XenApp 6.5 BuildingBlock for Automation Manager

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:

New technote: Deploying a custom screensaver

From the technote dept. A new article RG02E has been posted in the Technote Library. This article is an entrylevel tutorial in how to use the Workspace Manager’s CustomResources feature to distribute a component, in this case a screensaver. We will also use Workspace Manager to configure the deployed screensaver. If you’re a veteran workspacer, check it out anyway, you might pick up a new trick or two! As usual the article comes with a nice buildingblock which you can try out in your own lab environment.

<<< Click on the doc to read the article

More cool RES community content

From the community hero dept. While the posting frequency currently is dialled down a bit here at the ‘Guru (I’m relocating to the states this weekend, remember?), it’s great to see that  my pal Iain Brighton over at Virtual Engine has been posting some serious in-depth technical articles. I can definatly recommend you to go have a closer look at these. Specifically I would like to highlight the following articles:

• Staging RES PowerFuse 2010 Agent Deployment. This one covers how to roll out a PowerFuse installation, including a copy of the PowerFuse cache, so you won’t have every agent pulling this data (around 20meg) over the network uppon first startup.

• Decoding the PWRMENU.INI Colours. This article describes how you can preconfigure the background color in the PWRMENU.INI file to ensure it matches the wallpaper.

• Migrating GPOs to RES PowerFuse (Part1, Part2 and Part3). In this article series you can learn how to efficiently convert existing applied ADM(X) for an environment into Powerfuse, by importing the registry.pol files located in the Sysvol folders.

Updated: PowerFuse Commandline parameters

From the technote department. One of the oldest articles in the RESguru Technote library has finally received a long deserved overhaul. The article in question, RG005 was first published back in January 2009. The new and improved article is optimized with an index, jumplinks, and organized into 3 main sections:

• Parameters for the RES PowerFuse console
• Installation parameters for the different PowerFuse components
• A mixed hodgepodge of parameters for different sub-components

Click here to read the article

New technote: StealthMode PowerFuse Deployment

From the cloak & dagger dept. Another technote, RG02A has been posted in the RESguru technote library.  This article is a one-of-a-kind, that will explain to you how to get started with PowerFuse in an existing production environment, where you do not care to disturb the users, but want to sneak PowerFuse in through the back door. The solution to this is StealthMode. By combining a few console settings and installation parameters, you can fly in under the radar completely unnoticed. The article goes through step-by-step what you need in order to set this up to work correctly. Note; a Wisdom Buildingblock is included for your convenience.

Click here to read the RG02A article