Sysadmin Help…

I have been having issues connecting redirected drives into my Xenapp Server.
It seems there is a problem with the new Citrix Receiver where this has been disable for some reason.

So you can not open any documents published through XenApp from Xendesktop from any local or networked drives for your Xendesktop image.

The following registry key on your Xendeskop image will help you resolve this issue

32Bit Desktop Windows 7

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\ICA Client\Engine\Configuration\Advanced\Modules\ClientDrive

64Bit Desktop Windows 7

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Citrix\ICA Client\Engine\Configuration\Advanced\Modules\ClientDrive

Sometimes in some scenarios, you encounter a Xen hosted VM that is stuck in a “Pending” state, typically a VM that was stuck with a pending Shutdown task. from XenCenter, the VM is no responsive in a panic state and the Shutdown and Reboot buttons are greyed out.

A couple of potential causes for this condition include:

1. a mounted iso from the console that is not avaliable for some reason
2. From Citrix:

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This latest updates Welcomes a few new feature which we have been waiting for, for quite some time.
Such as the introduction of

IntelliCache. makes hosted Virtual Desktop Infrastructure deployments more cost-effective by enabling you to use a combination of shared storage and local storage. The load on the storage array is reduced and performance is enhanced.

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The long awaited Service pack for Xendestop 5 has finally arrived.
Bringing new features along

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When Clicking on a link from a local or network share on a Xendesktop 5 image, an error with  cannot access \\client\c$\users\desktop\file.doc
This is a problem as you have to manually open the application and then select the file from within the application, making the user experiance quite unfriendly.

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1. Perform a metadata backup and back up your VMs before performing the rest of this procedure.

2. Disable High Availability (HA) from XenCenter, if enabled.

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It’s been a while since i updated the Templates, here comes our new friend Ubuntu 10.04 and it’s running in Pv mode on Xenserver Yep

As usual there are a few tweaks that had to be done to the vm for it to work, however this time it is easier then 9.10
If you download my template you do not need to do any changes. however if you update the kernel once your vm is running, then you must tell Xenserver where to find this kernel,
since the new ubuntu uses grub2, xen does not know how to handle this, so instead of pygrub reading the grub.cfg file, we need to specify the kernel and ramdisk manually.
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I have created a small script, which enables you to take a backup of a Vm running on Citrix Xenserver and Export it on your local machine,
You can also restore an exported vm (IMPORT) to any remote xenserver with this script.
I am also working on the functionality to create scheduled tasks (cron jobs) out of this script so that you can create a backup schedule for your xenserver vm’s
with two options, you can either shutdown a vm and export it, or else you can take a snapshot of a vm and then export that snapshot.
As usual this Xenserver Backup application will be free, and should be avaliable shortly, if you are in need of this, let me know as i already have a beta version running,
however packing an installer is the most tedious part of the whole process

This script has been tested on ubuntu 9 but should work on any linux.

To Run the script, just run
chmod +x IMPEXPVM.sh
./IMPEXPVM.sh

And then follow the instructions on the screen

Please let me know if this was of any help.

You can Download it here IMPEXPVM

Here is a short script, which you can use to shutdown any Citrix Xenserver upon powerfailure,
Firstly you need a pc connected to a ups, running some sort of ups software, usually this software lets you run a script upon power failure, such as Apcupsd
Basically all you have to do is tell the ups software to run this script upon power failure.

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Many users have been experiencing problems in XenServer, Basically Used Space and Allocated space does not match, I too have encountered this issue, It is to do with the snapshotting feature,
When a snapshot is deleted , Citrix XenServer should automatically reclaim the disk space by un allocating data which had been used by the snapshot, The process known as coalescing. XenServer coalesces the disk space while the vm’s remain running (online coalescing).
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