In effort to conserve resources and Citrix License, booting off users that are not using their XenDesktops might be an option. In our environment, we have number of concurrent license for XenDesktop and XenApp. We have tried hard to educate our users on how to logoff their machines when not in use but there are always some who don’t. This last project was assigned, required me to build a pooled catalog for 150 users. We know for sure that not all of the 150 will be using simultaneously.

Currently we added over 80 users assigned to the pool of 50 machines. I am slowly adding more systems due virtual host resources. When I first built the machine catalog I assigned too much memory, wrote about this issue on my previous post Changing XenDesktop Machine Catalog Memory.

Based on data collected only 40% of these XenDesktop are in use everyday, 30% are in Disconnected state, 5% Ready  and 10% Turned Off.  What we are looking at is the 30% that are in disconnected state. Out of that 30% roughly 18 machines, 11 of them have been in this state for more than 1day. Couple of them were disconnected for 6 days.

I have several machine catalogs that are currently using up too much memory. The only way to change the memory size in the machine catalog is via Powershell SDK from the desktop controller, and the only way to change the memory size of existing VMs is by modifying the actual VM memory settings from the virtual host.

Objective of this project

Change a the machine catalog memory size from 2gb to 1.5gb. This will take care of any new VMs that will be added to the machine catalog. Change all existing VMs in the catalog via VMware PowerCLI.

I am finally to the point where my XenDesktop environment has grown. The VLAN setup for my XenDesktop farm only handles up to 64 IPs and all of a sudden I need up to 200+. In the past, shortening the IP Lease time to 12 hrs helped but not anymore. My request for a new VLAN with more capacity finally came thru, was added into vSphere and now is time to switch the XenDekstop VMs to the new VLAN.

To avoid manually switching each VM to the new VLAN, I tried to change the network settings on my XenDesktop master image and push the new image to the entire catalog but VM settings did not change.

I posted a question in the Citrix Forum on how to switch all the machines from one catalog to a new vlan and one of the Citrix Engineers said that this cannot be done on the XenDesktop side. All the changes will need to be made in the vSphere.

On the new EPO server the Lastest Available column was all empty and the master repository pull keep failing. This problem is mainly caused by a proxy or firewall setting.

We finally upgraded from McAfee Orchestrator from 4.0 to 4.6. The overall install was painless but configuring this is a different story. One of my issues was simply setting up the Dashboard for everyone. I noticed that only one person was able to see the dash even though I configured created them as global admins.

I bumped into an issue where Internet Explorer displays black rectangle bricks or block on certain websites. This mainly happens on Windows 7 x64bit and Internet Explorer 8.0. This problem does not exist with Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

At first glance, I did not like about the new Citrix Receiver 3.0 because it seemed inconvenient and some of the old features were removed. Unlike Citrix Online Plug-in v12. a menu of published applications when you click on the icon. The other thing couldn’t figure out was how to display all the published applications on the desktop. The default installation of the receiver will only show a very simplified menu. You cannot even change the server path. This was possibly designed this way to prevent users from “accidentally” changing the server path.