non-Persistent VDI inventory

[dave767]

Please assist how we can collect the inventory from 'non-Persistent Vdi'? Does the normal 'Citrix integration' would help us get the required information or do we need some other configuration?

[mfranz]

Hi,

This is assuming you have FNMS on-prem.

While there are approaches to gather technical inventory from non-persistent VDIs, I am not sure you're going to be happy with the results.

I usually recommend to my customers to look for an "organizational" (in contrast to a "technical") solution. E.g.

• How's the access to these VDIs managed? > Perhaps AD or other directory groups?
• Is there a clear understanding/list of applications provided by these VDIs? > yes/no

If you have both, you could just shortcut the whole inventory thing and establish a business import to assign users to licenses based on AD group memberships. At least for some publishers, this would actually be more exact than inventory. That is, if you have to license the possibility of use instead of the actual use of an application.

This is also assuming all apps on VDIs are licensed per user, because user based access restrictions and device licensing does not go together very well. Only few customers have computer based access restrictions in place.

Best regards,

Markward

[dave767]

Thanks Mark for your response.

However please confirm, if we need to get the inventory  from  non-persistent VDIs automatically not through adapter. What process we should follow? 

[mfranz · Accepted solution]

As you originally mentioned, I am not exactly sure how the Citrix CenApp Adapter will help in this scenario.

Different SAM tools have different approaches. I believe SLM deploys their agent to the VDI image and scripts them to run just before the VDI instance is shut down. In theory, I can imagine doing something similar with the FNMS agent. However, I am not sure how FNMS will handle such data/how to effectively manage licenses with it.