From the Technotes-R-Us Dept. With the Automation Manager 2012 currently available as RC2, a RESguru article describing the nuts, bolts and registry settings of the new Dispatcher+ has been overdue for a while. To the rescue comes Rob Aarts with a great article, which explains the ins and outs of the new dispatcher component. Also covered in the article is the Master Dispatcher/Cache feature. The most important registry settings to tweak the behavior of the Dispatcher are also covered. Finally the article also covers the new WebAPI for Automation Manager.
<<< Click here to read the article!
Tags: Automation Manager, Dispatcher, Dispatcher Plus, Master Caching, Master Dispatcher, Registry Hack, RESTful Web Services, SOAP, WebAPI
2012, Automation Manager, Technote | RESguru | 
January 8, 2012 09:24 | 
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Today, Jan 3rd we celebrate the 3rd year of RESguru.com and a new staffmembers arrival. As you may recall there was a bit of controversy surrounding RESguru.com’s date of inception, but I’m glad this is behind us now and the usurper was silenced – at least for a while anyway :-) At this time, I wanted to take the opportunity to thank YOU, our regular readers and commentors for help in making the site what it is today. Your feedback and constructive critique has been essential to motivating myself and the other writers to continue what is essentially a labor of love.
I would also like to thank my current co-writers for providing quality content over the years. As all contributions to RESguru.com are on a completely voluntary basis, it’s with gratitude that I am able to publish the shared works of our regular staff, colleagues, friends and industry partners. To all of you: Thank you!
On that note, I would also like to welcome another RESguru onto the regular writer’s staff: Mr. Rob Aarts. Rob has a load of technical RES product experience which he’ll be sharing here on the ‘Guru site. His first article is about the new Global Variables in the RES Automation Manager. I’d suggest you give it a read! Rob’s bio can be found here.
From the Get-Yerself-Certified Dept. As the year is drawing to a close, it’s my pleasure to share with you the partner training calendar for the United States, 2012. We’ll be hosting a number of classes where you can learn the nuts & bolts of the RES product line, from the ground up. The classes will primarily be run by yours truly in 2012. According to the wishes of existing and new RES partners, we’ve selected a number of US cities where technical training will take place. Mark down the dates and contact me if you want to reserve a seat. Registered participants will receive information about the venues, prerequisites and everything else, when time is approaching. Read more »
Tags: Automation Manager, Lab Build, PoC, Proof of Concept, Provisioning Server, Unattended Install, Xenapp, XenDesktop
Automation Manager, BuildingBlocks, Citrix, External stuff, Technote | RESguru | December 19, 2011 16:57 | Comments (1)
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 b
lock: 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 pers
onally 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 RES Tech Training Dept. Are you a new or prospective RES partner in the United States? Need to get trained in a RES product? Missed the recent invite? Then keep reading, this article is for you then!
Read more »
Tags: Automation Manager, Florida, Ft. Lauderdale, RAMBC, RES Training, RWMBC, training, Workspace Manager
2011, Automation Manager, Events, Fun, RES Products, Training, Workspace Manager | RESguru | October 28, 2011 01:06 | Comments (0)
From the Interesting Tidbits Dept. Here’s probably the shortest RESguru posting to date, but it’s been a little thing that has been itching to be posted for a while. In all it’s simplicity it’s about how you would reference an empty string in either Automation Manager or Workspace 
Manager. Since there isn’t a NULL operator per say, we have to rely on our old friend, Mr. PatternMatching. In other words for the uninitiated, RES products supports a pletora of wildcard operators within the text input fields of the products. You can also use variables and functions here. Also check out the RESpedia entry on patternmaching.
The use-cases are many, as you might need to check on environment variables, registry settings, AD properties, file versions or something completely different. Here is a 
quite simple one: Let’s say we want to check if a variable is set or not. All we have to do is use the pattern “?*” without the quotation marks. The questionmark determines that a single any-character must be present, and the asterisk says that any number of characters including none, may follow. Here on the right is a screenshot which illustrates the usage. PS: Thanks to Dave Bryant for sharing this nugget.
From the Alliance Partner dept. Wednesday last week, together with a handful of good colleagues, I had the pleasure of presenting for about 300 SE’s at Citrix ServTech 2011 in Santa Clara, California. This is an internal event which Citrix does every year, to update their own folks on the latest and greatest. As a Citrix Ready Leadership partner, RES Software was invited to show off our stuff and explain how we can help Citrix’s field engineers speed up XenApp/XenDesktop Proof-of-Concepts installations. As the whole notion of profile management is a moot point at that stage, I explained how Automation Manager can roll out an entire Xenapp farm straight from a consultant’s own laptop and showed as an example how our Automation Manager can roll out hotfixes in a matter of minutes. Here’s a few snaps we took during the event (click to enlarge):
Overall it was a great day. Presentations and demo went well, feedback was great, and the ensuing Pool & Cigar party at the Hyatt was awesome! BTW: Just when I thought the day couldn’t get any better, the CTO of a certain UK based competitor, made his way out of the building as we walked in. Seeing us, the look on his face was priceless! ;-)
Anyway, to make sure this article still holds technical relevance, I’m sharing the actual Building Block for RES Automation Manager that I built during the live demo at ServTech. As mentioned above, this buildingblock installs all current XenApp 6 hotfixes, valid as of August 10th 2011. The list was based on the CTX129229 KB article. I’ve pimped the module a bit with some nice commentary since then, but besides that it’s the very same block:
Click the brick to download the AM BuildingBlock (60MB, faster mirror here)
Note: To the Citrix SE’s who are reading this: Just go to the RES Download page and grab a copy of Automation Manager (you’ll need to enter a few details, but you’ll get the package immediately) Before you install it, you will need a database server. In case you’re not running a server OS on your laptop, consider MySQL or SQL Express.
Finally I want to send thanks to all our friends over at Citrix Systems for hosting us. I look forward to training with you soon! Be sure also to check the good Mr. Donahue’s article on the RES Blog, for more impressions, pictures etc.
Tags: Automation Manager, Citrix, Farm-in-a-Box, Hotfixes, PoC, Proof of Concept, Rapid deployment, Unattended
Citrix, Events, External stuff, Fun | RESguru | August 17, 2011 22:09 | Comments (0)
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. Read more »
From the technotes-R-us dept. Patrick Kaak has written the second part of his article series on how to wrestle the most out of RES Automation Manager. This time he dives into how to use parameters between modules and run books. This makes short work of expanding existing functionality in Automation Manager Modules. The idea is really simple. For those of you back in the day who started out writing batch files, a module parameter is equivalent to putting in %1, %2 etc into a script.
The beauty of using parameters inside the RES Automation manager is that you can do it without any scripting, yet still benefit from using information which as already been entered across multiple modules.
<- Click here to read the article
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