The newish Connector for XenApp/Config Manager is great. I like the automation of installing applications out of hours, although I haven’t used the publishing aspect of it yet, just the deployment tool.
http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/subfeature.asp?contentID=2301676
At a high level, the Connector is the integration point for XenApp 6 and SCCM 2007 R2. With the Connector you can advertise applications to XenApp and let the Connector handle draining the server, notifying the users of impending installs and logging them off. Once the application is installed, the Connector can publish the applications and also push users back on to the server.
The Connector uses the Citrix Power and Capacity Manager to handle the draining of servers,which is done by changing the logon preference from 1st Choice to whatever the lowest choice is.
Installation is pretty straight forward, but there are some tweaks you can make to the Connector to get it working just the way you want.
With the XenApp Connector, application advertisements run a task sequence
When an advertisement is run the following actions happen:
1. Citrix Power and Capacity Management changes the connection preference for servers targeted in the Collection and that haven’t processed the advertisement to drain user connections.
2. Then the task sequence will run on the targeted server, if there are user sessions then the advert will fail. The Advertisement Wait timeout starts counting from the first time the server processes any mandatory assignment
3. If a previous mandatory assignment has failed, and there are still user sessions, and the Advertisement Wait period has passed, then the following will happen:
i. Users will be warned of impending logoff, and asked to save their work
ii. Users will be logged off after the time set expires
iii. Server logons will be disabled
iv. The application will install
v. Logons will be enabled on the server
vi. Logon preference will be set back to normal
Change Advertisement wait times
When installing the Connector console extension, the default settings for the Advert Wait time is three days, and it is not possible to set it to less than one day but more than 0 through the GUI. To do this, the following file must be changed on any machines the console extension is installed on.
Browse to
C:\Program Files\Citrix\XenApp Connector for ConfigMgr 2007\Edit the XASCCM.config file in notepad
The file should look like this:
<XASCCMConfig version="1.00">
<XADistributionPackage>
<ForceDateInterval>0.00:10:00</ForceDateInterval>
<ForceOutWarningNotification>
<LastMinuteInterval>00:05:00</LastMinuteInterval>
<MessageTitle>Upcoming Maintenance</MessageTitle>
<MessageBody>Please save your work and logoff, server will be in maintenance mode in 5 minutes.</MessageBody>
</ForceOutWarningNotification>
</XADistributionPackage></XASCCMConfig>
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