Troubleshooting CITRIX Virtual Apps & Desktops Using PowerShell

I typically will have these installed on a “jump box” rather than using a delivery controller directly as that risks resource and stability issues (“oops, I rebooted the wrong machine” said no admin ever).

The easiest way to get the cmdlets you need is to just load everything although in a script I would recommend just adding the specific modules that you need (Get-Command will tell you what module a specified cmdlet resides in). In 1912 LTSR and above we run:

Import-Module -Name Citrix*

For earlier releases, where modules weren’t available, we run:

Add-PSSnapin -Name Citrix*

Note that if you are using Citrix Cloud, you need to use the Remote PowerShell SDK rather than Studio or the MSIs from the CVAD ISO.

One other thing to bear in mind if you’re not running this on a delivery controller, which I don’t recommend, is that you will need to pass -AdminAddress to the CVAD cmdlets together with the name/address of a delivery controller.

If using Citrix Cloud, the argument to -AdminAddress needs to be an on-premises cloud connector. I’m sure I’ve read somewhere in Citrix documentation that you only need to specify it once, but I’ve had problems with that so specify it for every CVAD cmdlet called, albeit usually via a hash table using PowerShell’s “splatting” feature so if I need to change it, or add an extra common parameter, I can do it in one place.

Another potential “gotcha” is that by default the Citrix cmdlets only return 250 records so if working in a large environment, either in terms of users, VDAs, delivery groups, etc, you may need to use -MaxRecordCount (remember you can tab complete so type -max and hit tab or leave it as “-max” as it is not ambiguous – but not in scripts as it can make them difficult to understand when abbreviations are used) and enter a sufficiently large number, like shown below in figure 1.

Fig. 1: Using -MaxRecordCount you can return more than the default 250 records

In some of the examples I use a variable of type string called ‘ddc’ which I have set as one of the delivery controllers so that I don’t reveal its name in the screenshots.

Enable Maintenance Mode

Set-BrokerMachine -MachineName GUYRLEECH\GLXA19PVS41 -InMaintenanceMode $true

Message Users

You can even create custom Notification via Send-BrokerSessionMessage, as can be seen in figure 10.

Get-BrokerSession -MachineName GUYRLEECH\GLXA19PVS41 @commonCVADparameters | Send-BrokerSessionMessage -Title "Message from Guy Leech" -MessageStyle Critical -Text "Please logoff & back on as an urgent reboot is required"

Fig. 10: A custom popup notification created in PowerShell

Note that this will not prompt the users nor give them a grace period so ensure they are expecting their session to be logged off!

Logoff All Sessions for a Specific User

Get-BrokerSession -UserName guyrleech\billybob @commonCVADparameters | Stop-BrokerSession