Automated Configuration for Virtual Apps and Desktops

What's new 

Automated Configuration 3.0.107 has been updated to a new version with features including: 

• Backup and Import/Merge/Restore support added for MCS machine catalogs (applicable to Cloud 118 and above)
• Enhanced UserZonePreference component to also backup applications 
• ACT will now detect if Provisioning Schemes are missing from the machine catalog (MCS), if they are then the tool will skip the catalog and write a fixup
• Fixed resource pools not applying prefix/suffix values, causing the migration of hosting managed catalogs to fail when using site merging
• Fixed Host Connections in Admin Scopes not being written to the AdminScope.yml file
• Other minor bugfixes

Changelog from previous versions

Version 3.0.106: 

• Added support for exporting GPO Group Policies 
• Added support for RDS AutoScaling OnPrem
• Added new component for Backup/Restore, BackupSchedules pertaining to Backup/Restore feature in WebStudio
• Minor bug fixes

Version 3.0.100:

• Fixed export issues, including StoragePath not being included for certain Host Connections as well as missing associated Application Groups or Delivery Groups for Applications
• Fixed Backup-CvadAcToFile failing to backup information for several components with users in languages that aren't English 
• Other minor fixes

Version 3.0.96:

• Get-CvadAcVersion has been updated to check for a new release, if the current version is out of date it will report the changelog and provide a link to the latest version download page
• -ZipResults command for Backup-CvadAcToFile has been fixed, and also been removed from the Export-CvadAcToFile command
• Updated migration to support Delivery Groups that contain no catalogs
• Removed -ByDeliveryGroupName and -ByMachineName filtering for Export-CvadAcToFile
• Fixed Group Policies to treat the PolicySet feature toggle the same, this allows for backing up/restoring of Group Policies interchangeably with or without the PolicySet feature toggle enabled
• Fixed not being able to export Storefronts, and other minor export errors
• Enabled backing up Delivery Group feature, LoadBalanceType (none, vertical, horizontal)
• Various other bug fixes

Version 3.0.93:

• Various bug fixes
• Minor changes to HTML log file

Version 3.0.92:

• Added component support for Zones, this only applies when both the source and destination are On-Prem CVAD environments
• Added HTML log file, users can now see their fixups, logs, summary, and troubleshooting links all within the HTML log file after executing a command
• Other various bug fixes

Version 3.0.91: 

• Fixed issue with importing Admin Folders
• Other various bug fixes

Version 3.0.90:

• Enhanced Delivery Groups to have support for Autoscale Logoff Reminders and restricting Autoscale to tagged machines
• Enhanced components that support folders to check for number of subfolders, if there are more than 5 subfolders, the component will be skipped and a fixup will be reported
• Enhanced the removal of On-Prem Administrators to ignore the last Full Admin, this no longer produces an error
• Application Folders are no longer considered with Admin Folders and are now their own, separate component in the migration process
• Other various bug fixes

Version 3.0.89:

• Added support for exporting Admin Folders
• Fixed issues with Application Folder prefixing when using Site Merging
• When using the Remove-CvadAcFromSite command, ACT will now create a full backup of the components being removed. This is found in the Remove folder.
• Other various bug fixes

What is the Automated Configuration tool for Virtual Apps and Desktops?

This tool is designed to help automate the migration of Virtual Apps and Desktop configuration (such as policies, applications, machine catalogs, and others) from one or more On-Premises site(s) to the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop service (CVADs) hosted on Citrix Cloud. It can also be used to migrate information between different Cloud regions or tenants. The migration can be performed in stages by executing the tool multiple times, allowing administrators to easily achieve the desired configuration state.

Why use the Automated Configuration tool?

IT Administrators, particularly those dealing with large environments, find migration to be a very tedious process. And since it tends to be specific to their use cases, they often must write their own automation to accomplish this successfully. Citrix wants to ease this process by providing a tool that addresses customer use cases and automates the migration.

How is the Automated Configuration tool implemented?

Citrix has leveraged industry standard configuration as code mechanism to help automate the migration process. Essentially, with this tool, we discover and export one or more on-premises sites as a collection of configuration files and use custom commands to import configuration in stages into Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service. Admins can also run the tool multiple times, enabling them to achieve the desired configuration state easily.

Use cases supported

• On-prem to cloud migration. (On-prem versions supported - All LTSR version and last two CRs)
• Cloud site to cloud site migration