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.

Unveiling of MassCat (Citrix Patching Made Easy) Read More »

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 1912 LTSR Highlights

Citrix, Infrastructure, SysAdmin | Josh M

Anytime a new product release is unveiled I like to take a look at the features and improvements that may be important to the masses. With roughly two years between LTSR releases, the drop of the new Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 1912 LTSR <h2 surely has some features that were previously debuted in the CR track. Below is a chart outlining a few features newly added to the LTSR chain that is sure to impress! And man oh man, is it a list of goodies. Enjoy!

Product	Feature	Description
Delivery Controller	App/Desktop Probing & Reporting	Finally! With this addition Citrix Admins now have a Citrix provided tool for proactive monitoring of resources. https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2018/06/18/application-probing-your-proactive-application-monitoring-solution-from-citrix-director/
	Windows 2019 Compatibility	Pretty straight forward here…but important none-the-less.
	MCS for Linux Apps & Desktops	7.15 LTSR allowed Linux VDAs, but now we can mass create the with MCS.
	MCS Write-back Cache v2	If you ever used MCSIO to save the IOPS hit on your storage, you know it had it’s problems. The v2 iteration now uses the tried-n-tested PVS drivers for Write-cache and yeah…it’s vast improvement in stability. http://blogs.ultima.com/citrix-update-highlights
	Multi-Reboot Schedules for Delivery Groups in the Studio	Tired of typing Set-BrokerRebootSchedulev2…wait what’s v2? Well no need to worry with that anymore. Now numerous machine reboot schedules can be set via Studio…making Admin’s lives easier.
User Experience	User Personalization Layer	Worth upgrading alone for this feature! Think Personal vDisk’s are back, but better and supported! If you haven’t heard about this one, stop what you’re doing now and read up on Daniel Lazar’s post. https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2019/12/18/user-personalization-layers-for-citrix-virtual-apps-and-desktops/
	Office 365 User Layers	Similar to FSLogix’s approach, but allows a user to store their O365 related data in a “roaming” VHD. https://www.jgspiers.com/app-layering-office-365-user-layers/
	Microsoft Teams Optimizations	Numerous advancements in AV codecs and general settings have created a much better experience for Teams. If your organization relies on Teams for daily operations, you’ll want to see these enhancements.
Client Side	Varying DPI Settings for Multi-Monitors	Ever noticed when you extend to multiple monitor with a VDI or Published Desktop, odd things seem to happen. If you’ve got two different sized monitors this feature is now available in the new LTSR.
	Copy-Paste from Client-Side to VDA Session	Miss that Copy-Paste function from your desktop to RDP sessions? Great news! Citrix now lets you do it with their App and Desktop sessions. Security folks take note, as this could pose a possible security risk.
	Battery Status on VDI	Ever been working on a VDI only to have your laptop or mobile thin-client’s battery die on you? Worry no more! Citrix now relays a Battery Status Indicator to your VDIs system tray.
Security	Windows LSA Protection	Once you realize how easy it is to extract cached Windows password from memory via Mimikatz, you’ll be glad Microsoft finally got on this longtime threat. https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Mitigations+against+Mimikatz+Style+Attacks/24612/
	Session Watermarking	Worried about data loss? Session watermarking will provide you with the source of the leak by stamping a watermark on any screen captures.
	SSL encrypted Print Jobs b/n VDA & CUPS	It’s always good to know that communication channels are encrypted. This one just so happens to focus on print jobs relayed to the Citrix Universal Print Server.
Director	Application Analytics Dashboard	Provides detailed insights into Applications faults, errors, and real-time probing status. https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/director/troubleshoot-deployments/applications.html#application-analytics

Whew! Now with all that covered, you’re likely thinking, so “what’s my upgrade path?” The good news is you can upgrade from the 7.6 LTSR or 7.15 LTSR assuming you’re on the current CU (CU8 and CU5, respectively). If you’re on the CR track, you’ll need to be at a minimum of 7.16.

Should you need assistance upgrading your environmet, feel free to contact us here at IT Benchmarq.

https://www.citrix.com/content/dam/citrix/en_us/documents/data-sheet/citrix-virtual-apps-and-desktops-current-release.pdf

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 1912 LTSR Highlights Read More »