When installing the Citrix Delivery Services Console with an unattended install (using CtxInstall.exe) the Citrix Password Manager gets automatically installed as well.

You can see this in the Console where you will get an additional node called “Single Sign On”.

I couldn’t find any information on how to make CtxInstall exclude it so I was left with 2 options:

1. Unregistering the .net assembly for the Single Sign On Node.
2. Unattended Uninstall of the Password Manager.

I went for option 2 since 1 might mean it comes back after an update, the commandline is:

msiexec /x {25F2D5CD-B428-4869-B32B-031A9D5CE0C1} /Qb

If it’s somehow possible to prevent installing it in the frist place, please let me know!

After having successfully tested the Unattended install jobs for my Citrix XenApp 5 environment I went on to testing the install.

The install itsself and the msi logs that my jobs created all indicated that the install was successfull.

So I went on and launched the install jop for the Delivery Services Console. This job succeeded nicely but when I opened the console the XenApp node was missing:

The resolution is described in CTX125827 but Resolution 2 is a lot of manual labour 🙁

So what do we do? We script it! (more…)

Today I was tested my unattended Citrix installation (XenApp 5 on Windows 2003) and I noticed that the install was taking longer than expected.

This was because of a popup:

I am not sure if this popup is shown because I ran MsiExec with /Qb- (I usually do that when testing) but if the Popup is not shown it means that at least the installation of this driver (probably Citrix Universal Print driver) fails.

So this means I needed to script turning off Driver Signature Warnings. A quick search led me to kb article kb298503 which is titled “Driver signing registry values cannot be modified directly in Windows“. As you may guess that title drew my attention. (more…)

I was creating an unattended Exchange 2007 install job today and while testing it, it failed with the following error:

Active Directory operation failed on nl-dc001.MYDOMAIN.LAN. The object ‘CN=Default Global Address List,CN=All Global Address Lists,CN=Address Lists Container,CN=My Organisation,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=MYDOMAIN,DC=LOCAL’ already exists

I opened the Exchange System Manager and expanded the Tree (Recipient | All Address Lists | All Global Address Lists) and I found 2 Global Address Lists but not the Default Global Address List:

(more…)

VMware has released an updated Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere document for 4.1.

The document provides tips that help administrators maximize the performance of VMware vSphere 4.1.

Chapter 1 – “Hardware for Use with VMware vSphere,” provides guidance on selecting hardware for use with vSphere.

Chapter 2 – “ESX and Virtual Machines,” provides guidance regarding VMware ESX™ software and the virtual machines that run in it.

Chapter 3 – “Guest Operating Systems,” provides guidance regarding the guest operating systems running in vSphere virtual machines.

Chapter 4 – “Virtual Infrastructure Management,” provides guidance regarding resource management best practices.

Links: Technical Resource Center (direct link to the Document).

Earlier versions:

Performance Best Practices for VMWare vSphere 4.0

Performance Tuning Best Practices for ESX Server 3

After deploying Virtual Machines from a template and adding disks the next Task was to create and format the partitions.

In a VMWare environment it is very important to assure that the partitions are aligned. VMWare has a nice document that explains the details called Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.0.

Basically the recommendation is to align partition on a 64 KB boundary, not only for VMWare itsself but also for the guests.

Of course we could do this manually but I wanted to run this task of from my Deployment Server to automate the following:

• Create aligned partitions on all extra disks of the maximum size
• Format, assign drive letter and assign a label
• A safeguard to prevent overwriting existing Data

Well enough talk let’s go the scripts! They are written as bat files that can be executed directly in Altiris as an embedded script but of course you don’t need Altiris to use them. (more…)

I have had to activate Altiris Licenses a lot in the past and this is a task that could be done in a few minutes however in the case of using the HP branded version (HP Insight Server control, previously named HP Rapid Deployment Pack) it’s not.

This is because HP delivers a seperate license for each server which you have to load manually. An annoying thing if you have a lot of them.

I was already looking if I could automate this with some kind of script since I know from the past that the Product Licensing Utility embeds the license into the Express.exe file.

(more…)

As I wrote earlier today I am provisioning Virtual Machines with PowerCLI. I don’t know if this is intentional behaviour but after Deploying (Cloning) a Virtual Machine from a template the Network Adapter is not automatically connected at power on.

This made the Join Domain operation which is party of the Customization Specification to fail. I noticed this in the log file which can be found in %WINDIR%\Temp\vmware-imc\guestcust.log:

Joining domain mydomain using account mydomain\myaccount and password ‘*****’
The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted.

So I wrote a small fix script in PowerCLI:

And of course I changed the Provisioning script to do this as well 😀

I am currently provisioning a lot of Virtual Machines in VMWare vSphere 4.1. Because I had already sized the Virtual Machines I am doing this from PowerCLI based on my Excel Sheet.

I will probably blog later about the details of how I am doing this in PowerCLI (would you be interested in that?) but after successfully deploying some Windows 2008 VM’s I got this error in PowerShell:

New-VM : 3-11-2010 10:00:50 New-VM The operation for the entity VirtualMachine-vm-150 failed with the following message: “Cannot complete customization.”

At C:\Users\Administrator\Documents\NewVm.ps1:64 char:14

+ $VM = New-VM <<<< -Name $Name -VMHost $VMHost -Template $Template -OSCustomizationSpec $Spec -DiskStorageFormat $DiskFormat -Datastore $LargestDataStore

+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [New-VM], CustomizationFault

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : Client20_TaskServiceImpl_CheckServerSideTaskUpdates_OperationFailed,VMware.VimAutomation.ViCore.Cmdlets.Commands.NewVM

In the vCenter console the following error was logged:

Cannot deploy template: Cannot complete customization.

(more…)