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

1. Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
2. Add-PSSnapIn Citrix.*
3. 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.

Resoures :

• How to Replicate Print Drivers with PowerShell in XenApp 6
• Understanding Universal Print Server (UPS)

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.

Resource :

• Citrix License Server VPX

More and more people are moving their file servers to Windows 2008. For this reason it’s essential to do some SMB 2.0 tuning in the registry to get the best possible performance with Citrix XenApp 6.x.

SMB 1.0 was originally designed 15 years ago and was introduced with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Since the fastest networks in use at the time generally offered a maximum transfer rate of 10 Mb/s, the protocol has become out of date.

Indeed, with Gigabit Ethernet interfaces now a common feature even on budget motherboards, SMB can’t keep up with current network speeds.

SMB 2.0 is the new version of SMB that has been redesigned for today’s networking environments and the needs of the next generation of file servers. SMB 2.0 has the following enhancements:

• Supports sending multiple SMB commands within the same packet. This reduces the number of packets sent between an SMB client and server, a common complaint against SMB 1.0.
• Supports much larger buffer sizes compared to SMB 1.0.
• Increases the restrictive constants within the protocol design to allow for scalability. Examples include an increase in the number of concurrent open file handles on the server and the number of file shares that a server can have.
• Supports durable handles that can withstand short interruptions in network availability.
• Supports symbolic links.

SMB 2.0 seems to perform significantly faster than SMB 1.0 under optimal circumstances. I’ve heard of improvements ranging from 50% faster to 3500% faster. The bad news is that, as you might expect, you have to have SMB support on both ends of the communications pipe for SMB 2.0.

SMB 2.0 Tuning File Server :

Our XA5/XA6 Group Policy Tuning Templates have been downloaded more than 12.609 times. The SMB 1.0 tunings are ready-to-go as long as you set the values on your File Server(s) correctly. If you’re running a pure SMB 2.0 environment there’re still some SMB 2.0 Tuning needed. These registry keys needs to be added to your File Server(s).

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LanmanServer\Parameters]
"TreatHostAsStableStorage"=dword:00000001
"MaxThreadsPerQueue"=dword:00000040
"Smb2"=dword:00000001
"Smb2CreditsMin"=dword:00000040
"Smb2CreditsMax"=dword:00000400

SMB 2.0 Tuning Citrix XenApp 6.x Servers :

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LanManWorkstation\Parameters]
"DisableBandwidthThrottling"=dword:00000001
"MaxCredits"=dword:00000080

All credits for this article goes to Dan Allan from Citrix Consulting. Make sure you check out his in-depth article SMB Tuning for XenApp and File Servers on Windows Server 2008 over at Citrix Blogs.

Resource :

• SMB 2.0 Tuning
• Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008 R2

ControlUp has in the last month become my favorite free monitoring application. The tool is extremely powerful and I’m constantly adding it to all my customers. There’s simply so many cool features to cover that you’re better of trying it out yourself, seeing is believing.

My most commonly used ControlUp features are :

• Refresh Machine Group Policy
• Check memory and CPU utilization
• Check all event logs
• Number of application process running on all Citrix servers

Resource :

• ControlUp - Free Enterprise Monitoring Tool

What’s your favorite Monitoring solution for Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop? If you’re already using ControlUp, whats your best feature and what could be improved? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

I’ve just recently moved to Brazil and for this reason I needed to build a new Citrix XenServer lab and restore all my Virtual Machines used in my xenapptraining.com course. Rebuilding the environment was not a option. So in this post I’ll describe my new hardware and how I managed to completely replicate the environment.

Citrix XenServer Hardware :

I purchased all the hardware in Norway except from the case that I bought here in Brazil. Be aware that I also bought an extra Intel network card as a backup in case I had problems with the network card on the motherboard. The issues with Realtek RTL8111/8186B is now solved with Citrix XenServer 5.6SP2 and 6.0.

So the total cost without case and network card turned out to be only $514,96. Pretty sweet for a 6 core – 16GB memory system. If you would like to boost the overall performance you could replace the SATA disk with a faster SSD disk. I prefer space before speed.

• ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3, Socket-AM3
• AMD Phenom II X6 1055T
• Intel Pro/1000GT Desktop Adapter
• Corsair Dominator DHX DDR3 1333MHz 16GB
• Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB

Backup :

I’ve been running the awesome software PHD Virtual Backup for some time so I simply transferred the backup catalog to my laptop, packed my suitcase and went to Brazil.

Citrix XenServer Installation :

After I purchased the case in Brazil I needed to create a bootable USB stick to install Citrix XenServer. Back in the days we normally used Unetbootin for this, but this tool doesn’t work anymore with the latest releases of Citrix XenServer. This is how to create a bootable USB key with XenServer.

1. Format the USB key with Fat32
2. Download the latest copy of syslinux and extract it
3. Open a command prompt and change directory to your extracted syslinux\win32/64 folder
4. Run syslinux.exe X: – replacing “X” with the drive letter of your USB key
5. Extract the Citrix XenServer ISO. To mount it you can use Pismo File Mount
6. Copy the content of the extracted XenServer ISO folder to the root of the USB
7. On the USB drive, copy the content of the \boot\isolinux folder to the root of the USB
8. At the root of USB drive, rename the isolinux.cfg file to syslinux.cfg
9. At the root of USB drive, rename the isolinux.bin file to syslinux.bin

I started this project trying out the new Citrix XenServer 6.0 (How to install Citrix XenServer 6.0). There seems to be a bug with DYI hardware since the console on each VM was booting like slow motion, so I ended up installing XenServer 5.6 SP2.

Restore :

I imported and configured the PHD Virtual Backup for Citrix XenServer appliance and shared my backup folder from my local computer. In the beginning I had some problems getting access so I contacted support who quickly responded to my support ticket.

Turns out that you cannot have non-ASCII characters (ie. #,$,%….) in the password and PHD requires both Share and NTFS Full Control permissions. The restore is straight forward and only took a couple of hours.

Your System :

I would like YOU to share your home lab environment either it’s a DIY system or a HCL Citrix XenServer supported vendor in the comments below.

Here’s a new video showing you how to install Citrix XenServer 6 and enable IntelliCache in XenServer. IntelliCache is a technology that may reduce the requirements for central storage by as much as 90%. Be aware that this is a technology which is dedicated for XenDesktop using Machine Creation Services (MCS) only. Provisioning Server does not leverage IntelliCache technology today.

Select Enable thin provisioning (Optimized storage for XenDesktop) when installing XenServer. The installer will then create a Storage Repository which has thin provisioning enabled. You cannot enable thin provisioning after a non-thin provisioned Storage Repository has been created. This includes the case where you are upgrading from an older version of XenServer.

As a bonus we also show you how to import and configure the brand new XenServer Web Self Service appliance.

And here’s another great video : How To Configure Citrix Passtrough Authentication

VirtuAll User Environment Manager (VUEM) was finally released in the beginning of this month. I’ve covered VUEM before in this post Virtual User Environment Manager – A Sneak Peak and this Interview with Pierre Marmignon – CitrixTools.Net. This tool is a fantastic present to the Community and will let you eliminate your login scripts once and for all!

To test VUEM in a isolated environment I spun up some servers in RackSpace Cloud (Getting started with Rackspace). The installation and configuration are straight forward and Pierre have also created a Quick Start Guide. This tools is an perfect addon to Citrix User Profile Manager and does some awesome stuff that’s hard to do with Microsoft Group Policy Preferences (GPP). E.g. dynamically adding icons to Quick Launch, Pin to TaskBar and Start Menu as you can see in the image below.

The most exciting features for me are the Fast Logoff that immediately disconnect the user session and log off properly in the background. This will greatly improve End User Experience.

Also the CPU & Memory Management which was not part of the first beta release that I tested. Currently we have a customer which are having problems with wfshell.exe with very high CPU caused by ICA in ICA session. I’m certain that VEUM will solve this and many other problems.

Resource :

• Join the 300+ others and Download your copy of VUEM today

What’s Next…
I’ll be testing VUEM in Production and teaching my students inside of the Private Members Area on how to configure and integrated this tool with the rest of our Best Practices. Stay tuned.

In this video tutorial I’ll show you how to install and configure Citrix XenDesktop 5 (XD5) with Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). The process is pretty straight forward if you do them in the right order.

I’m installing SCVMM on the same server as XD5 which means you’ll need to install XD5 first to get the latest versio of Microsoft SQL Express. Always remember to install the SCVMM Admin Console on the server(s) hosting XD5.

Related post :

• XenDesktop Tuning Group Policy for Windows 7 x64
• All you need to know about XenDesktop 5.0

The new Citrix Online Plugin 12.1 was released last week and the new interface looks really good. Hopefully we now got a working bug free client. In my opinion there have been way to many bugs after Citrix went from the old style Citrix XenApp Client to the new Citrix Online Plugin supporting the HDX features.

I highly recommend you taking a look at Citrix Merchandising server to manage your Citrix clients, but it is pretty easy to upgrade your existing clients as well. This could be done with Microsoft SCCM or by using a startup script in Active Directory. Citrix have created a script that propably uninstall existing clients and install the new version. I have used this script at many clients and it simply works.

The unattended script can be found here : Sample Script to Install CitrixOnlinePluginFull.exe

It has been an exciting week at Citrix Synergy in Berlin. Even though I haven’t been there I have a pretty good overview on what happened thanks to Twitter and Synergy Live that streamed some of the events. In terms of XenDesktop 5 I did see the product a couple of month ago, but because of the NDA I haven’t been able to share this information with you.

So the biggest news at Syngery was the release of XenDesktop 5 that will be available sometime in Q4 2010. Citrix also revealed XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1 that I will be covering in a later post in a couple of weeks.

The biggest disappointment for me was that they did not announce the new Citrix Access Gateway 5.0 (CAG) or CAG support in general for VMware. Our customers are screaming for a CAG virtual appliance (VA) for VMware. The reason is simple, most of our customers have already VMware inhouse and in the DMZ.

Citrix Secure Gateway do not support 3rd party authentication for iPad/iPhone which means you have two options. Run without 3rd party authentication (no option) or simply wait till the appliance is available. Putting a XenServer in DMZ just for this is not a option, specially not now when the CAG 5.0 are in beta and there already exist a VA for Citrix Merchandising Server that have VMware support.

In this post I’m going to concentrate on XenDesktop 5. Jarian Gibson have already posted a in-depth article (check the resource section). I would like to highlight other features that haven’t been covered as well as provide you with some screenshots of the new version.

Licensing :

Normally I don’t pay to much attending to this, but I found the trade-up information very interesting. The trade-up to XenDesktop program creates an attractive transition path to XenDesktop. Customers with an active Subscription Advantage have the option to trade up every XenApp license and receive two XenDesktop licenses for each XenApp license, or trade up a portion of their licenses and receive a XenDesktop license for each XenApp license. Customers with no Subscription Advantage can convert each XenApp license to a XenDesktop license, this is pretty cool.

Installation and management :

The setup process for XenDesktop 4 is pretty loooong. There is numerous of hotfixes for each individual component that has to be patched with new hotfixes as well as the XenDesktop Agent that get’s a new version every second week. What’s new in XenDesktop 5 is the simplicity of the installation. There is no roles required, the setup will take care of everything. So the new Citrix slogs is “1o minutes to XenDesktop“. 10 minutes to install, 10 clicks to configure and 10 seconds to add a new desktop user. You’ll see a screenshot of the Setup wizard at the top of this blog post.

There is now 2 management console based on MMC3.0, one for Administrators and one for Support. Desktop Studio are for the Administrators and the second one showed are Desktop Director for the Support personal. The HDX Policy are now managed from the same console.

What awesome with Desktop Director is the possibility to see the HDX status on the VM as well as the possibility to run Remote Assistance session on Windows desktops and solve the users problems from the same console.

Offline Support :

As announced earlier with the release of XenDesktop 4.0 Feature Pack 2 we’re available to stream a XenDesktop image down to a XenClient for offline usage. What we didn’t see in this release is the availability to access this offline image from the cloud, e.g when you computer gets stolen. We will probably see this later next year, but I would believe that this is only possible for private images. Remember that the XenClient synchronizes the image back to your DataCenter when it is online, and that the image is basically a normal VHD file. Shouldn’t be to complicated to pick this up from both the cloud.

Resources :

• Jarian Gibson – XenDesktop 5 Announced…Lots of New Features
• Simon Bramfitt – XenDesktop 5
• Citrix – Video tour of Desktop Director
• Citrix – Video tour of Desktop Studio