Prepopulating Citrix Receiver within ICA session.

We get the requirement quite   often that once users logged into virtual desktop application should launch via seamlessly. Here seamlessly have many meaning  and it varies from customer to customer. For example one customer would like the application to be present as a shortcut in the start menu and when users click the application it must do single sign on.  There are various way to achieve this. Once can import receiver ADM template using gpedit.msc

To prepopulate the receiver with the URL

To prepopulate url , one can do it via adm template or via Citrix HDX policy . To do it via adm template, import it into local policy and then perform following settings

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Once storefront url is selected value must be entered in following format “

SalesStore;https://sales.mycompany.com/Citix/Store/discovery;On;Store for Sales staff” and even one doesn’t want to wish to have it. So once this is done it will prepopulate the URL.

Once url is prepopulated, SSO has to be done. To do the so , we must choose “local user name and password” and then choose Enable pass-through authentication.

This will allow single sign on and allow users to launch application seamlessly.

Failed to add a Failover Cluster Node because “SQL Server Agent” account name empty

I came across interesting issue on two occasion when I tried adding second node to the SQL 2012 cluster node. After it detecting the second server detail, account name for “SQL Server Agent”  is blank. After we typed password this still fail with error message “There are validation error on this page”

We tried rebooting boxes but that didn’t help. Finally to fix this we need to create

1. SQL Server agent 2. Add the same agent as fail over cluster resources.

You can do this steps on any of the fail over cluster node. Use following PS editor to run the command

$ClusterName = "YourClusterName"
$FciClusterGroupName = "SQL Server (MSSQLSERVER)" # may need to modify to reflect your environment

Add-ClusterResourceType -Name "SQL Server Agent" -Dll "sqagtres.dll" 

Output of command will be like this

Once this is done,select role –>Add Resource –> More Resources –>

More Resources –> SQL Server Agent

Select “New SQL Server Agent” and --->properties –>Dependencies select resource as “SQL Server”

Now select properties tab and type  InstanceName = <Name of the SQL server Instance name> VirtualServerName =<Name of the SQLCluster>

Now the “New SQL Server agent”  will start

Make sure the registry on primary server is set to 1

After above steps when setup is run again , it was able to see SQL Server Agent users name.

Yeah I am also a SQL expert

Source here

Citrix Profile and folder redirection without Microsoft GPO

Sometimes you have a situation where profile and folder redirection can not be done via Windows GPMC. Citrix provide you an option to do so via HDX policy. Citrix have inbuild policy which can used to achieve this. This way we may not require help from AD team and can be managed at our own. I am not going to explain  what all we can apply as part of UPM because everything is available here , here and here.  Profile and redirected folder path must be different .

1. To get this first make sure path is define in this way for each of the folder redirection highlighted in red

Along with each of the folder redirection make sure that “Redirect settings for <folder name>” is selected to “Redirect to the following UNC path”.

2. Make sure policy is applied to the users group

3. For UPM alone path should be set to \\path to folder\#SAMaccountname#or %username% also make sure following should be defined

For rest of the settings and best practices please follow the above mention 3 link .

Gud luck for not using Microsoft GPO :)

Expand vDisk for PVS 7.1 on Hyper-V

There are many article which talks about vDisk expansion on different version of PVS but couldn’t find one for PVS 7.1 using windows 2012R2. Here I am sharing what I have done. Download vhdtool.exe from here. After downloading the tool follow this command as shown below

Now open disk management on any machine and attach the vhd

Once disk is attached it will showup as expanded volume . Select the disk and then choose extend volume.

Select the entire size and then next

Detach the hard disk post expansion

PVS streamed Win2012R2 /Win7 and NIC fail over.

In this video I am trying to show how NIC speed varies for windows 2012R2 vs Win7. As you know , HyperV support PXE on legacy nic at the speed of 100MB. Streaming VM’s over 100MB would be really challenging .  Windows 2012R2 VM does fail over the network from legacy NIC to Synthetic NIC as shown over the video whereas Windows7 only use synthetic nic for VM traffic and streaming continue over legacy network. In this video, I tried copying file to PVS streamed  windows 7 and all the activity happening over synthetic NIC whereas streaming continue over legacy NIC.