Ulrik Christensen

Archives for July 2017

Citrix Health Assistant is replacing XDPing

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For years we have been using XDPing for trouble shooting VDA registration in XenApp and XenDesktop. XDPing has now been replaced with Citrix Health Assistant.

Citrix Health Assistant is an application that you can download from citrix.com. It is very easy to use. It is a desktop application instead of command line tool.

All you need to do is launch Citrix Health Assistant and click “Run Check Now”. If you want to run the check on a different VDA, you can type in the FQDN of the server and the user credentials for that server and click “Run Check Now”.

Citrix Health Assistant
Citrix Health Assistant

The Citrix Health Assitant checks for all the things that are needed for the DDC to communicate with the VDA and back again.

If one of the things fail, you will be told what you need to change or configure in order to get it to work.

Citrix Health Assistant
Citrix Health Assistant

Many hours can be spent on troubleshooting on why your VDAs are not registering on your DDC. With this tool, it is a lot easier to figuring out why.

You can download the latest version of Citrix Health Assistant from the link below.

Download from citrix.com

Take control of Patch Tuesday with Citrix AppDNA

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Citrix AppDNAHow many time have you tried that applications break, when you roll out Microsoft updates. I bet you have lost count. I am not blaming Microsoft for rolling out bad code. There are a lot of reasons why your applications don’t work. With Citrix AppDNA, you can test all updates before your roll them out.

Citrix AppDNA allows you to import your own Windows image with your specific settings and applications.

  1. Create a new machine with all your settings and tweaks.
  2. Install the Import OS tool from Citrix AppDNA
  3. Import your machine OS into Citrix AppDNA
  4. Select which updates to analyse.

Once you are done, you can see which updates that might cause a problem. When you have found workarounds for these updates, you can install them on your machine. Import the OS again and you are ready for the next batch of updates.

Can I use Citrix AppDNA to analyse updates from other vendors?

Yes. You can also test updates from any other ISV. All you have to do is to import the update into Citrix AppDNA and then test it up against your image.

You can save a lot of time with Citrix AppDNA because you do not need to test updates by hand. If you take the easy path and just roll out all the updates without testing, you will get calls to your helpdesk. With Citrix AppDNA you can test your update automatically and then know which updates you need to hold back and find a workaround for.

Citrix AppDNA is available for customers with Citrix XenApp / XenDesktop Platinum Licenses and can be downloaded from citrix.com.