Publish App-V applications to XenApp servers remotely using PowerShell

Question

Hi
We have a XenApp/App-V 5 environment in which our applications are published globally from a content share by way of a startup PowerShell script. The XenApp servers are scheduled to reboot every other night to keep the PVS image clean and all is working
well.
Apart from when we have a scenario where we need to rush out an application update etc at short notice. Because half the servers reboot one night then the other half the next, ordinarily we have to wait two days after placing an updated app in the content
share to ensure it's published on all the production servers.
To try and avoid forcibly restarting servers out of sequence, or manually publishing apps on lots of servers, I was hoping to create a PowerShell script to allow us to publish an application remotely when needed and came up with this:
$s = New-PSSession -ComputerName (Get-Content "Servers.txt")
Invoke-Command -Session $s -ScriptBlock {
    Add-AppvClientPackage "\\appvcontent\Apps\Application.appv" | Publish-AppvClientPackage -global
$s | Remove-PSSession
I've enabled Windows Remote Management on the servers and while I can run other PowerShell commands in the scriptblock fine, when I enter the App-V publishing command I get:
Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [Add-AppvClientPackage], UnauthorizedAccessException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : System.UnauthorizedAccessException,Microsoft.AppV.AppvClientPowerShell.AddAppvPackage
    + PSComputerName        : <computername>
Has anyone come across a similar scenario or can anybody suggest why I'm getting the access denied error? I'm running the script with an account that has admin permissions on the target server. I've tried moving the appv package locally
on the target server but still get the same error.
Thanks

Answer 1

Add-AppvClientPackage requires admin privileges on the machine, so you should verify that the remote command is really executed with the right permissions. Does the remote call work in general (like try to create a file in the (remote) user profile)
Falko
Twitter
@kirk_tn   |   Blog
kirxblog   |   Web
kirx.org   |   Fireside
appvbook.com
Hi Falko
The remote call definitely works correctly with full admin privileges. I've just removed the AppV publish command and replaced it with a command to create a txt file in the local administrator profile on the target server and it works perfectly. It's just
the AppV publish command that doesn't work.
I'm looking in Event Viewer to see if I can find any further detail but can't spot anything.
Thanks