Microsoft SCVMM, Citrix PVS and Powershell: Some quick tips

5 min read

Kees Baggerman·Senior Technical Director at Nutanix – Former Citrix CTP – NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor – 15+ years in EUC

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Another week, another reference architecture in the making… This time I’m working on a new reference architecture for Hyper-V 2016, SCVMM 2016 and XenDesktop 7.13. Obviously PVS 7.13 is in the mix too so I’ve been building out the environment but needed some PowerShell one-liners and easy scripts to get some work done and figured I could put them in a short blog for my own reference.

Using the usual setup within our labs required installing the SCVMM console on our DDC(s) so that’s where I started. Luckily the console installation comes with the PoSH cmdlets by itself, the console even loads the cmdlets via this shortcut: 

Setting up PVS PowerShell is a little bit more complicated as it requires a DLL to be registered:

Import-Module “path\Citrix.PVS.SnapIn.dll”

A very useful document when working with the PVS PowerShell cmdlets is the Citrix Provisioning Services 7.13 PowerShell with Objects Programmer’s Guide.

My typical PVS workflow looks as following: 

After all the installations, I wanted to start deploying a Windows 10 based machine catalog using Citrix PVS. Because I used the base image for my MCS-based testing too I knew the image was ok and could be used in the PVS scenario too.

I forgot to set the VM network interface to Legacy NIC so PXE boot didn’t work the first time, after changing the synthetic network interface to a legacy network interface the PXE boot did its job and I was able to create a VHDX on my PVS server to be used as vDisk. 

Running the XenDesktop Streaming Wizard from the PVS console gave me an unexpected result, it said it failed on 40 devices while other went without issues. Looking in SCVMM I only had a few desktops including ones with duplicate names.

After fixing that and getting ready for the testing I was wondering if I could do the same with PVS/SCVMM PowerShell one-liners which worked out ok although SCVMM network is different than what I’m used to which resulted in a bunch of VMs configured with no VM network and the identical mac addresses.

Here are a couple of my one-liners that helped during testing:

Starting all VMs that don’t start with “NTNX” as our CVM (Controller VMs) names typically start with “NTNX-“:

# Starting VMs

$VirtMs = Get-VM | where {$_.Name -notlike "NTNX*"}
foreach($VirtVM in $VirtMs) {
       Start-VM -VM $VirtVM
}

Stopping all VMs with a certain name that are running:

Import-Module VirtualMachineManager

# Stopping VMs
 
$VirtMs = Get-VM | where {($_.Name -like "GEN1PVS*") -and ($_.Status -eq "Running")}
foreach($VirtVM in $VirtMs) {
       Stop-VM -VM $VirtVM
}

Check which VMs are configured for which network (again excluding the CVMs):

# Check which VM networks are being used

Get-VM | Get-SCVirtualNetworkAdapter | where {$_.Name -notlike "NTNX*"} | Ft Name, VMNetwork

Check which VMs don’t have a VM network configured:

# Check which VMs don't have a VM network configured

Get-VM | Get-SCVirtualNetworkAdapter | where {($_.Name -notlike "NTNX*" -and $_.VMNetwork -like "")} | Ft Name, VMNetwork 

Count the number of VMs that don’t have a VM network configured:

# Check which VMs don't have a VM network configured

Get-VM | Get-SCVirtualNetworkAdapter | where {($_.Name -notlike "NTNX*" -and $_.VMNetwork -like "")} | Ft Name, VMNetwork | measure

Change the VM network configuration for a VM (excluding the CVMs):

# Changing Network on the VM

$VirtMs = Get-VM | Get-SCVirtualNetworkAdapter | where {($_.Name -notlike "NTNX*" -and $_.VMNetwork -like "")}

foreach($VirtVM in $VirtMs) {
       $VM = Get-SCVirtualMachine -Name $VirtVM
       $Adapter = Get-SCVirtualNetworkAdapter -VM $VM
       Set-SCVirtualNetworkAdapter -VirtualNetworkAdapter $Adapter -LogicalNetwork "LN_RTP_164" -VLanEnabled $true -VLanID 164 -VirtualNetwork "ExternalSwitch" -IPv4AddressType Dynamic -IPv6AddressType Dynamic -NoPortClassification -RunAsynchronously
}

Listing VMs with a certain MAC address as I scripted VM creation but didn’t set the mac address being unique (lesson learned here!):

# Get VMs with a certain mac address

Get-SCVirtualMachine | Select -ExpandProperty VirtualNetworkAdapters | Where { $_.MACAddress -eq "00:1D:D8:B7:1C:61" } | Ft Name

Changing the mac addresses of VMs with a duplicate Mac address:

$VMS = Get-SCVirtualMachine | Select -ExpandProperty VirtualNetworkAdapters | Where { $_.MACAddress -eq "00:1D:D8:B7:1C:61" }
foreach ($VM in $VMS) { 
        Get-SCVirtualMachine -Name $VM | Stop-SCVirtualMachine -Shutdown 
        $VirtualNetworkAdapter = Get-SCVirtualNetworkAdapter -VMMServer localhost -VM "$VM" 
        Set-SCVirtualNetworkAdapter -VirtualNetworkAdapter $VirtualNetworkAdapter -MACAddress "00:00:00:00:00:00" -MACAddressType Static 
        Start-SCVirtualMachine -VM $VM.Name
}

Getting the mac addresses from VMs and placing them in an existing PVS device collection:

# Importing the proper modules
Import-Module -Name VirtualMachineManager
Import-Module "C:\Program Files\Citrix\Provisioning Services Console\Citrix.PVS.SnapIn.dll" 
Add-PSSnapin Citrix.PVS.SnapIn

# Connecting to PVS
Set-PvsConnection -Name Citrix-PVS01

# Parameters which have to be edited to add devices to the PVS Device Collection
$collection= "GEN1"
$site= "SITE"

$VMs = Get-VM -VMMServer "SCVMM2016" | Sort-Object Name
ForEach ($VM in $VMs) {
        $vNICs = $VM | select -ExpandProperty VirtualNetworkAdapters

        # specifying MAC Address and delimiter
        $MacAddress = $vNics.macAddress
        $Delimiter = ":" 

        # Rewriting the mac address from SCVMM to PVS
        $MacAddress = $MacAddress -replace "$Delimiter","" 
        $MacAddress = $MacAddress.insert(2,"-") 
        $MacAddress = $MacAddress.insert(5,"-") 
        $MacAddress = $MacAddress.insert(8,"-") 
        $MacAddress = $MacAddress.insert(11,"-") 
        $MacAddress = $MacAddress.insert(14,"-") 

        # Adding the new PVS devices to the given collection
        New-PvsDevice -deviceName $($vm.Name) -collectionName $Collection -siteName $Site -deviceMac $($macAddress)
}

Moving a specific range of VMs to a specific host:

# Importing the SCVMM Module
Import-Module -Name VirtualMachineManager

# Grabbing all VMs with a specific name and selecting a range of those VMs
$VMs = Get-SCVirtualMachine | where {$_.Name -like "GEN1PVS-*"} 
$VMs = 451..600 | foreach { "GEN1PVS-$_" }

# migrating those VMs to a specific host
foreach ($VM in $VMS) { 
Move-SCVirtualMachine $VM -VMHost RTP-TEST-53-D -RunAsynchronously
}

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Kees Baggerman

Kees Baggerman is Senior Technical Director — Performance & Solutions Engineering R&D at Nutanix, where he leads a global team responsible for defining how enterprise applications are delivered on the Nutanix platform. A former Citrix Technology Professional and NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor, he has spent 15+ years driving EUC strategy and technical direction across architecture, product, and customer success. He has been writing here since 2011 — sharing what he learns at the intersection of platform engineering and enterprise IT.

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Kees Baggerman

Senior Technical Director at Nutanix - Former Citrix CTP - NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor - 15+ years in EUC

Kees Baggerman is Senior Technical Director — Performance & Solutions Engineering R&D at Nutanix, where he leads a global team responsible for defining how enterprise applications are delivered on the Nutanix platform. A former Citrix Technology Professional and NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor, he has spent 15+ years driving EUC strategy and technical direction across architecture, product, and customer success. He has been writing here since 2011 — sharing what he learns at the intersection of platform engineering and enterprise IT.

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