Entries for May 2009

Working in SBC environments for some years now I've used some best practices documents like the well known Methodology In a Box (MIAB) from Douglas Brown or the MF Tuning Tips from Rick Delingher.

These documents, although really pertinent, are now quite outdated and do not include the latest OS and XenApp releases.

The purpose of this article is an attempt to summarize all Tuning Tips I've found (and also that I'm using) and describe the target operating system / XenApp version(s) they're working for.

Do not hesitate to give us your comments for this Article to be updated with your experience and feedback.

Please note that these informations are provided "as is" and that using these tips is at your own risks.

I was recently working on a large migration project in which we had to clean the users profiles.

To ease Users experience, we had to develop a way to avoid the eternal first run Microsoft Office Popup asking for Username, Company and Initials.

As these settings relies on reg values, this could be easy to define them by logon script.

However, as they are hardcoded within reg binaries values, scripting these settings is not as simple as it could have been ...

Working on a Provisioning Server project, I had to deal with the Trend Officescan product installation.

The problem was really critical because installing the Antivirus Software within the image would lead to a blue screen at boot time.

Not installing the software was not an option, as the Security Administrator would have not allowed that because even if the servers are "Read Only" they could be virus propagation vector.

During investigations we've found that if the antivirus software was installed at each boot (so not incorporated within the image but installed on top of it) the blue screen issue was over and the Antivirus Software perfectly working.

To automate the deployment process we decided to write a script and push it by machine GPO.

To ease administration processes and ensure the Antivirus Installation would never happen within a private image, I've developped the script provided in this article.

Working on a Provisioning Server Project we've decided to use Device Hard Drive Cache.

However during the initial tests, we've faced an issue : How to automate the creation of the Cache Partition on the physical drives ?

To do so, we've developped a little script, launched at Computer Startup by GPO.

At first server boot on image, the local disk is not present, causing Provisioning Server to fallback on Server Side cache.

The following script will then initialize and format the cache partition which will be available for the PVS Client at next reboot.

Working on XenDesktop POCs and Deployments I've done some researches on how to optimize XenDesktop UPD printing just like in XenApp (check this article for more details).

With XenDesktop 2, it was possible to modify the DefaultPrnFlags value (which controls the Citrix printers autocreation process) using the following procedure. 

With XenDesktop 3, things are a little bit different, as the Printing Subsystem is now closer to the XenApp One ...

I've recently faced an issue regarding using Provisioning Server (4.5, & 5.0) to provision XenApp VMs on XenServer hosts.

The VM's were booting properly and were responding correctly through XenCenter but was freezing when accessed through network (either ICA or RDP for example)

I had used all registry tips from KB (EnableOffload reg value turned to 0 ...) without any success getting my VM to work properly ...