Hi everyone! Today I’m super excited to announce the first release of our in-house developed solution for making Citrix Admin’s lives/jobs a little easier. Introducing…(dramatic pause)…MassCat, the Mass Catalog update utility for updating numerous Machine Catalogs to their latest Base Image’s snapshot
To understand the usefulness of this solution consider a Citrix Admin tasked with patching multiples Machine Catalogs for say your standard monthly Windows Updates. Normally this process would include the following process.
1. Powering On each Base Image
2. Running Windows Updates on each Base Image
3. Powering Off each Base Image.
4. Capturing a Snapshot of each Base Image.
5. Logging into Citrix Studio
6. Navigating thru each Machine Catalog’s wizard to find the correct Base Image.
7. Drilling thru the snapshots to find the latest one.
8. Selecting the appropriate Deployment Schedule
9. Rinse & Repeat
MassCat eliminates steps 5-9, which are repetitive and potentially error prone tasks as Admins click through countless dropdowns/options.
Masscat turns patching 10 machine catalogs into what once was a 30 minute job to a 30 second job. To get an idea of the time savings look at the estimated chart below.
| Number of Machine Catalogs | Standard Time | Time w/ MassCat |
| 5 | 15 minutes | 30 seconds |
| 10 | 30 minutes | 30 seconds |
| 20 | 60 minutes | 30 seconds |
The video below really highlights the time savings and I hope you find it helpful!
**MassCat comes in two editions, Engineer and Enterprise. The Engineer edition requires a license and is allowed installation on up to 5 instances.
The Enterprise version is not limited on the number of installs.