitoring XenApp with WMI – Part 1: Basics

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It has been a long time ago since I last created a new post. Time for a new one! I’ve created a series of posts about starting ICA connections programmatically (by using PowerShell). These posts were about the client-side of ICA connections; in this series, I will talk about using the Windows Management Instrumation (WMI) which allows you to monitor your XenApp environment.

While Citrix did document something on eDocs, it’s not a highly-documented feature. This feature is actually quite useful when, for example, monitoring your environment.

This post is not about WMI basics, so I expect that you already know what WMI is and how it’s used. I’ll be using PowerShell as an example, but any scripting/programming language can be used to access the WMI classes. To get more information about WMI in general, visit the Microsoft MSDN site.

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