Tag Archives: Virtual Desktop

Backup Citrix VD templates with OVF Tool utility & PowerCLI

This script will automate the process of backing up your Citrix VD templates. As a matter of fact, you can use it for backing up any VM in your vCenter server.

The script leverages the OVF Tool utility. This tool can be downloaded from myvmware.com and should be installed on the server you’re scheduling the script on. For more info: www.vmware.com/support/developer/ovf

The script will run the OVF Tool utility for each Template or VM defined in the CSV file. It will then zip the log files generated by the OVF Tool utility and email them to the email addresses defined in the variables section.

NOTE – Each time the script runs the OVF data is overwritten. Export job logs for previous runs are archived in the Log-Archive folder. The script also creates a console log file in the root of the export folder.

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Migrate a VMware View linked-clone replica to another ESXi host

The other day I was patching the hosts in a cluster which currently hosts our Virtual Desktop environment.  I’ve put the first host in the cluster into the maintenance mode and migrated all the Virtual Desktops to the other host in the cluster.  Unfortunately I also migrated the VMware View Linked-Clone replica residing on that host.  I forgot to un-tick the prompt tick box about “Powered off VMs” which comes up after you initiate maintenance mode for the host.  Luckily this didn’t create a major issue as VMware View doesn’t care about which host the replica resides on.  It only cares about the datastore the replica and the linked clones are stored on (so it’s best to turn off SDRS for VDI clusters*). But nevertheless, I wanted to migrate replica back to its original host.  However, when I tried to do so, I’ve realised the migrate option on the replica was greyed out.

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