I’m working more and more often in large Citrix Cloud environments, and I’ve often had a hard time easily finding the right master in the list shown by the “Change master image” wizard.
In this image, which is obviously just an example, you can see a list that includes VMs that have nothing to do with the Citrix world, and it would be handy to be able to exclude them from the list.
As you’ve surely noticed, the VMs created with MCS aren’t shown in the list either. Why is that?
Simple: Citrix adds a tag to the VMs created with MCS, which makes the catalog update wizard leave those machines out of the list. So we can use the same mechanism to exclude from the list the machines we will certainly never need to use as a master image (workaround?).
To add the tag to the VM, log in to vCenter, select the machine you want to exclude from the list and edit the “Custom Attributes” section.
By default, VMs don’t have the “Value” field filled in for the “XdConfig” attribute, while VMs created with MCS do. So all you need to do is fill in the “Value” field with “XdProvisioned=true” and save.
Obviously, if there are many VMs to exclude, this could still be a time-consuming method…but I think I can come up with a faster way using PowerShell…stay tuned.
This way we can exclude all the VMs we’re not interested in, leaving only the master images visible. It’s not the “cleanest” solution (I would have preferred to be able to define a tag to include and assign that tag only to the masters, instead of having to work by exclusion), but it works.
Please note that the exclusion of the VMs may not be picked up by the Cloud right away…I expect some kind of cache of the information is kept, so it doesn’t have to keep querying the hypervisor live, but after a few minutes you’ll see the result.