Expert Insights

Citrix ADC–Tips From the Field

By Preston Gallwas

Citrix ADC–Tips From The Field As a consultant, I get the opportunity to work with companies of all sizes and across many verticals. The needs of customers can vary greatly, from simple ICA Proxy implementations of Citrix Gateway to complex multi-datacenter, cross-continent geo-load balancing. Despite this, I thought it would be helpful to share some tips that come up often working in the field. How to Tell If a Policy Is Being Hit One of the more frequently asked questions for troubleshooting configuration I receive is “Why isn’t my policy working?” Of course, this question can have many answers, but more often than not there are a few steps ...

Citrix Workspace Environment Manager (WEM) and SQL Availability Groups - Database Master Key Issue

By Scott (Ozzy) Osborne

I have been meaning to get this out there for a few months now, but since most of my time during the week is spent onsite all over with customers and on pre-sales meetings, I tend to not be home much to get it done. Weekends for me are 100% all about my one and four-year-old princesses and our house remodeling, so needless to say, this leaves me little extra time for writing things like this up, unfortunately. I have posted a few times for others to help so with this being end of the year and it being a bit quieter on this front, I wanted to get it cemented out there formally. Nothing fancy; just getting it on paper now that the new www.mycugc.org blogs site ...

Configure iPXE for a Nutanix Environment – Part 1

By Matthias Schlimm

Configure iPXE for a Nutanix Environment – Part 1 Nutanix uses the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) based on KVM, the open source Hypervisor. iPXE is open source boot firmware, checkout https://ipxe.org/ also used on AHV. I found many links on the web, and these are helpful to start, but I need some tools and knowledge in addition to address all needs. I hope this blog can help you to easily setup your own iPXE environment. iPXE is very powerful. You can easily create your own bootmenu, and automate it in the backend (I’m a big automation fan). In this blog, I will use a WinPE-Boot ISO pointing to my Ivanti DSM infrastructure to install my VM from scratch on ...

2018, What a First Year as a CTP!

By Patrick Coble

2018, What a First Year as a CTP! What a year this year turned out to be as my first full calendar year as a Citrix CTP (Rookie Year). I want to first thank Citrix and the Citrix User Group for all their support. I have got to speak with so many people this year about Security and its relationship to VDI deployments. I couldn’t have done it without everyone in this great community! Well, what did you do this year? I got to work with a great group of CTPs, CTAs and Citrites on a lot of items to provide feedback to make Citrix “More Better”. Then I got the opportunity speak at all these events and meet hundreds of people and tell them about Security. ...

Workspace Environment Manager – Capture Screen

By Carl Behrent

Workspace Environment Manager has a cool little feature for end users to use called ‘Capture Screen,’ it can be accessed by right clicking on the WEM Agent in the System Tray. This utility captures the user's screen and lets them either Save the image or send it straight to a pre-configured email address (Service Desk, etc.). Enable Screen Capture in the WEM Administration Console under: Advanced Settings > UI Agent Personalization > Helpdesk Options By default, the Comments field is greyed out on the end point and needs to be enabled within the WEM Administration Console. To enable the Comments field, you need to put the WEM ...

Some Tips for National Cyber Security Awareness Month

By Patrick Coble

Wow, it is National Cyber Security Awareness Month! What Cyber Security things have you done? I know for most Citrix admins, it is very tough to come up for air when you’re fighting Application Fires and the non-stop upgrades of Windows and Citrix. I thought I would write up a quick’ish blog on some of the Cyber Security Highlights and then some of the things you might be able to do to help secure your deployment, after testing, as always and forever. 2018 Cyber Security Highlights Ransomware is still alive and kicking . If you have not seen Martin Zugec's presentation on breaking the Ransomware Kill Chain, you're missing out. The main thing ...

My Favourite Overlooked vs. Hidden Citrix Workspace App Features

By Lyndon-Jon Martin

There are a number of hidden features or GEMS that are often overlooked by many individuals when I speak to them about Citrix Workspace. Here is a list of my top favourites in no particular order: 1. Lost vs. Compromised Devices So you've lost your BYO and or Corporate device(s)? It's left in a taxi, London tube or overland train. Now what? Let's also assume your smartphone can be found by the manufacturer's built-in app vs. a third party app, but the individual who's found it doesn't call you. Or, worse, it goes offline? What do you do now? Built into the Citrix Workspace HTML5 portal (e.g. https://CUSTOMERNAME.cloud.com/) you can navigate to the ...

How Citrix Supports Digital Transformation In Education

By René Bigler

When I started working in education about 20 years ago, there was one computer in our school: the device was placed on the desk of our accountant, right beside an electric typewriter. Obviously, things have changed a lot since those days. While seemingly yesterday, there were not much more than a couple of personal computers and printers, today, our equipment includes Thin Clients, PCs, Notebooks, Tablets, Smartphones, MFPs, 3D-Printers, Plotters, Cutters, CNC, Projectors, Visualizers, HoloLens, etc. The school has also moved from a Microsoft-only shop to a very diverse place with devices running on Windows, MacOS, ChromeOS, Android, iOS and Linux. Word ...

Be a #CitrixHero – DJ's TOP Tip: OS Optimization

By DJ Eshelman

I get this question a lot: What is the #1 thing you recommend? As some quick background, in addition to independent consulting, I remain on the 'virtual bench' with Citrix Consulting (and have since 2011) so needless to say, I make a LOT of recommendations. In fact, I recently cataloged 335 recommendations in a search for the 'Top 12' that I have made over and over and over again... I call these the Dirty Dozen. After giving a presentation at E2EVC (Experts to Experts Virtualization Conference) it was clear I was on to something. Well, lucky you, CUGC member! You are getting the one I make THE MOST OFTEN...and this time, for free. In fact, this is FIRST of ...

Size Matters

By Gareth Carson

Host Solution Sizing 101 - Part 1 When I was younger, so much younger than today, I gazed at a pair of trainers that I had to own, pleaded to always be a good boy and never do naughty things if I could have them. Once I duped my parents, I tried the shoes on. Wow, they were incredible. Clean, not a mark on them and, more importantly, they were “named” sports trainers. Proper cool-looking grips with some mesh material on the leather for extra dude appeal. There was one small problem. They were way too small. As they were the only pair in the shop, I tried them on and did the new shoe walk up and down the store and told my folks they fit perfectly. To this ...

User Created CTP

My First Time: Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS)

By Marco Hofmann

Introduction So today is my very first time: After years of MCS virginity, I decided it’s finally time to ditch the little farms and try out good ole’ Citrix Machine Creation Services. Over the last ten years, I almost exclusively installed small deployments. The bigger ones have about 150 concurrent users. All are built upon XenApp 6.5 or XenApp 7.6+ with static persistent virtual machines. I always told myself that static persistent virtual machines, together with fully automated patch management (for example: PDQ ) are enough. And this is still true, because the maintenance effort is virtually nonexistent. But, it really bugs me that I’m not equally familiar ...

Solved: Citrix Mobile Productivity Apps, Business Contacts and Compliance with EU GDPR

By Thorsten Rood

I've never been an office worker... My mobile life spans almost my whole career, so over the course of time, I actually used communication tools and toys of almost any flavor, vendor and technical generation. In the earlier days, the technical challenges making the mobile workforce use-case happen were so overwhelmingly complex that nobody asked about the legal perspective (at least it has been left unspoken and unregulated most of the time). Nowadays, the game has changed. Simplicity and ubiquitousness of email everywhere is a given fact. With more and more devices/form factors and more and more flexibility granted to our employees, we learned it is a ...

Its Like Magic! The Citrix Workspace App

By Lyndon-Jon Martin

Introduction In this post, I'm not going to cover off the usual topics you'd expect me to, I'll be focusing on some of the cool new stuff within the all-new Citrix Workspace app + HTML5 portal and why for me, it's a bit like Magic. Is Citrix Workspace app well beyond Citrix Receiver? Yes it is 100%! If we look at Citrix Receiver vs. Citrix Workspace app, at a glance, it may appear to be an icon switch-out grey to blue along with a new fresh UI, right? It couldn’t be further from the truth. So therefore, lets begin with a technology diagram depicting most of the features vs. capabilities within the Citrix Workspace and app. The visual aid/diagram ...

Configure NetScaler WAF for Azure Web App

By Saadallah Chebaro

Introduction: Just when I thought I had it all figured out, Citrix NetScaler on Microsoft Azure gives me a reality check–proving to be a worthy adversary and a true nemesis. Having spent so much time on the HA part of NS on Azure , now is the time to dive into real-world scenarios involving advanced features, that being WAF “Web Application Firewall” use-cases on Azure with PaaS offerings aka. Web Apps. Citrix NetScaler platinum offers WAF capabilities that can be applied to published virtual servers on the appliance itself, which works the same as on-premises or on-Azure, since IaaS machines can be simply added as a LB virtual server ...

How-To: Update Citrix Workspace Environment Management (WEM) from 4.x to 4.7 (v4.07.00.00)

By Marco Hofmann

On July 18th 2018, Citrix released version 4.7 of Workspace Environment Management (WEM). This is an update guide. Customer Success Services / Software Maintenance eligibility date: May 18, 2018 Download Citrix WEM 4.7 (v4.07.00.00) here: https://www.citrix.com/downloads/xenapp-and-xendesktop/components/workspace-environment-management-47.html What's new: https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/workspace-environment-management/current-release/whats-new.html Fixed issues: https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/workspace-environment-management/current-release/fixed-issues.html Infrastructure Service Update If you load balance your WEM Infrastructure ...

Codename Your SD-WAN Transformation Project Butterfly

By Lyndon-Jon Martin

The world as we know it has changed. We are consuming tools within our workspace in a profoundly different way versus two years ago, and many organisations are struggling with on-boarding of NEW tools, let alone MANAGING all of them, in today's workspace. Citrix Workspace App ( https://www.citrix.com/products/workspace-app/ ) is the enabler to unlocking your future state of on-boarding + managing all these NEW tools (LOB Apps) within our workspace. Previous challenges now become part of the daily routine for IT, and saying YES more often! I have to be honest. For me, this is only one part or piece (BUT an important one) of your digital puzzle, as you drive ...

WEM 4.6 - Agent (Agent Name) is not Bound to any Configuration Sets

By Alain Assaf

Workspace Environment Management is one of the most exciting products recently acquired by Citrix. I’ve been testing and using the product since day one. I recently upgraded to Workspace Environment Management 4.6 and started seeing a lot of the following Event Log errors on my WEM infrastructure servers (in the Norskale Broker Service Event Log): I did a quick search and found the following article - After Upgrade to WEM 4.6 agents not getting configurations with error: Agent (Agent name) is not bound to any configuration set . If you are using Active Directory OU's in your configuration sets, this bug prevents any WEM agents from registering. I reached ...

Citrix Studio: Unable to Delete Hosting Resources: There is Currently an Active Background Action

By Marco Hofmann

Today in Citrix Studio, I discovered a dead Hosting connection that I had set up years ago for some MCS tests. When I tried to simply delete the connection, I received the following message: The error message leads to the following (helpful!) KB article: CTX138318 After following the different steps outlined in the article... asnp citrix* Cd XDHyp:\HostingUnits Get-ChildItem Get-ProvTask | Where-Object { $_.ImagesToDelete | Where-Object { $_.HostingUnit -eq "f4dcd282-3d9b-478a-9107-2cafe6f6f124" } } ... I ended up with something like this: TaskId : db2ed90d-9f5f-43c9-8ee0-01dfde159544 Active : False Host ...

ICYMI: A Few Notes About the Citrix Receiver Clean-Up Utility

By Marco Hofmann

The Citrix Receiver Clean-Up Utility has been my biggest friend for a while. It helps you to recover broken Citrix Receiver installations on Microsoft Windows. Before I knew it, I sometimes even reinstalled Windows to get Citrix Receiver back to work. Good old days. But, after many years, a trustful friendship came to an end. Citrix included the functionality of the Receiver Clean-Up Utility into the Citrix Receiver Setup a while ago. If you use a CitrixReceiver.exe Setup which is >4.4, then there is a new command line argument which acts like Receiver Clean-Up Utility: /rcu This is explained in detail in the Citrix eDocs: Citrix Receiver: Configure ...

My First Citrix Synergy–2018

By Kevin Howell

Hello CUGC community, Having worked with Citrix as a customer and a partner over the last 20 years or so, I have always had the desire to attend Synergy but, for one reason or an other, it hasn’t really happened. It’s always been a difficult ask to justify to your boss or wife (same thing?) that t aking a week out of your life to attend a conference in California on a “holiday/vacation” is a good thing. The investment, in time and money, is quite significant to travel from the UK. H owever, as a recent Citrix CTA working for a Citrix Specialist partner (HTG), I am lucky that everyone in our business understands the value of attending, and I had ...