If you’ve been following along so far you’ll have read my follow up coverage of my (and co-host, Jonathan Eyton-Williams) Geek Speak talk at Citrix Synergy in Barcelona, with Hands off my gold image – Automating Citrix XenApp/PVS Image Creation and Hands off my gold image – Microsoft Deployment Toolkit details. In this article I’ll cover the task sequence that deploys Windows Server, installs XenApp and captures the image into PVS.

App-V 5.0 is PowerShell driven, which means opportunity for automating and scripting tasks that might have to be completed manually or might have been a challenge to script previously.

You’ll then have tackled with the product matrix that comes as a PDF instead of something more reasonable like, say, a spread sheet. There’s probably a good reason for this document to be a PDF, but it’s not the best format for reading this type of information.

App-V 5.0 is PowerShell driven, which means opportunity for automating and scripting tasks that might have to be completed manually or might have been a challenge to script previously.

After the corresponding Geek Speak talk at Citrix Synergy in Barcelona, I posted an article on automating a XenApp deployment and capture into Provisioning Services via the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT): Hands off my gold image – Automating Citrix XenApp/PVS Image Creation.

App-V 5.0 is PowerShell driven, which means opportunity for automating and scripting tasks that might have to be completed manually or might have been a challenge to script previously.

App-V 5.0 is PowerShell driven, which means opportunity for automating and scripting tasks that might have to be completed manually or might have been a challenge to script previously.

Citrix Provisioning Services is a great solution for the rapid deployment of Windows workloads from a master image. However, rapid deployment is not a replacement for a consistent, repeatable method of creating that master image.

Adobe Reader XI is now available and along with this release comes some interesting tools for deployment:

Note: this article covers a product that is in beta at the time of writing; therefore the specifics of the approach outlined in this article may be subject to change. This is not a recommendation to use this approach in production; rather it’s an exercise in understanding what’s possible with a new data synchronisation product.