How to Discover Citrix VDA Servers

[sasikumar_r]

Hi All,

We  have created discovery and Inventory rule for XenDesktop Inventory, it is able to discover the VDI templates.  However we are not able to discover\inventorise the Citrix VDA servers.

Is there any procedure for discover\inventorise the Citrix VDA servers. Not able to find much information on the community\documents that are related to VDA servers.

Thank you

Sasikumar Raja

[ChrisG]

I don't know what a Citrix VDA server is sorry, so am not sure I have much to offer except ask a further question: what operating system runs on these servers?

If the operating system is something that is supported by whatever agent technology you are using for your inventory source, then consider just using that agent. If the operating system is something more obscure that isn't supported by the agent technology you are using, then let us know what the OS is and maybe somebody can come up with another idea.

[sasikumar_r]

Hi  ,

Thank you for your reply. 

Citrix VDA Servers- they are just Citrix PVS worker servers, Windows Server operating system is running on them.

Little background - We have a Master Image Server which has got Flexnet Agent on it. PVS Servers gets the Image daily from the Master Image server. 

On checking the PVS worker servers, they are getting their policy from beacon. ndi file also got generated and transferred to Application server. However they are not appearing on the All Inventory.

When i check the inventory import log file i found below mentioned line,

"Prevented 2 non-persistent VDI devices from being created"

So my questions are,

1. Non-persistent VDI's cant be seen in All Inventory? 
2. By any chance do they appear as a VDI Devices on the Virtual Desktop Templates tab?

* Sorry for asking basic questions, but this topic is something new for me.

Thank you in Advance.

Sasi

[DanRussell]

Non-persistent VDI is created from a single “golden image” that just gets cloned or replicated according to user demand. VMware calls these cloned instances “linked clones”.  They are very easy to spin up, for example, on virtual machines. https://docsbay.net/persistent-vs-non-persistent-vdi

[bradleywong]

Hi Sasi, You are correct in that non-persistent VDI devices are not visible in the All Inventory grid (or FNMS in general). What should happen is that the VDI Templates can be viewed via the Virtual Desktop Templates page that will list all VDI Templates in your environment and all users that have access to the VDI Template via XenDesktop. If you're not seeing any data in there yet, have you performed a XenDesktop inventory yet? You should see data in the Virtual Desktop Templates page once the required XenDesktop inventory has been collected.

[sasikumar_r]

Hi @bradleywong ,

Thank you so much for the clarification. We are able to see the VDI Templates(not all 😞 ) on the All Virtual Desktop templates Page now.

I believe all Virtual Desktop templates page shows users who are having access to the VDI templates and not about the users who accessed the VDI template. Please correct me if i am wrong.

Xendesktop connection has created one ndi file and one vdi file, VDI file has got VDI group names and SID's.
is SID's on the VDI file belongs to the SID of the Active directory groups?i am assuming users on AD group have access to VDI group,hence the SID of that AD group is present in the VDI file. correct me if my assumption is wrong here.

Reason being i am asking for these questions are, out of 2 vdi groups, only one VDI group templates and its users are showing on the UI. 2nd VDI group templates and users are not appearing. If the SID's showing on the vdi file belongs to the AD group, then i suspect the issue could be because of one of the AD group has not imported. may be because of which 2nd VDI group and its users are not appearing.

Thank you all for your Clarifications on this topic.

Regards,
Sasi

[bradleywong · Accepted solution]

Hi @sasikumar_r ,

---

is SID's on the VDI file belongs to the SID of the Active directory groups?i am assuming users on AD group have access to VDI group,hence the SID of that AD group is present in the VDI file.

---

You are correct, the SID you find in the object element inside the vdiGroup represents the users in an AD group that has access a XenDesktop group.

For example

  <vdiGroup name="Sales group">
    <object Sid="S-1-5-21-3979096840-3638017588-2354792377-500" />
    <object Sid="S-1-5-21-3979096840-3638017588-2354792377-46432" />
  </vdiGroup>

Represents two AD groups with the SID S-1-5-21-3979096840-3638017588-2354792377-500 and S-1-5-21-3979096840-3638017588-2354792377-46432 with access to the VDI Templates associated with the XenDesktop group Sales group.

Note: The AD access is recursive, so if the AD group has child AD groups with users in them, they will be considered to have access as well.

If you are not seeing any information for one of the VDI Templates, it would suggest that perhaps you are missing the AD data for one of the AD SIDs. I think you are on the right track with your diagnosis. Check you have the AD data imported all the required AD domains.

---

[sasikumar_r]

Hi @bradleywong ,

SID which was showing on our vdi file was no longer exist because of which we faced the issue. we have added new ad group for that particular delivery group. After that it started picking the correct SID and now all the templates are showing up in the VD Templates page.

Thank you all for your information.

Sasi

[James62]

During session brokering the VDA is responsible for establishing and managing the connection between the virtual or physical RDSH / VDI machine and the user’s end point device. During session initialization (after a user logs in) it also checks if a valid Citrix license is available and it will apply whatever policies myloweslife.