While not very frequent, some of my ex-colleagues ask me would ask me about Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops from time to time and one of the most common question is how to determine the master image of a Machine Catalog in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops / DaaS because there still does not seem to be a way to find this information from the GUI. Those who are familiar with the Citrix portal will be aware of the Template Properties tab shown here:
… and while it displays what snapshot the master image virtual machine for this machine catalogue is currently using, it does not indicate the VM name. This appears to have been by-design since the Citrix XenDesktop 5.6 days as shown in one of my older posts here:
How do I find what master image I used for a desktop catalog in Citrix XenDesktop 5.6?
https://blog.terenceluk.com/2012/04/how-do-i-find-what-master-image-i-used.html
It was easy to load the PowerShell directly on a Delivery Controller back in the on-premise days but most of the environments I’ve worked in over the past few years has been in Citrix Cloud, which means you’ll need to install the Citrix SDK to remotely connect to Citrix cloud.
Given that I haven’t really written a post on this and I often struggle to remember, this serves as a short write up that I can refer to in the future.
The Virtual Apps and Desktops Remote PowerShell SDK can be downloaded here:
Virtual Apps and Desktops Remote PowerShell SDK
https://www.citrix.com/downloads/citrix-cloud/product-software/xenapp-and-xendesktop-service.html
Once installed, launce PowerShell and execute the following command to add the Citrix PowerShell snapins:
asnp citrix*.
Use the following cmdlet to authenticate against Citrix Cloud (a browser popup with a prompt similar to https://citrix.cloud.com will be displayed):
Get-XDAuthentication
After successfully authenticating, you can use the cmdlet Get-ProvScheme to list all of the Machine Catalogs for the tenant or narrow it down by using the ProvisioningSchemeName to reference the machine catalog you want the details for:
Get-ProvScheme -ProvisioningSchemeName “Machine catalog name”
The screen shot below is a sample output and the field we’re interested in is the MasterImageVM with the following output:
MasterImageVM: XDHyp:HostingUnitsCC NimbleCTX-CMComApp-CC.vmCTX-CMComApp-CC Post Vendor Upgrade
07-11-19.snapshotPost Vendor Upgrade 08-04-20.snapshotUpdated July 28
2021.snapshotCTX-CMComApp-CC_vm-3432_1.snapshotVendor Update July 4 2022.snapshot
The value ending with .vm represents the virtual machine name and in this example the VM is named:
CTX-CMComApp-CC
If there are multiple vCenters in the environment, the vCenter hosting the VM can be found via the GUI by navigating into the configured resource:
Hope this helps anyone looking for this information.
