Citrix News! I have join the Citrix Technology Professional ranks!
I was notified last week, but I wanted to wait till my profile was up on the site. For those of you wondering what in the heck that is… it is basically Citrix version of the MVP program. It will allow me to interact more directly with Citrix. I am sure this will be a mutually beneficial relationship. They have made a huge stake in Powershell and I want to do my best to help direct or guide their adoption.
You can read more about the program Here.
In other news and more important to you as a reader 
Citrix is working on a set of Powershell cmdlets for XenApp 5 (most of them should work in XenApp 4.5 if you have HR3 installed.) We have been in closed beta, but I have got to tell you… this is good stuff. They did a stellar job and have been very open to feedback. These cmdlets should make my scripts obsolete and I am very much looking forward to it. I will be releasing details and demo’s as soon as I am allowed.
OH! Did I mention I am doing a Geek Speak Session at Synergy? Well I am!
At this point I just know I am on Wednesday at some time, but I will be there all week if you around. Just email!
Lets show them we Powershell people are serious! Vote for my session here: VOTE!
Still lot to improve
Get-FarmConfiguration | Set-FarmConfiguration
And congrats to CTP
That example (Get-FarmConfiguration | Set-FarmConfiguration) works locally, but is not very useful.
I think the question here is why the XenApp commands do not support remote management (Get-FarmConfiguration A | Set-FarmConfiguration B).
And the answer is that PowerShell 2.0 remoting will allow multi-farm management.
For example, say you want to copy all the farm settings from farmA (connecting thru farmAServer) to farmB (connecting thru farmBServer):
>$farmA = Invoke-Command -ComputerName FarmAServer -ScriptBlock { Get-FarmConfiguration }
>Invoke-Command -ComputerName FarmBServer -ScriptBlock { $farmA | Set-FarmConfiguration }
This might not be as nice, but PowerShell 2.0 remoting will work for ALL cmdlets, not just XenApp, and that should be the way to go
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Felipe, why not just have a computername parameter on the cmdlets that does the remoting for you?
Like this
Get-FarmConfiguration -comp FarmAZDC | Set-FarmConfiguration -comp FarmBZDC
That could be implemented as a script cmdlet in PowerShell 2.0. That is a good idea, since the administrator would expect to be able to do remoting out-of-the-box.
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However, the original cmdlet should not do the remoting (or sorting, or converting data, etc, etc). Leave that to the experts (Microsoft)
I am not suggesting you rewrite the remoting, but simply abstract it from the user. You can still use the v2 remoting.
Sure, that is why I suggested using script cmdlets for that.
My point was that the cmdlet implementation should not have to know whether remoting is being used or not.
So this enhancement will be done without changing the cmdlet.
Another idea is to use the feature in remoting where you can “import” cmdlets from a remote computer, and proxies are created locally. This way you can use them without having to use Invoke-Command. But then this would only work for 1 farm. If we can control the generated proxy cmdlet names, we could imply the remote server name.
Congrats, Brandon!
Wow Brandon, AD expert, Powershell expert,….and now Citrix on top of those two.
Where do you find the time?
Impressive honor, well done!!
Thanks Mike, although I believe many would argue with you on the “AD” expert thing