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Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Where is the “Machines to be powered on” option in Citrix XenDesktop 5.5’s “Edit Desktop Group” menu?

I’ve been asked a few times by a few ex-colleagues why they can’t seem to find the option for the amount of Machines to be powered on in Citrix XenDesktop 5.5’s Edit Desktop Group menu when configuring their Desktop Groups that machine their Pooled Static assigned pools:

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The answer is actually quite simple:

“This option is not available for pools that are statically assigned.”

This option only exists for randomly assigned desktop pools where you can define the number of machines or the percentage of machines:

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It takes a bit of time to get the head wrapped around it but the reason why this option does not exist for statically assigned pools is because statically assigned pools are 1 to 1 or 1 (user) to x (desktops) mappings.  Each virtual desktop or desktops are assigned to a specific user.  There will be times that a user may have more than 1 but once a desktop gets assigned to a user, it stays mapped until you perform a refresh but updating the virtual desktop image.  This means that XenDesktop can’t possibly know which desktops to boot up because any user could be logging on after hours.

I’ll be writing another blog post soon to talk more about power management options for XenDesktop statically assigned pools and how to manage them.

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