Virtualization, technology, and random rantings with a focus on Citrix and VMware.

Category: Citrix Page 2 of 9

Replacing Your Certificate On Session Recording Server

With the wonders of doing your certificates on a much more frequent basis now, this becomes a yearly task. If you are using the WebPlayer feature of Session Recording on-prem (it is really nice), there is a little more tedious process you have to complete.

https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/session-recording/1912-ltsr/view-recordings/session-recording-web-player.html

This link has the overview you need to get you through the process. The only step I did not see in the article was the startwebsocketserver command at the very end. The location of the SsRecWebSocketServer.exe.config file you can find in the C:\Program Files\Citrix\SessionRecording\Server\Bin folder. I recommended making a copy of the file before you start.

But for your steps….

Get the certificate from your certificate provider of choice.

Import the certificate onto the Session Recording server.

Bind the certificate in IIS.

Bind the certificate in the Session Recording Server properties.

Export the cert as PFX to a local folder.

Perform the operations in the link above using OpenSSL to convert the exported PFX into a PEM file and extract the key file.

Modify the SsRecWebSocketServer.exe.config file in the C:\Program Files\Citrix\SessionRecording\Server\Bin.

Enter the location for the cert file and the key file.

Save file.

Open an elevated command prompt.

Navigate to the C:\Program Files\Citrix\SessionRecording\Server\Bin folder.

Enter “TestPolicyAdmin.exe -stopwebsocketserver” and press enter.

Enter “TestPolicyAdmin.exe -startwebsocketserver” and press enter.

The WebPlayer should be working as expected. If you do not update the SsRecWebSocketServer.exe.config file, the WebPlayer will give a WebSocket error.

Responder In The GUI… You Left Me Again.. Was It Me? : Upgrade From 13.0-84.11 to 13.0-87.9 Responder Policies Disappear From GUI

**Update: So.. It appears it does show up but… it shows under “Show built-in Responder Policies. **

This is where you select to show built-in.
They should up like normal now.

Did an upgrade of 13.0-84.11 to 13.0-87.9. Same thing occurred as in the upgrade to 13.0-85.15. The responder policies seem to vanish from the GUI. It will show the correct number of policies at the overview screen, if you look on the bound vServer, but not in the pane that shows all available policies. If you check the ns.conf, you will see the policies are there and are bound where they should be. Seems to be a bug again where it goes the way of the dodo.

You can see there are policies
You see there are no policies showing
But you can see there are policies bound to the vServer

Dazed And ConFAS’d : Cipher Suites For FAS And EndGame Exceptions For VDI

Ran into some fun with setting up FAS for MFA. I was testing a shorter list of ciphers on a test SSL profile on ADC on the test vServer. Come to find out, when accessing a machine that was using MFA from outside the network, I was getting an SSL error 4 on Windows machines and SSL error 47 on Stratodesk machines. I hadn’t seen that error since Receiver 4.x. It appears there are some additional ciphers needed in regards to the Citrix Workspace App. It appeared to work fine with the other cipher set using the HTML5 Workspace App. This article has the updated cipher set you need to have or it may cause you some issues (Changes To FAS Ciphers). These would be applied to your SSL profile assigned to the vServer on the ADC.

Ciphers needed in the SSL profile that are in link above

I also ran into an issue with EndGame.

When trying to connect from to VDI Windows 10 machines, you would encounter an incorrect user name or password error if EndGame was enabled, instead of it SSO logging you in.

Checking the event log on the machine, you encounter a Smart Card Logon Event 5.

There are 2 DLLs you have to add to a global exclusion, scardhook.dll and scardhook64.dll. These are located under C:\Program Files\Citrix\ICAService. Just excluding those DLLs got rid of the Event 5 Smart Card Logon error and allowed the Provider DLL to initialize.

After getting these exclusions applied, SSO works normally for accessing the VDI machines.

Changing HypervisorConnectionUid for VDI machines

So you have a new / different vCenter you want to move your VDI machines to. For the power management part, you will need to have the other hypervisor connection configured. You can run the script below to change the hypervisor connection on your VDI machines. You will want to make sure you have the VMs powered down before beginning. The first steps are just information gathering. This is part of migrating machines to new hardware. I will be adding the other pieces at a later date.

First you will need to get your hypervisor names and Uids with this command: Get-BrokerHypervisorConnection | Select-Object Name, HypHypervisorType, Uid.

Then you can get a list of machines with the hypervisor connection you want to change from. This was just getting the first machine that had the hypervisor I wanted to change from. Machine was already moved to a new Uid but it would be 2 in this case. Get-BrokerMachine -MaxRecordCount 100000 | Where-Object SessionSupport -eq “SingleSession” | Where-Object HypervisorConnectionUid -eq “3” | Select-Object -first 1 | Select-Object HostedMachineName, HypervisorConnectionName, HypervisorConnectionUid

<#  Script to change Hypervisor connection and power systems back up. This was done with PowerShell ISE 5.1, default profile configured on CitrixCloud SDK, and ESXi 7.0 with connection
    to vCenter. This was built from Ben McGirt and slightly modified to get the machine names with a specific configured HypervisorConnection via Get-BrokerMachine command.
    As it is best to change these settings and power the VM on, you will need to have the VMs powered down before beginning. The Uid in the example is "2" to get the machines using a different
    HypvisorConnectionUid that you wish to change from and setting in this example to HypervisorConnectionUid "3."
#>

Get-XDAuthentication -ProfileName "default"

$getVDIMachines = Get-BrokerMachine -MaxRecordCount 100000 | Where-Object SessionSupport -eq "SingleSession" | Where-Object HypervisorConnectionUid -eq "2" | Select-Object HostedMachineName, HypervisorConnectionName, HypervisorConnectionUid

$citrixVMs = $getVDIMachines.HostedMachineName
 
Function PowerOnVM ([string] $Name) #, [string] $Hostname)
#From https://thecloudxpert.net/2016/04/25/howto-power-on-a-vmware-virtual-machine-with-powercli-powercli-101/
{
    $VM = Get-VM -Name $Name
    Switch ($VM.PowerState)
    {
        PoweredOn { Write-Host "$VM already Powered On.";break}
        PoweredOff { Write-Host "Powering on $VM"; Start-VM -VM $VM;break}
        Suspended { Write-Host "$VM suspended.";break}
        Default {break}
    }
}
 

ForEach ($VM in $CitrixVMs){

    Set-BrokerMachine -MachineName ("*\" + $VM) -HypervisorConnectionUid 3
    Start-Sleep -Seconds 2
    PowerOnVM $VM
    
    }
 

What Do You Want? Information! : Getting Application Information And Exporting To CSV

You know you have a LOT of apps. But you want to know about 1 app in particular. You could go to Studio and look. You could peruse the various pieces and parts to and get what you want. Or…. you could just grab it via script. So that is what we gonna do here. We are going to present a grid view of the applications you have published, select one of them, and give you all the information you have room for! And, for an unlimited time offer, export to csv! This requires having setup your Citrix Cloud authentication and using your secureclient.csv to access.

Selection menu
Output from script
CSV output
# Get Citrix Application Info
asnp Citrix*
Get-XDAuthentication -ProfileName "default"

$application             = Get-BrokerApplication -MaxRecordCount 100000 | Select-Object ApplicationName, Enabled, AssociatedApplicationGroupUids, AllAssociatedDesktopGroupUids | Out-GridView -Title "Applications" -PassThru
$date                    = Get-Date -Format MMddyyyy
$a                       = 1
$d                       = 1

$app                     = $application.ApplicationName
$appGroupUids            = @($application.AssociatedApplicationGroupUids)
$deliveryGroupUids       = @($application.AllAssociatedDesktopGroupUids)
$appGroupUidsCounts      = ($appGroupUids).Count
$deliveryGroupUidsCounts = ($deliveryGroupUids).count
$ctxAppInfo              = [PSCustomObject]@{}
$ctxAppInfo | Add-Member -NotePropertyName "ApplicationName" -NotePropertyValue ($application).ApplicationName -Force
$ctxAppInfo | Add-Member -NotePropertyName "Enabled" -NotePropertyValue ($application).Enabled -Force

if($appGroupUidsCounts -gt 0){

  foreach($appGroups in $appGroupUids){
    
    $applicationGroupInfo    = (Get-BrokerApplicationGroup -Uid $appGroups)
    $applicationGroupNames   = ($applicationGroupInfo).ApplicationGroupName
    $ctxAppInfo | Add-Member -NotePropertyName "ApplicationGroups-$a" -NotePropertyValue $applicationGroupNames -Force

    if($applicationGroupInfo.AssociatedUserNames -ne $null){
      
      $applicationGroupUsers = ($applicationGroupInfo).AssociatedUserNames -join ';'
      $ctxAppInfo | Add-Member -NotePropertyName "ApplicationGroupUsers-$a" -NotePropertyValue $applicationGroupUsers -Force
      
    }
    
    $a++
  } 
}

if($deliveryGroupUidsCounts -gt 0){
  
  foreach($deliveryGroup in $deliveryGroupUids){
    
    $deliveryGroupInfo  = Get-BrokerDesktopGroup -Uid $deliveryGroup
    $deliveryGroupNames = $deliveryGroupInfo.PublishedName
    $deliveryGroupUsers = (Get-BrokerAccessPolicyRule -DesktopGroupName "$deliveryGroupNames")
    $dgUserCheck        = ($deliveryGroupUsers).AllowedUsers
    $ctxAppInfo | Add-Member -NotePropertyName "DeliveryGroupNames-$d" -NotePropertyValue $deliveryGroupNames -Force
    
    if($dgUserCheck -eq "Filtered"){
    
      $deliveryGroupUsers  = ($deliveryGroupUsers).IncludedUsers.Name -join ';'
      $ctxAppInfo | Add-Member -NotePropertyName "DeliveryGroupUsers-$d" -NotePropertyValue $deliveryGroupUsers -Force
    }
    if($dgUserCheck -eq "AnyAuthenticated"){
      $ctxAppInfo | Add-Member -NotePropertyName "DeliveryGroupUsers-$d" -NotePropertyValue "AnyAuthenticated" -Force
    }
    
    $deliveryGroupMachines        = Get-BrokerMachine -MaxRecordCount 100000 | Where-Object DesktopGroupName -eq "$deliveryGroupNames"
    $deliveryGroupMachineNames    = ($deliveryGroupMachines | Select-Object MachineName).MachineName -join ';'
    $ctxAppInfo | Add-Member -NotePropertyName "DeliveryGroupMachines-$d" -NotePropertyValue $deliveryGroupMachineNames -Force
    
    
    $d++
  }

 
}

$ctxAppInfo | Export-Csv C:\scripts\logs\$date-$app-App-Info.csv -Append -NoTypeInformation

A Wild Citrix 2203 LTSR CU1 Appears!

https://www.citrix.com/downloads/citrix-virtual-apps-and-desktops/product-software/citrix-virtual-apps-and-desktops-2203ltsr-cu1-all-editions.html

Go and check it out!

Moving Control Plane To Cloud: Migrating Citrix Director To Cloud

Fourth in the series of moving the control plane to Citrix Cloud…. So you have moved your control plane and now you need some monitoring via the wonders of Director. You can do this… There are some things that you have to consider. First, historical data DOES NOT migrate as part of using the Automated Configuration Tool (ACT). I looked over the list of things that it did, and that was not one of the things listed as migrating. I did learn through a ticket that moving the historical data is not at this time supported, nor was there a tool to move said data. For those customers that heavily rely on the reporting data available, you will need to plan accordingly. This presents a difficulty that an on-prem version of Director would need to be maintained for a year (or whatever grooming schedule you have defined) to allow the data to be accessed while the new data was populating. This can cause issues with people needing to access BOTH locations in order to get accurate data. Also, default for Premium / Platinum customers is 90 days of historical data in Director. Advanced licensing provides 31 days. If you need more time than that, you will need to open a ticket with Citrix to get that time extended which can take 1 – 2 weeks. (More information on Citrix Director in Cloud can be found here: Director On Citrix Cloud )

Now if you have setup AD Connect to connect to Citrix Cloud with company credentials, you can publish Director with the accounts people already use to login with at their company. After moving, there is also a post that will come about how scopes are affected and you have to reassign your access groups used in your company to the new Monitor role that is created for EACH scope they need access.

To confirm that you have AD Connect configured, you can check the Identity And Access Management on the hamburger menu on your Citrix Cloud login.

It should show Azure Active Directory and next to https://citrix.cloud.com/go should be your company name selected when you connected AAD.

If this is showing as connected, you can publish Director to your helpdesk group.

These are the arguments for publishing Director with Microsoft Edge:

ApplicationName : Director
CommandLineArguments : https://xenapp.cloud.com/monitor
CommandLineExecutable : %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe
WorkingDirector : %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft\Edge\Application

Once you have published the app to your users, the directions below will allow them to connect with their AAD credentials.

Once the user clicks on the link, they will be presented with the Citrix Cloud login.

The user will need to click on “Sign in with my company credentials.”

The user will need to enter the company name assigned at the configuration of AAD Connect.

If you are using MFA with Office 365 or another provider, you will have needed to setup your MFA app / other methods of verification.

After completing login, user will be presented Director and be able to continue duties as assigned by roles.

Links to other articles in the series:

Part 1 of migration series Setting Up Cloud SDK And Authentication Profiles: Part 1

Part 2 of migration series Changing Custom PublishedName Property: Part 2

Part 3 of migration series Migrating Citrix Daily User Report: Part 3

Moving Control Plane To Cloud: Migrating Citrix Daily User Report

Third in the series of moving the control plane to Citrix Cloud…. So you had your daily user report kicking out everyday (Surely you created one from this other post: https://xenapplepie.com/2022/04/12/if-you-could-get-those-user-counts-today-that-would-be-great/). It was working its happy way through life. Then you just moved parts it talked to into the cloud. I have created this updated report script to allow for it to pull from Citrix Cloud. This requires that you have already setup your API access with the secureclient.csv, that you added the CustomerID to your secureclient.csv, and you have installed the Citrix Cloud SDK. If you don’t have those, you are gonna have a bad day. I left the comment for the #Get Licensing Info so you can see what all other fields you can get if needed from there. If you are using VS Code, when you run that section, you can create a new variable and assign it as “$content.” and it will show the other available pieces of information you can assign such as “deviceLicenseUsage.”

**Update: Removed line with Get-XDAuthentication as it is doing a double authentication. Changed SDK commands to use $headers.Authorization to pass same bearer token**

Example Of Autocomplete From VS Code For Licensing
Sample Output From Script Email
# Citrix Daily Report with updates for using Citrix Cloud. This was done in Powershell ISE 5.1 with Citrix Cloud SDK installed.

asnp Citrix*

$Today = Get-Date
if(($Today.DayOfWeek) -eq 'Monday')
{$when = $Today.AddDays(-3)}
else{$when = $Today.AddDays(-1)}

$creds          = import-csv "c:\scripts\logs\secureclient.csv"
$CLIENT_ID      = $creds.ID
$CLIENT_SECRET  = $creds.Secret
$CUSTOMER_ID    = $creds.CustomerID
$tokenUrl       = 'https://api-us.cloud.com/cctrustoauth2/root/tokens/clients'

$response       = Invoke-WebRequest $tokenUrl -Method POST -Body @{
  grant_type    = "client_credentials"
  client_id     = $CLIENT_ID
  client_secret = $CLIENT_SECRET
}

$token = $response.Content | ConvertFrom-Json

$headers              = @{
  Accept              = "application/json"
  Authorization       = "CwsAuth Bearer=$($token.access_token)"
  'Citrix-CustomerId' = $CUSTOMER_ID
 }

# Get Licensing Info
$response            = Invoke-WebRequest "https://api-us.cloud.com/licensing/license/enterprise/cloud/cvad/ud/current" -Method Get -Headers $headers
$content             = $response.Content | ConvertFrom-Json
$response.Content | ConvertFrom-Json | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 10
$licensingTotalCount = $content.totalAvailableLicenseCount
$licensingUsageCount = $content.totalUsageCount
$licensingRemaining  = $content.remainingLicenseCount

$connections = Get-BrokerConnectionLog -BearerToken $headers.Authorization  -Filter {BrokeringTime -gt $when} -MaxRecordCount 100000 | Select-Object BrokeringUserName

$CitrixVDIConnected     = (Get-BrokerSession -BearerToken $headers.Authorization  -MaxRecordCount 100000 | Where-Object SessionSupport -eq "SingleSession" | Where-Object SessionState -eq "Active").count
$CitrixVDIDisconnected  = (Get-BrokerSession -BearerToken $headers.Authorization  -MaxRecordCount 100000 | Where-Object SessionSupport -eq "SingleSession" | Where-Object SessionState -eq "Disconnected").count

$ctxUsers = [PSCustomObject] @{

  UniqueCitrixUsers      = ($connections.BrokeringUserName | Select-Object -Unique).count
  CurrentSessions        = (Get-BrokerSession -BearerToken $headers.Authorization -MaxRecordCount 100000 | Select-Object BrokeringUserName).count
  CitrixVDISessions      = $CitrixVDIConnected + $CitrixVDIDisconnected
  CitrixLicensesUsed     = $licensingUsageCount
  CitrixTotalLicenses    = $licensingTotalCount
  CtxLicenseFreePercent  = ((($licensingUsageCount) / $licensingTotalCount ) * 100).ToString("#.##")

}

# HTML Formatting
$style = "<style>BODY{font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;}"
$style = $style + "TABLE{border: 1px solid black; border-collapse: collapse;}"
$style = $style + "TH{border: 1px solid black; background: #dddddd; padding: 5px; }"
$style = $style + "TD{border: 1px solid black; padding: 5px; }"
$style = $style + "</style>"

$body = $ctxUsers | ConvertTo-Html -Head $style 

$date             = Get-Date -Format "MM-dd-yyyy"
$emailFrom        = "someemail@company.com"
$emailto          = "someemail@company.com"
$emailtwo         = "someemail@company.com"
$emailCC          = "someemail@company.com"
$subject          = "Daily Citrix User Report | $date" 
$email            = New-object System.Net.Mail.MailMessage 
$email.to.Add($emailto)
$email.to.Add($emailtwo)
$email.CC.Add($emailCC)
$Email.From       = New-Object system.net.Mail.MailAddress $emailFrom
$email.Subject    = $subject
$email.IsBodyHtml = $true
$email.body       = $body
$smtpserver       = "smtp.company.com" 
$smtp             = new-object Net.Mail.SmtpClient($smtpServer)
$smtp.Send($email)

Links to other articles in the series:

Part 1 Of Cloud Migration Series: Part 1

Part 2 Of Cloud Migration Series: Part 2

Part 4 Of Cloud Migration Series: Part 4

Moving Control Plane To Cloud: Changing Custom PublishedName Property

Next in the series of Cloud Migration…. When migrating the control plane to Citrix Cloud, I found that if you had changed the PublishedName to something other than the default Delivery Group name, they up and vanished and reverted to the Delivery Group name. I didn’t have that many to have to change, but if you had a LOT of them set, it would have not been fun. But…. Powershell again to the rescue!

If you do use custom set PublishedName, then you will need to get a list exported from your old DDC to import. This builds on the other post of setting up your new Powershell SDK.

The script below has parts to run on the old DDC and on a machine with the new SDK installed.

# Script to get custom PublishedName and change from on-prem to Citrix Cloud after ACT import.

# To be ran on old on-prem DDC to get custom PublishedNames.
Get-BrokerDesktopGroup | Select-Object Name, PublishedName | Export-csv C:\scripts\logs\pubslishedname.csv -append -NoTypeInformation

# To be ran on machine with Citrix Cloud SDK installed.
asnp Citrix*

Get-XDCredentials -ProfileName "default"

$pubName = import-csv "C:\scripts\logs\published.csv"

foreach($pub in $pubName){
  
  Get-BrokerDesktopGroup -Name $pub.Name | Set-BrokerDesktopGroup -PublishedName $pub.PublishedName

 }
 
 Get-BrokerDesktopGroup -MaxRecordCount 10000 | Select-Object Name, PublishedName

This is the output you see where the Name and PublishedName are matching the Delivery Group name.

After exporting your CSV from the old DDC and copying the file to your machine with the new SDK installed, you can edit the csv (example here in Notepad++) and make and changes you need to make to it.

After running the second part of the script, you see the changes reflected on the PublishedName field.

Links to other articles in the series:

Part 1 Of Cloud Migration Series: Part 1

Part 3 Of Cloud Migration Series: Part 3

Part 4 Of Cloud Migration Series: Part 4

Moving Control Plane To Cloud: Setting Up Cloud SDK And Authentication Profiles

This will be first in a series of posts relating to what I found in moving to Citrix Cloud and some of the gotchas I encountered.

Update** Added change to switch profiles to: Get-XDAuthentication -ProfileName “Cloud-Test” -Verbose**

This was a good article to get started with using the Cloud SDK to replace your other SDK you installed with Citrix Studio (https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2022/02/03/getting-started-with-powershell-automation-for-citrix-cloud/). Important note, if you install this with Studio installed, Studio will no worky after the installation.

One of the other things you will have to do, is create an API access account that will download a secureclient.csv that you will use to authenticate and allow you to run commands against Citrix Cloud.

Logon to the Citrix Cloud at cloud.com and get authenticated.

Click on the hamburger menu in the upper left.

Click on “Identity and Access Management.”

Click on “API Access.”

Fill out the name and click “Create Client.”

Copy and save the “ID” and “Secret.”

Click to download and save the “secureclient.csv” file to store in a safe location.

I added the “CustomerId” field to my secureclient file to pass to the XDCredential setup. To get this, you can see your CCID on the upper-right hand side underneath your name while you are logged into Citrix Cloud.

Below is what I used to configure my access to do the connections. One thing I noticed, if you name the profile anything other than “default,” it prompts for authentication and caused issues for automated scheduled tasks.

# Script to setup Citrix Cloud credential profile
asnp Citrix*

$secureClientProd = “C:\scripts\logs\secureclient-1.csv"
$secureClientTest = “C:\scripts\logs\secureclient-2.csv"
$xdCredsProd = import-csv $secureClientProd
$xdCredsTest = import-csv $secureClientTest

# Set prod profile
Set-XDCredentials -CustomerId $xdCredsProd.CustomerId -SecureClientFile $secureClientProd -ProfileType CloudAPI –StoreAs "default"

# Set test profile if you have a test cloud account
Set-XDCredentials -CustomerId $xdCredsTest.CustomerId -SecureClientFile $secureClientTest -ProfileType CloudAPI –StoreAs "Cloud-Test"

# List profiles
Get-XDCredentials -ListProfile

# Load credentials
Get-XDCredentials -ProfileName "default"

# To change profile credentials
Get-XDAuthentication -ProfileName "Cloud-Test"

# Clear Cloud credentials if you wish to delete a profile
Clear-XDCredentials -ProfileName "profilename"

So what I did to modify most of the scripts I was using before, was to remove the -AdminAddress and add these lines to the top of the scripts, then proceed business as normal. This allowed me to do the same things I was doing before and pass the API securecred file information.

asnp Citrix*
Get-XDCredentials -ProfileName "default"
From Update section to show the change of the profile

Links to other articles in the series:

Part 2 Of Cloud Migration Series: Part 2

Part 3 Of Cloud Migration Series: Part 3

Part 4 Of Cloud Migration Series: Part 4

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