How to find your Datastore for XenApp

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Sometimes you inherit a customer/client that you have no details for and therefore cannot find out certain information quick enough!!!

If you need to find out where the Datastore is for a certain installation just check the following regkey. 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Citrix\IMA\Database Settings.

Citrix Licensing Service will not start!!!

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OK I know I've not been working with Citrix as long as some people but this is the first time I've come across this this problem...  For some reason on a customers Citrix environment the Citrix Licensing Service would not start...

you will get an event id something like the following


Faulting application name: lmadmin.exe, version: 11.9.0.0, time stamp: 0x4d6bbff6
Faulting module name: lmadmin.exe, version: 11.9.0.0, time stamp: 0x4d6bbff6
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0005e222
Faulting process id: 0x2a58
Faulting application start time: 0x01cd65da86623391
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\Licensing\LS\lmadmin.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\Licensing\LS\lmadmin.exe
Report Id: c469cc23-d1cd-11e1-ab7b-0050568070dc


The client was running License server 11.9.0 Build 11011 and to resolve this issue i had to rename the "C:\Program Files\Citrix\Licensing\LS\conf\concurrent_state.xml" and then start the licensing service again and all works fine.

The issue is resolved in License server 11.10

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX129747

New Microsoft Excel 2010 Worksheets are Not Shown in Taskbar

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I came across this today when you open a new Microsoft Excel 2010 worksheet, the new sheet is not shown on the taskbar, only the main Microsoft Excel icon is shown on the taskbar. 

This is because the Excel hook is not injected into any process because the seamless engine component (Sehook20.dll) responsible for the fix fails to load into the user session. Sehook20 fails to load because active accessibility hook is disabled in the Seamless Flags settings. Seamless flags are often used when troubleshooting problematic display issues.

I got round it by adding the following registry key.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Citrix\ExcelHook
Name: Enabled
Type: REG_DWORD
Data: 1

Get out the following article for more details.

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX133198/

Citrix Session Monitoring & Control Console

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I found this great article about Citrix Tool called "Citrix Session Monitoring & Control Console" from Thomas Koetzing that describes in detail the functions and use of SMCC.

http://www.thomaskoetzing.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=133&Itemid=205

You can also read a bit more about it on the edocs web page too.

http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/xenapp65-admin/ps-printing-limiting-printing-bandwidth-all.html

The Situation:

You have performance problems with user session(s) and want to see what's going on in the session. Is the display not updated or the printing channel? Is speedscreen working or do I have network problems? You can use the performance monitor for that but there is also a GUI, the SMCC. 
  
The running SMCCAfter you have started the SMCC you have to select a specific ICA Session. I have selected the ICA-tcp#2 of the remotely logged in Administrator. Now you will see the overall Session Data of the selected ica session. Check out the Compession, the Session Line speed or even the session Latency and also the update time.

Switch to the Session Channels 

Now take a deeper look in the Admin ICA session. Switch to the Session Channels and see every single Channel that is running in the session. It depends on your MetaFrame settings which channel is active or you have allowed. For example the "old" Printing Channels (CTXLPT1, CTXLPT2), "old" COM Ports Channels (CTXCOM1, CTXCOM2), Clipboard... etc. and the main ICA Control Channel (CTXCTL).
In the Session Channels you can take Control of the Session total Bandwidth therefore use the slider, but in the next step you can take Control of each Virtual Session Channel.

Take Control of a Channel 

Click on the CTXCTL and you will get the Virtual Channel Control. Now you can take control of that specific channel. Here a quick try out, copy as the Admin some megs to the mapped client drive and when the system is copying the files, open the CTXCDM and set the Priority to low and apply it You will see the copy time will decrease.

The SMCC might help you with your Thin Clients (Linux, Windows CE), Fat Client, PALM's or what ever you use for connecting to the Citrix MetaFrame Server and Montitor and Control the ICA Session for troubleshooting and pin point your problem.

XenApp 6.5 event ID 30107 and 10001

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Ok so i started to get a XA 6.5 farm up and running for testing and i ran in to the following errors.

Event ID 30107


Site path: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Citrix\PNAgent.

The Citrix servers reported that they are too busy to provide access to the selected resource. This message was reported from the XML Service at address http://CTXSERVER/scripts/wpnbr.dll [com.citrix.xml.NFuseProtocol.RequestAddress].  [Unique Log ID: db5427d9]

Event ID 10001

A usable server cannot be found on which to launch the application. Application: MyDesktop, Client: MYWORKSTATION (address: 10.10.10.10;;;), User DOMAIN. Check your worker group definitions and load balancing policies to verify appropriate servers are assigned for MyDesktop. 

How i got round this.

1.  Setup a worker containing my servers

2.  Applied a load evaluator to the App.

3.  Applied XA650W2K8R2X64001

4.  Restarted XA server

Also make sure you don't have 1 in the following regkey.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\fDenyTSConnections

Errors occurred when using "Servername" in the discovery

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After running discovery, the following error message is received:

“Errors occurred when using Servername in the discovery process.”

Double-clicking the error message to see the error details reveals the following:

“An unexpected error occurred. Check that the server name is correct, that the server is on, that Citrix Presentation Server is installed on this server, and that the Citrix MFCOM Service is running.”

Make sure the user is a member of the Distributed COM Users and try your discovery again and it should pickup the server correctly.

Citrix Delivery Services Console: Unknown Error Occurred and Can’t Display Users?

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Sometimes when trying to view user sessions in the access management console, the console fails to display any users but rather displays an error message:

“An error occurred. Try performing the task again. If the problem persists, contact support.”  Then under details “Unknown error occurred”

This typically indicates the console is having trouble enumerating users or getting valid data back from the data collector. I then found that clicking on each individual server to display users pinpointed which server was not able to provide information as it popped up with its own error unknown message.

I then stopped the IMA service on this server which does not impact users sessions in progress (but will prevent new sessions from being directed to that server). I then ran dsmaint recreateLHC which recreates the local host cache, a subset of the datastore. Then I restarted IMA and made sure the server was back in the farm (verify with theQFARM command)

XenApp 6.5 - Enhanced Desktop Experience

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To deploy hosted desktops with the Windows 7 look and feel and control desktop customization through Group Policy think about using XenApp's 6.5 new feature Enhanced Desktop Experience. 

When you install XenApp 6.5 the Windows Desktop Experience Integration role is installed by default through the Server Role Manager and the installation sequence performs the following tasks. 

• Adds the Desktop Experience and XPS Viewer features to the Windows server configuration.
• Moves the Citrix folder items in the Start menu to the Administrative Tools folder (including the Citrix AppCenter).
• Creates a new Windows Theme file and sets the default wallpaper.
• Starts the Windows Themes service and configures it to start automatically.

Now to get Enhanced Desktop Experience working do the following

1. First run the Set-ExecutionPolicy AllSigned command within powershell as this will allow you to run the Citrix powershell script that we need to run later.

 2.  Now change your directory to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\App Delivery Setup Tools\" and once you have changed directory run the following command  .\New-CtxManagedDesktopGPO.ps1 and wait for it to finish.

3.  Once the command has finished you are ready to apply one of the following group polices to the OU that you require.

CtxStartMenuTaskbarUser - Enables the Windows 7 look and feel for published desktops. It also changes the pinned shortcuts on the Taskbar and configures the user's Start menu to match the Windows 7 environment. This GPO includes a script that executes when a user logs on to the server for the first time. To ensure the script executes correctly, the PowerShell execution policy on the server must be set to AllSigned.

CtxPersonalizableUser - Configures the user account that is accessing the XenApp server. It configures Windows policies to limit the available Control Panel applets and restricts users from installing programs, viewing properties, scheduling tasks, or shutting down the server.

CtxRestrictedUser - Includes most of the policies from the CtxPersonalizableUser GPO. Additionally, this GPO configures the Desktop wallpaper policy to prevent users from personalizing their desktops and prevents users from modifying settings for the Start menu and Taskbar.

CtxRestrictedComputer - Configures certain restrictions on the XenApp servers allocated to the tenant. This GPO restricts users from accessing Windows Update or removable server drives.

4.  OK before i apply any of the policies to an OU lets have a look at XenApps standard published desktop that a user would get without these GPO's applied and as you can see its a standard Windows Server 2008 desktop.

5.  Looking at the new GPO's that the powershell script created you can see that its automatically created the 4 GPO (CtxStartMenuTaskbarUser, CtxPersonalizableUser, CtxRestrictedUser, CtxRestrictedComputer).  Now I've applied CtxPersonalizableUser and CtxStartMenuTaskbarUser to the OU that the XA server's are in and if you have another GPO to handle general XA GPO's (in my case the XA Servers GPO) make sure that this GPO has the loopback processing mode enabled and set to replace so that the settings within the CtxPersonalizableUser GPO apply correctly.

 6.  Now as you can see once the GPO's are applied currently to the OU and a user lunches their published desktop you can now see that the Enhanced Desktop Experience is working correctly.

NOTE 1: At first I did have a bit of a problem getting this to actually work currently with a users profile that was already created but after installing this HOTFIX it seemed to work successfully.  If you are still having issues after applying this hotfix try to delete/rename the local profile/roaming/UPM profile and get the user to log in with a fresh profile to test.

XenApp 6.5 Pre-Launch

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Now setting up Session Pre-Launch is a every simple task but I though I would would just add a bit more regarding the topic along with some screen shoots of how I set it up. 

The pre-launch feature allows a pre-launch session to be created when a user logs on, pre-launch session reduces the launch time of the first application. The default application ctxprelaunch.exe runs in the session, but is not visible to the user.  Also keep in mind that once a pre-launch session starts it does take a XenApp license regardless of whether a user launches an app or not and this setting will apply to all users.

1.   First right click on an App and select other tasks> Create Pre-Launch application.

2.  It will now create a PreLaunch-AppName application, me personally i like to change the name of this to PreLaunch-FarmName (Or something more descriptive) since you only need to create one PreLaunch per farm.

 3.  Next add the Pre-launch Disconnect Timer Interval policy - Amount of time before the pre-launch application disconnects the session (60 minutes by default). Once disconnected, the session gives up the XenApp license. When a user launches an application, the session is reconnected. This timer does not disconnect a session if a user launches an application. If the interval is not configured, the pre-launch session is not ever disconnected.

 4.  Next add the Pre-launch Terminate Timer Interval policy - Maximum amount of time before the pre-launch application exits (60 minutes by default). Starting a user application in the session also terminates the pre-launch application. Once the pre-launch application exits, the session remains alive if the user's applications are running or if you configured session lingering.

 5.  Now if you are setting this up for the first time remember to restart your receiver and once you do have a look at the connected users

NOTE: Customizing the pre-launch feature using Administrative Templates is not supported. However, you can change the pre-launch configuration by modifying the registry values, located at:

For 32-bit: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\ICA Client\Prelaunch and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Citrix\ICA Client\Prelaunch

For 64-bit: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Citrix\ICA Client\Prelaunch

XenApp 6.5 Step by Step - Step 4 Configuring the Farm

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Step 4 - Configuring the farm. 

Ok let me stress that this is only a test environment and there is a hell of a lot more configuration required for a XenApp environment to run smoothly, you now have to start to consider things like Citrix policies, Windows Desktop Experience, session pre-launch, HDX configurations are just among a few that spring to mind.  I will be blogging about the above soon so if this is something you would like to see documented keep your eyes peeled on ITGerrish.  

1.  On the XenApp server click on configure to start to build the XenApp Farm.

2.  As this is the first server in a new farm I have to select Create a new server farm.

3.  Give the Farm a name and make sure you're happy with the first Citrix Administrator that you are adding to the site.

4.  As this is only a test environment I will be using SQL Express as it fits my requirements but if you need to know more information regarding the setup of SQL have a look here.

5.  Add in the credentials of the users who will be used to connect to the SQL Express DB. 

6.  I've left the shadowing options as the default but if you want some more information regarding the setup of shadowing have a look here.

NOTE: By default, shadowing is enabled. Shadowing restrictions are permanent. If you disable shadowing, or change shadowing features when configuring XenApp, you cannot change those settings later. You must reinstall and reconfigure XenApp on the server to change shadowing restrictions.

7a.  As this is the first XenApp Server in the farm it will be the data collector.

7b.  As i choose to enable XML integration i cannot change the XML server port as this now shares this with IIS.

7c.  I added in the WI address that we created in Step 3.

7d. I left the remote desktop users as default too.

8.  Review the settings you have just selected and choose apply.

9.  Wait for the configurations to finish and this can take a while

10.  The installation is now finished and you need to restart your XenApp Server.

11.  Looking back at the Server Role Manager you can see that the XenApp server requires a Reboot.

12.  Once you have logged back in with the same user account that you configured the XenApp with you will see that a task are now completed.

You are doing ready to start configuring your XenApp environment and i hope you found the step by step guild helpful.