Using My Citrix XenApp 6.5 PowerShell Documentation Script with Remoting

I received an email from a reader wanting to know how to get my Citrix XenApp 6.5 Farm PowerShell documentation script to work remotely.  After I wrote my original script and article, Citrix updated the XenApp 6.5 PowerShell SDK to support Remoting and a Default Computer Name.  Even using the new –ComputerName parameter he was still unable to get my script to work.

What I did was install the Citrix XenApp 6.5 PowerShell SDK and Group Policy modules on my lab domain controller.  All my lab servers have the Windows Firewall enabled and Server Manager Remote Management enabled.

I found this information in the SDK help file on Remoting Cmdlets:

This section explains how to invoke the XenApp Commands remotely. In XenApp 6.5 the cmdlets can be remoted using 
the -ComputerName parameter.  In order to facilitate running existing scripts remotely without having to make 
significant changes, a default computer name can be set in the client machine. To do this a new set of cmdlets 
was introduced. When the default computer name is set, all the cmdlets will automatically remote to the server 
specified without having to explicitly use the -ComputerName parameter every time.

To set the default computer name:

Set-XADefaultComputerName server1

My lab XenApp 6.5 server is named XA65, so I entered

Set-XADefaultComputerName XA65 

on my domain controller.  When I ran my documentation script, I received:

Figure 1

I then ran Microsoft’s Sysinternals ProcMon to get a network trace and found that TCP Port 2513 needed to be opened (Figure 2).

Figure 2

My wife tells me I couldn’t find a 10 gallon (37.8541 Liter) jug of milk on the top shelf of the fridge!  What does this have to do with anything?  DOH! At the top of the help file I now see (Figure 3):

Figure 3

The help text says TCP Port 2513 must be opened on both computers but I found I only needed it opened on the XenApp server.  To me, that is one less port open on my network.

I created a Windows Firewall Rule on my XenApp server to open TCP Port 2513 between the domain controller and my XenApp server (Figure 4).  The “remoteip” will need to be the IP address of the computer used to run the script.

 netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="Citrix PoSH TCP Port 2513" dir=in action=allow description="Allow communication between XenApp and remote computer running PoSH scripts" enable=yes profile=any remoteip=192.168.1.100 protocol=tcp localport=2513  

Figure 4

The Windows Firewall GUI shows my new rule created and enabled (Figure 5).

Figure 5

Now my scripts runs (Figure 6).

Figure 6

Now you can use my XenApp 6.5 PowerShell Documentation Script with absolutely no modifications and have it work with remoting.  Thanks Citrix for making this so easy.