Tag Archives: machine creation services

Applying group policy preferences based on Citrix delivery group or machine catalog membership

Leave a reply

We’ve slowly been transitioning our Citrix XenApp environment from static VMs to Machine Creation Services (MCS) based VMs. My goal was to have two master (fat) images and two machine catalogs. Because of policy and application segregation requirements those two catalogs translated into more than two delivery groups. With these delivery groups came the requirement to apply different group policies to different machines. One option would be to move the corresponding AD object into a different OU and apply policy that way. While that would work due to AD objects not being automatically moved/re-created after machine creation it still requires some administrative overhead. It was clear that dynamically adjusting certain policies based on delivery group membership would be ideal.

After a little digging I found where both the delivery group and machine catalog memberships were written to in the registry by the VDA. Below is an example of how we applied a user GPP item dynamically based on the delivery group of the machine.

Registry Key Path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\VirtualDesktopAgent\State
Delivery Group Value Name: DesktopGroupName
Machine Catalog Value Name: DesktopCatalogName

A NIC device is tied to a disallowed network

Leave a reply

I recently received a call from a former colleague where they were unable to update a machine catalog. They stated nothing had changed in vCenter, Citrix, or the master image. The error they were receiving was:

Error Id: XDDS:919D761E

Exception:     Citrix.Console.Models.Exceptions.ProvisioningTaskException Create Catalog failed with an unknown reason, see terminating error for more details.        at Citrix.Console.PowerShellSdk.ProvisioningSchemeService.BackgroundTasks.ProvisioningSchemeTask.CheckForTerminatingError(SdkProvisioningSchemeAction sdkProvisioningSchemeAction)        at Citrix.Console.PowerShellSdk.ProvisioningSchemeService.BackgroundTasks.ProvisioningSchemeTask.WaitForProvisioningSchemeActionCompletion(Guid taskId, Action`1 actionResultsObtained)        at Citrix.Console.PowerShellSdk.ProvisioningSchemeService.BackgroundTasks.ProvisioningSchemeCreationTask.StartProvisioningAction()        at Citrix.Console.PowerShellSdk.ProvisioningSchemeService.BackgroundTasks.ProvisioningSchemeCreationTask.RunTask()        at Citrix.Console.PowerShellSdk.BackgroundTaskService.BackgroundTask.Task.Run()


DesktopStudio_ErrorId : ProvisioningTaskError
     ErrorCategory : NotSpecified
     ErrorID : NetworkNotPermitted
     TaskErrorInformation : Terminated
     InternalErrorMessage : A NIC device is tied to a disallowed network.
     DesktopStudio_PowerShellHistory : Create Machine Catalog 'XenApp - WSRV12 - DAPPS - DR'
     11/25/2018 7:09:42 AM

The key error here is ‘A NIC device is tied to a disallowed network’. If you do a quick search you will find an article referencing this error: CTX139460. This points to a change in the vCenter networking config, but supposedly there weren’t any changes. Time to do some digging. I asked them to get networking info from both vCenter and CItrix using PowerShell.

To get the hypervisor networking I asked him to log in to one of the delivery controllers, launch PowerShell as administrator, and run the following:

Add-PSSnapin Citrix*
dir XDHyp:\HostingUnits | Select PSPath,HostingUnit*,*Network* | Format-List

The output of this was:

PSPath : Citrix.Host.Admin.V1\Citrix.Hypervisor::XDHyp:\HostingUnits\DR_Cluster-vm_dr
 HostingUnitName : DR_Cluster-vm_dr
 HostingUnitUid  : bddd641a-a55c-4f0e-bd62-9331502fd908
 NetworkId       : Network:network-641
 NetworkPath     : XDHyp:\Connections\PRDVCENTER01\DR.datacenter\DR Cluster.cluster\VM Network 201.network
...

The thing to take note of is the ‘NetworkId‘ for the DR hosting connection. This Id is the vCenter MoRef (Managed Object Reference) for the VM network. I then had him pull the VM networks from vCenter using PowerCLI.

To get the VM networks (with MoRef) from vCenter I asked him to launch VMware PowerCLI as administrator and run the following:

Connect-VIServer prdvcenter01.domain.com
Get-View -ViewType Network | Select Name,MoRef

The output of this was:

Name                                                        MoRef
 ----                                                        -----
 VM Network 201                                              Network-network-4790

...

The MoRef was network-641 in MCS, but network-4790 in vCenter even though the VM network names were the same. From this it was clear there was a networking change performed on the vCenter side at some point. After stating this, it was revealed that port groups were deleted and recreated (which generated new MoRef ids) in this DR cluster. At this point we have to reconfigure the hosting connection networking with the new MoRef and this cannot be done in Citrix Studio. To do this we have to reconfigure the ‘NetworkPath‘ in the hosting connection, but use the same ‘NetworkPath‘ since the network name did not change. Running this will force the network MoRef to be queried and updated in the MCS hosting connection.

To reset (or change if needed) the ‘NetworkPath‘ in the hosting connection you take the ‘PSPath‘ from the first command and copy everything starting with ‘XDHyp‘. I took that path and provided them with this command to run:

Set-Item –Path ‘XDHyp:\HostingUnits\DR_Cluster-vm_dr’ –NetworkPath ‘XDHyp:\Connections\PRDVCENTER01\DR.datacenter\DR Cluster.cluster\VM Network 201.network’

Finally, I asked them to re-run the first ‘dir‘ command again to verify the network MoRef updated. After doing this they were able to successfully update the machine catalog.