From the TechNote Dept: A new article by Patrick Kaak has been posted in the TechLibrary. This time around Patrick shows us the advantages of incorporating existing scripts into RES Automation Manager, illustrating by example how an otherwise semi-static script can be converted into a reusable runbook, which requires no editing what so ever. The example at hand utilizes Thomas Koetzing’s excellent Citrix Hotfix downloader script. By embedding it into an AM runbook you don’t have to ever edit it again. As usual for your convenience, an example buildingblock is included

<<< Click here to read the article

From the Mayday-We’re-Syncing Dept. On the last day of 2011, the Service Release 3 for the RES Workspace Manager 2011 was released. Among a bunch of new cool enhancements, there is one that I especially would like to elaborate on. Workspace Manager supports Microsoft Sync Center, a part of Windows 7. Specifically the support consists of that network drive-mappings, created in Workspace Manager will continue to work nicely, when Sync Center is used to bring stuff offline. This means you don’t have to worry about scripts to map the network drive when you’re offline. A new technote RG044 has been added to the Technote Library describing how this works. A helpful buildingblock has been included.

<<< Click here to read the article

‘Twas a month before Xmas and through the hotel, nothing was stirring… well maybe, except for the 450+ geeks and guru’s who assembled at the Hilton Universal City, Los Angeles for the first major Citrix Technology Exchange event on Dec 2nd 2012. RES Software had been invited as a platinum sponsor of the event. Besides showing our products at the vendor’s tables, we also had a couple of presentation slots. I want to take a moment to specially thank my friend Rick Eilenberger at Citrix for putting this great event together. Be sure to check out his follow-up article here.

During one of the RES Software presentations, I had the pleasure of once again demonstrating the unparalleled awesomeness of the RES Automation Manager. This time I had the good Mr. Luca Lo Castro with me on stage, as he is indeed the evil mastermind behind this latest creation. What we have here is nothing less than one of the most awesome Run Books created for RES Automation Manager yet. The Runbook does the following:

• Unattended installation of Citrix Provisioning Server 6.0 (PVS)
• Unattended installation of Citrix XenApp 6.5 (XA)
• Unattended installation of Xen Desktop 5.5 (XD)
• Preparation of a Windows 7 image (application of best practices, per Citrix’s recommendations.

This is quite valuable for anyone who installs these products for a living, no matter if you are a consultant, a Citrix SE or perhaps a Citrix admin at a large installation. The cool part is that ALL of the above is done in less than 45 minutes! Add that to the approx. 15 minutes it takes to stand up the RES Automation Manager infrastructure, and ask yourself this: How long does it take you to stand up a XenDesktop + PVS + XA environment under normal circumstances? I trust you see my point. So what are the prerequisites for all this? You’ll need the following:

• Your 3 .ISO files, respectively for PVS, XA and XD. If you haven’t got them, download them from MyCitrix.com
• A server (200x, doesn’t really matter), which will hold your DBMS for Automation Manager and be a mount point for your ISO’s. Let’s call it Server1. If you can run a compatible datastore for Automation Manager, this could be your laptop!
• Mount the ISO’s on this server using Daemon Tools or similar. Alternatively, if you are using a VM, you can just mount the ISO’s directly on the virtual machine as DVD drives. Finally if you already have the ISO’s extracted somewhere, you can just share those folders. Either way, make sure you share the individual mount folders, so the contents of each ISO is available as a \\server1\share UNC path.
• You will also need 3 blank x64 Server 2008R2 servers. And I do mean blank. For example, not manually install the .Net 4 client profile ahead, as it will mess up the unattended installation of SQL Express. These servers will be the target servers for PVS, XA and XD. Lets call these machines Server A, B and C
• Finally you’ll need a blank Windows 7 machine. This is the machine which will be prepped for use with PVS (registry hacks applied, services configured etc) as the golden image.

To get things stood up, here are some guidelines to get you started:

1. Download and install the RES Automation Manager aka AM. Refer to the Getting Started guide.
2. Deploy the AM Dispatcher to Server1
3. Deploy the AM Agents to the 3 blanks Servers A..C
4. Import the buildingblock, which you will find at the end of this article.
5. In the AM console, go to Repository | Run Books
6. Rightclick on the Citrix POC-Sales runbook and select Schedule Job
7. Fill out the parameters for the runbook as described below
8. Hit OK, then hit the local Starbucks.. :)

The parameter screen needs a bit of explanation, because if you don’t fill things in right, then of course “interesting” things may happen. You know the drill: BS in, BS out. So let’s have a look at a screen I’ve already filled out below. Click to enlarge:

 The table below explains each field and what you need to enter. There’s a couple of blank spots, but as soon as I get them validated by Luca I’ll be sure to update the posting.

Those of you who are savy with Automation Manager may wonder why that AM resources aren’t utilized for this RunBook. The reason is twofold: First of all, you don’t wan’t to be waiting to upload the close to 8GB of the 3 ISO’s together to the datastore. Not that it can’t handle it, but think about that you would have to do that every time there is a new .ISO. it would make things really cumbersome. Second, by not using a linked resource we preserve the flexibility of the runbook, without having to modify it, i.e. we don’t need to edit any resource every time we go to a new place where we want to use the Run Book.

I guess at this point you want to have a go at the RunBook, so just click on the Christmas present on the right to download:

Enjoy!

Note: If you have problems with getting the runbook to work, again: Make sure the 2008 servers are blank. If still no luck, post your results in the forum, so we can get some eyes on it. The buildingblock is provided as-is. It’s not something that has been provided officially in the context of RES or RES Support.

From the So-Ein-Ding-Muss-Ich-Auch-Haben Department. Here the other day I came across a nice article by Michel Stevelmans, where he’s taken the time to dig out some really useful explorer registry keys. These are the settings one needs to pick up from the users registry in order to serve up a consistent desktop experience, when moving across a computing estate. While the article was written with a competing vendor in mind, I have the luxury of really not having to care about that. This article will show you how to to put this knowledge into practice with RES Workspace Manager – and yes, you guessed it: BuildingBlock Included!

<<< Click here to read the full article

From the Gold-Brick-Through-Your-Window Dept. A while back you may have read about the work that was initiated at the Citrix Servtech event in Santa Clara, CA. As it turns out RES Software and Citrix Systems found a lot of common ground in leveraging the power of the RES Automation Manager to speed up Citrix XenApp 6.5 deployments.

IMPORTANT: The buildingblock has been updated Dec 5th. See below.

There is good reason to look into automating XA6.5 installations: You may not have noticed it, but the end-of-life date for XenApp 6.0 was recently updated. In other words, within the coming year you may need to start thinking about upgrading your XenApp farms. To ease this transition, it is my pleasure already now to be able to share with you the fruits of the collaboration between Citrix and RES. You can download the building block for Automation Manager at the end of this post.

A few words about the building block: It contains a Run Book which will schedule several Modules, necessary to install and configure XenApp 6.5 – including it’s prerequisites. To try it out, you need to download and install the RES Automation Manager. You can pull down a fully functional 45-day eval copy here. Getting-Started guide is available here. Out of the box there will be enough licenses to install a handful of XenApp servers. You will also need your XenApp 6.5 ISO image handy. You will either mount the image somewhere or extract the contents to a folder. Either way, the buildingblock requires the contents of the ISO to be accessible via a share. This is important. Once you schedule the Run Book, you will be prompted to enter some information such as paths, passwords, etc. See the screenshot on the right for an example.

Those of you who are savy AM hackers may wonder what’s up with the share. As it turns out, it’s really the most efficient way to access the Citrix distribution media, simply because of it’s size, it’s not feasible to upload as a AM Resource. Second, bear in mind that the ISO contents may be updated by Citrix in the future.

I wish to personally thank the following people for their contributions to this project: Rick Eilenberger, Josh Fleming, Alex Danilychev and Brian Mirrotto @ Citrix Systems. And last but not least my fearless Sicilian friend Luca Lo Castro here at RES, who put the pieces together into a working building block. Credit also goes to Musa Cakar and Arno Vos, who took the time to expand the datastore capabilities. See below:

As mentioned, the buildingblock was updated December 5th 2011. The update consists of support of MS SQL Datastores. While the original buildingblock only supported SQLserver 2008, it now supports creating the XenApp Datastore on MSSQL 2005 and 2012 (Release Candidate 0).

Click here to download the updated XenApp 6.5 block:

From the BuildingBlock dept. I’ve posted a new buildingblock in the Automation Manager section. This BB is based on some original work by Jeroen Speetjens who shared it with us a while back (Cheers mate!). This building block contains one single module, which can both disable or enable mouse and keyboard on a target computer. This is great for situations where you want users to keep their hands completely off the computers until you’re done with them.

The module has been tested on x86 workstation operating systems, hence for safety I’ve added the corresponding conditions to the tasks in the module. If you feel up for it, give them a whirl in your x64 lab and let me know if it works.

When scheduled, a parameter called INPUT must be specified. It can either be ON or OFF. The latter will disable user input. I’ve deliberately not used the List parameter types to ensure compatibility with Service Orchestration. Another thing: The module will reboot the target computer. This is necessary as the keyboard driver can’t be disabled while the OS is up. Not even devcon.exe can do this. When executed and the computer comes back up, the keyboard and mouse will be as good as unplugged. Be sure to run the module with INPUT=ON at the end of your Run Book or Project.

Download the building block here

From the RES Community Hero dept. My good friend Iain Brighton over at Virtual Engine in the UK has for quite some time offered a pretty amazing toolkit which will help you in your daily work with RES Workspace Manager. It’s about time I gave it a proper review. The VEToolkit is to the RES Workspace Manager what Robin is to Batman! It’s a great sidekick as it picks up where WM leaves off by offering multiple functions, which are all triggered by the green button in the lower right of the app.

This application is in continued development (beta 3) at the time of writing. In this article I’ll give you a detailed introduction to it’s capabilities along with usecases and show you where to download. I should probably also mention the VEToolkit is free! Interested?

BuildingBlock Spinner – This feature helps move buildingblocks between test and production environments. As you may know, buildingblocks are configuration exports from within RES products. Let’s say you have two domains; TEST and PRODUCTION. You have created some applications which in your test environment, assigned to groups in that domain. When you export building blocks of said apps, the access control info (i.e. domain+groupnames) will be exported as well. This means you would either have to manually edit the apps, or search and replace the TEST domain name with PRODUCTION. This is exactly what the spinner does. On top of this it can use the domain names as prefix and you can chose if you want to save the resulting changes in multiple or just one merged buildingblock.

POL Converter – This most excellent feature helps you grab the live user policies of any production system and convert them into registry settings, which you in turn can import into RES Workspace Manager. This effectively will speed up getting rid of existing AD based user policies in a RES WM managed environment. This way you don’t have to go back and enumerate the policies via the templates loaded into AD and build them manually into Workspace Manager. Using this feature is easy: Simply run the toolkit on your DC and point the policy converter to your C:\WINDOWS\SYSVOL\sysvol\<your domain>\Policies\ and look for the .POL files to convert. The resulting regfile will be placed where you specify it.

ADM(x) Template Merger – This is useful if you have several NT policy templates which you always need to use together anyway. The way the RES Workspace Manager handles .ADM(x) files is that it will import them into the WM Datastore so you don’t have to worry about distribution. When using the settings from the policy admin templates, you can however only edit one at a time. Using the merge functionality in VEToolkit you can combine the ADM(x) files which you need to have in one tree inside the Workspace Manager policy editor. There are two separate tabs as you can’t mix .ADM and .ADMX files as they have different formats.

GUID Locator – One of the powerful features of the RES Workspace Manager is the ability to set many configuration settings to Run-Once. This allows you to apply settings to users on a voluntary basis, such as “We think your Terminal Emulator app should use Courier as the default font – but if you hate it, you are allowed to change it.” When a Run-Once setting is applied to a user, a check/semaphore file is created in the users RES homedrive under <X:>\pwrmenu. The file will have the format of: <GUID>_<TYPE>.once. The file content itself is just a clear text time-stamp. The GUID will be generated when the RES object (registry setting, etc) is created.

The challenge with the Run-Once feature, is resetting it on a per-user basis. I covered this process a year ago in article RG020. It’s very easy if you know what .once file to delete, but mapping the right setting to the right GUID can be quite time consuming as the article illustrates. Again the VEtoolkit to the rescue! Using the GUID Locator, finding these is a snap. Just point the tool to C:\Program Files\RES Software\Workspace Manager\Data\DBCache\Objects and the GUID’s along with the name+description of the config items will be displayed. Note: It seems currently the name field is blank at the moment, but I’ve let Iain know about it. The resulting output looks like this:

Once you have the GUID of the .once file you need to delete, you could use it create a Managed App which reset an application to “factory settings” by deleting the .once file. This is useful if you’re not currently employing the User Settings feature of Workspace Manager, or if you in addition to the Restore User-Settings wizard want to provide a way to reset an app all the way, where initial Configuration actions on the app are re-applied.

With this article, I hope to have peaked your interest in the VEToolkit. Only thing remaining is where to download. You can pick it up at Virtual Engine’s site. Registration is required. It’s well worth your time though, so go have a look.

From the we-work-harder-so-you-don’t-have-to dept. My esteemed co-authors Patrick Kaak and Sascha Maier have produced a couple of new articles, which you may find interesting. Patrick has reworked another blog article he found, which compares different profile manager technologies, while Sacha has created an article that describes how you can first-time set up the correct initial keyboard for users in an international organization. This article also includes a buildingblock. Have a look at the articles in the Technote Library below:

<<< RG038 – Differences between profile managers

<<< RG039 – Mapping the right keyboard to the right people

From the Lego-R-Us dept. Today, May 8th I’ve posted a bunch of small Wisdom buildingblocks for your convenience. There’s one to install the Desktop Sampler, theres modules for some generic mucking-about with SQL databases (size query and shrink operations) and I’ve also thrown in one to help shut down an exchange server nicely. As always, if you feel like contributing some cool stuff you’ve made yourself, feel free to poste it over in the forum.

In the meantime go have a look at the new stuff  in the Wisdom BuildingBlock Library

From the spring cleaning dept. Ever got frustrated with having a Global Authorized File list which is a mile long? Been wanting to break down your appguard and read-only blanketing security into more manageable chunks? Then this article is for you. It will show you a very slick way of organizing security authorizations using blank/empty applications as placeholders and how you can easily move security settings inbetween them. Note the moving is a PowerFuse 2010 feature.

The article contains a nice buildingblock for you to try out also.

Click here to view the RG026 article.