Many people are wondering where the Printer Management node used for replicating print drivers is located in Citrix XenApp 6.x. This is now managed with the Windows Printer Management Role in Windows Server 2008 R2 or through XenApp PowerShell Cmdlets. I’m a big fan of the Citrix Universal Printer Driver but in some cases that’s not good enough and replicating print drivers to all Citrix XenApp servers are required. Luckily there’s light in the end of the tunnel.
Citrix Universal Print Server Tech Preview is available and will most likely be released at Citrix Synergy 2012. The Citrix Universal Print Server Technical Preview extends XenApp 6.5 and XenDesktop 5.5 Universal printing support to network printing. This feature eliminates the need to install numerous network printer drivers on XenApp and XenDesktop hosts, and enables more efficient network utilization. The new Citrix Universal printer driver supports direct network printing on Windows and non-Windows clients.
So while we wait for this new Citrix Universal Print Server, here’s the steps for replicating print drivers with XenApp PowerShell Cmdlets :
First you’ll need to decide which Citrix XenApp server you’ll be using as the source. A good suggestion would be your Preferred Data Collector. In our example that would be XA65-01. Start PowerShell as Administrator and run the following commands
- Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
- Add-PSSnapIn Citrix.*
- Get-XAPrinterDriver –Servername XA65-01
This will display a list of all the locally install printer drivers on that particular server. The simplest way to install a lot of printer drivers is to connect to your print server and select to connect to the printers you need.
Now rerun the command : Get-XAPrinterDriver –Servername XA65-01
To make sure that all your Citrix XenApp servers have the same printer drivers it’s recommend to add the required printer drivers to the Auto-Replication-List. A good tip would be to have these commands in a Notepad file to make it easier for you to Add/Remove printer drivers.
Simply copy and paste the commands to the PowerShell window.
Add-XAAutoReplicatedPrinterDriver “Print Driver Name” -SourceServerName XA65-01
To display a list of Printer Drivers in the Auto-Replication-List you’ll use the following command :
Get-XAAutoReplicatedPrinterDriver
I’m pretty sure there’s some smart people out there in the Citrix Community who have already created some smart automatic scripts for replicating print drivers in Citrix XenApp 6.x. Please share with the rest of the readers by adding your comment below if you know any good resources.
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Citrix has just released a new version of the Citrix License Server VPX which are a self-contained Linux-based virtual appliance that allows you to easily deploy licensing in your Citrix environment. The requirement is only 256 mb which are sufficient for up to 500 Citrix servers and approximately 50.000 licenses. Currently the Citrix License Server VPX is only available for Citrix XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1 / Service Pack 2 or higher.
To get started download and import the Citrix License Server VPX Appliance via XenCenter and then configure hostname, dns suffix and ip address. If you’re testing this out I would recommend using the same name as your current Citrix License Server. This way you don’t need to return and reallocate all your licenses. Even though the hostname is the same it won’t register in DNS so you’re all safe.
Log on to your license server and import all your licenses and restart the appliance.
Most likely you’re using Citrix Policy to define your License server host name. Simply change this to the ip address of your new Citrix License Server VPX.
To be sure that everything is working properly you should stop your old Citrix Licensing Server Service. Then run the command : gpupdate /force and qfarm /load on one of your Citrix XenApp servers to verify that everything is okay.
If the Server Load is 20.000 there’s something wrong, most likely the hostname. Remember that this is case sensitive.
For those wanting to Return and then ReAllocate the licenses to a new host name please logon to your MyCitrix account.
So should you transfer all your licenses to this new Citrix License Server VPX appliance? That’s up to you, but since the current Windows version normally runs side by side with Remote Desktop Services Licensing it won’t make sense to me. On the other side this is a great way to setup a standby Citrix License Server for Disaster Recovery.
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Setting goals is an important aspect of growth – for business, for personal development, and for life.
My goal for 2011 was to create a Citrix XenApp 6 Video Training Course. With almost 100 members and 41 modules this have been a massive success. The new goal for 2012 is to double the number of new members and modules to further grow this fantastic business.
The traffic to this blog has also increase from 20.000 to 35.000 visitors a month and YouTube has went up from 50.000 to 136.000 views. Pretty amazing growth for a blog created November 2009 with personal branding as the main purpose. Advertisers are also starting to notice this blog which is a good sign on market influence.
The biggest and most fantastic moment in my life will be April this year when I’ll become a father for the first time. I’ve done many amazing things in life, including spending two years circumnavigating the Caribbean, but nothing beats being a father.
By the end of February I’m living permanently in Brasil and we’re moving into a 180 square meter Beach House Apartment 50 meters from the kitebeach of Cumbuco. Thanks to Citrix I’m able to work from my home office in Paradise with customers all over the world.
It may seem like an unreachable dream, but if I can do it you can do it to! Start today by setting your goals and Take Action!
Your biggest and most valuable asset in the world of IT is your brain, experience and credentials. Who cares if you got a Bachelor of Information Technology from 2005? You’ll need to provide proof by getting certified.
I can gurantee that if you invest $497 in our Citrix Training and complete the Citrix Certified Enterprise Engineer (CCEE) for Virtualization certification your salary will increase by at least 10%.
Let’s say you’re investing $1000 for training, practice and live exams you’ll get an extra $10.000 every year! So would you invest you money in stocks or in your own brainshare? It’s up to you. Best of luck to all of you in 2012.
Green IT was the hottest buzzword before Cloud entered the scene. For this reason there’s a lot of new servers configured by default by the manufacturer to provide the best balance between performance and power consumption. So what does this mean?
Well most of the HP servers delivered today are running with the CPU Core Speed 1,6 GHz instead of the intended 2,3 – 3,2 GHz. So to get the full power of your Citrix XenServer hardware you need to do some chiptuning in the BIOS. For HP servers you set HP Power Regulator to HP Static High Performance Mode (see main picture).
You can verify the before & after results by using the freeware CPU-Z to gather information about the CPU Core Speed.
Real world scenarios has showed that customers that has changed the BIOS setting to High Performance Mode has seen an increase in user density and much better application reponse times. This applies mostly to Citrix XenServer and XenApp / XenDesktop VM’s but also to servers running Low Latency Applications.
If you have a BIOS snapshot from other hardware vendors please send us an email so we can add it to this blog post to better help other people with similar problems.
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Many of you are probably familiar with the new Reboot Behavior Policy. Maybe you’ve scratched your head trying to figure out why the Citrix policy didn’t work. Maybe you’ve spent a whole day until you came upon this blog post telling you that the Reboot Behaviour Policy only works with Enterprise or Platinum license. Thanks for letting us figure it out the hard way Citrix!
Some of you may also have tried Citrix Power and Capacity Management finding out that it needs a similar license, its own database and control server. Kind of overkill for small SMB environments with only 10-50 servers.
A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon a superb Citrix XenApp Rolling Reboot Script created by Dane Young. The script supports XenApp 5-6.5 and basically it uses a Load Evaluator to drain servers one by one. Once all sessions have been logged off, the server will go down for a reboot.
The script will also validate that the last rebooted server was successful before continuing on to the next server in the farm. By implementing this script in your organization you’ll get a zero-downtime 24/7/365 system without the annoying “Please Log Off” messages.
We’ve been running this script successfully for a couple of weeks with great success. Right now we’re having a dialog with Dane Young to add more features and further improve the script e.g. adding the possibility to create an Exclude Servers list to the Citrix XenApp Rolling Reboot Script.
In Citrix XenApp 6.5 there’s now also a great new feature called Logon Control that will let you drain servers without adding any form of Load Evaluator.
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