Community Roundtable

Citrix Cloud Integration with Azure AD MFA for Administrators In today's blog, we are going to discuss enabling Azure MFA for administrators who will login to Citrix Cloud for administration. Azure Integration for Citrix Cloud will provide a secure way to access your Citrix Cloud environment for administrative purposes by leveraging the existing security framework designed by customer. Configuration Login to Citrix Cloud Portal Navigate to Identity and Access management by clicking ...

This year, International Women's Day is on March 8 th and I have personally been using this day for the last couple of years to reflect on our CUGC Women in Technology mentorship program and its accomplishments.   About the program The program was started in 2016 by three female Citrix Technology Professionals (CTPs): myself, Jo Harder, and Theresa Miller with the awesome help of Stephanie Boozer of CUGC HQ. The CUGC WIT mentorship program has a very clear mission to provide 1:1 mentoring ...

Windows 2016 Deduplication on FSLogix Containers and ODFC  During the time of running my Shrink Scripts (yes, I have a couple I go back and forth with) for FSLogix, I noticed that my 4TB drive is used more and more. There wasn’t really anything I could do at this point other than adding disk space (call me old, but I try to optimize as much space as possible before throwing more hardware at it). One of the things I could do is delete all older profiles that haven’t been used in 90 days. Some scripts ...

Technology never stops changing, but you likely already knew that. Gartner recently released a new report talking about the future of network security, introducing: Secure Access Service Edge, SASE, (pronounced: sassy). Although it may sound complicated, it is simpler than it seems. You may actually be familiar with its components already. SASE is the combination of existing technologies into one, single solution to reduce overhead and overall operating costs. Through a bundle of cloud networking ...

Infrastructure as Code is the new way of deploying a fully working Citrix environment, if you have tried configuring a new Delivery Group on Citrix Cloud Studio using only PowerShell, then you most likely have run into the following error message: "The users configuration has been manually modified and cannot be changed by studio" Depending on whether you plan to deploy Apps & Desktops or just Apps or just Desktops, you need to set new entitlement policy. I'll go through the script in detail ...

A Warm CUGC Welcome to the new CTP and CTA Classes of 2021!  Congratulations and welcome to the newest members of the  Citrix Technology Professional (CTP)  and  Citrix Technology Advocate (CTA)  classes of 2021! And, of course, we are so happy to see all of the returning members in each program! Each year, Citrix awards Citrix technologists hailing from all over the globe for these two distinct programs. These seasoned techies bring a wealth of knowledge of Citrix solutions as well as active ...

A Tribute to Citrite Chris Gissing The Citrix UK team are saddened to announce to the Citrix and CUGC communities that Chris Gissing passed away suddenly last week. A near 20-year Citrite, Chris was all about 4 things: family, people, community, and technology. If you have worked with Citrix products, Chris' work and passion probably affected you – whether you realised it or not. Chris was an avid supporter of product quality , interoperability, and customer empathy. He built and ...

2020 CUGC XL Recap – What A Year! When we kicked off last year with our CUGC XL: Texas event at Space Center Houston, none of us had a clue it would be our only in-person XL of 2020.  The global pandemic may have slowed down our momentum, but our local group leaders stepped up to the challenge and we were able to quickly pivot and shift our remaining XL events into the virtual space. We pulled off a total of 8 virtual XLs last year, and brought in fun keynote speakers and happy hours to ...

Compliance, The Ultimate Convenience… Achieving a positive user experience and a successful information security program can be a good team building process. Create that positive user experience by keeping it simple with the three T’s of Technology: Teamwork, Training and Testing.   Teamwork - Developing a good relationship between your end user and your technology operations team is key for success. Building a relationship with the end users assists in every aspect of what you are trying ...

In 2019, Citrix held the first-of-its-kind conference in Santa Clara for developers, which I wrote about last year here on CUGC . I was thrilled to participate and was looking forward to seeing when such an event would return. Clearly, 2020 has had different plans in store for all of us. At the risk of sounding cliché… as we adapt to our ‘new normal,’ some things have changed in terms of format, but Citrix Converge is returning in an online format and is free! Multiple Tracks This year Citrix ...

Hi all, Citrix Converge 2020 is happening from November 2nd to November 13th and I wanted to share some of my insights into this conference. To be honest, I was not really thinking much about Citrix Converge 2019 when I first heard about it. The conference was presented as a developer conference, so I did not really think I would fit in for that type of conference since I am primarily a Citrix and Microsoft architect with a focus on automation. Since I was a bit curious about what the conference ...

CTP and CTA Applications for 2021 Classes Are Now Open! Are you interested in being more involved with other like-minded individuals who are Citrix technologists and are also huge fans & advocates of Citrix? Well today is your lucky day! We are excited to announce that we are now accepting applications for the CTP and CTA classes of 2021! The application window will remain open until October 30, 2020. For details on what it takes to be a CTP or a CTA, keep reading. CTP and CTA candidates are ...

CUGC Women in Technology–2021 Mentorship Program Applications Open! We’re so excited to announce that applications are now open for the 2021 CUGC Women In Tech mentoring program! This will be the program’s 5 th year, and we are so thrilled at the growth we’ve seen. (For more on the program's history and how it started, check out this blog post from co-founder and CTP Jo Harder.) Ready to Apply? The WIT mentoring program is now open for new submissions starting September 3, 2020 . Candidates ...

Even if any third party Antivirus solutions are installed on Windows Server 2016 and 2019, Microsoft Defender, unless manually disabled, remains in Active Mode. On windows 10, it disables itself when a Non-Microsoft antivirus product is installed. It becomes extremely important to apply CVAD exclusions, if Citrix Delivery Controllers are installed on Windows server 2016 and 2019, to avoid disruptions similar to CTX279897 where Defender virus definition 1.321.1319.0 detected HighAvailabilityService.exe ...

There has been some recent change to the LTSR article around Local Host Cache upgrades: https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/upgrade-migrate/upgrade.html#replace-sql-server-express-localdb When upgrading Delivery Controllers to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops version 1912 or 2003 :  Upgrading SQL Server Express LocalDB is optional.   Local Host Cache works properly , with no loss of functionality, regardless of whether you upgrade SQL Server Express LocalDB. We added ...

During my webinar on Layering , a question came up that I did not have time to delve into, mainly because it can become a ‘holy war’ amongst us all. The question, (or statement?): Why use layering ( notice I say ‘layering’ and not ‘app layering’ ) if I have automated my image creation? I want to address the phrasing of the question first because we need to make an important distinction here. As I address the question in this blog, I will be using the term ‘layering’ which means any layering ...

Introduction I recently completed a project with a client to build out a brand new, on-premises Exchange 2016 environment that required load balancing with Citrix ADC. As with most enterprise Exchange deployments, a reverse proxy and load balancing solution should be implemented for redundancy and to secure those services. This customer was previously using the Exchange SMTP relay receive connectors to explicitly allow certain hosts to send mail via SMTP relay but wanted to transition to a load ...

During this COVID-19 pandemic, I had to build 500 VDI desktops. I could only use dedicated machines because of how some software is licensed. I didn’t really care for this, but I had to do what was needed to provide remote support. This was my experience, in getting an automatic reboot with MCS Static (dedicated machines). Set the Delivery Group to the following. I set the peak hours to be 24/7. I specified that when the user logs off, it will shut down the machine. I will explain this ...

Hi! I'm Owen, this is my first MyCUGC blog post. I work as a virtualization expert for an IT solutions provider in Quebec, Canada. I've been working professionally in the IT industry since 2000, and from 2005 onwards, I have have seen a huge benefit to maintaining a home lab.  The thing about working in the IT industry is, once you've completed the first part of education via a 1, 2, or 4 year college or uni course, the learning doesn't stop (or shouldn't !). However, you  ...

It‘s time to say goodbye to your on-premises XenMobile Server (XMS) environment. And now, it‘s time for Cloud transformation to Citrix Endpoint Management (CEM)... The lifetime of XMS on-premises is a time-bomb and the End-of-Life date is currently still not released but could happen any week or month. And then start the last years of official support and Citrix will release only bug fixes and security patches. You can check the End-of-Life date on the Product Matrix: You’ll see new features ...