Publishing Citrix XenDesktop 5.6 VM Hosted Apps does not launch the application

I ran into an interesting problem last night while trying to publish a few web applications that required Internet Explorer 7 and because the environment I was working with was XenApp 6.5, which required Windows Server 2008 R2 as the base operating system, there was no other choice than to use Citrix’s VM Hosted App feature that allows you to publish an application installed onto a virtual desktop.  I went ahead and configured the application to launch internet explorer while adding a website’s URL into the command line argument but immediately noticed that whenever I attempted to launch the application through the Citrix web interface, the receiver would start but the application never launches.  Additionally, the virtual desktop reboots shortly after the Citrix receiver disappears.  As some administrators may know, the reason why the virtual desktop reboots is because that is the default behavior when a user logs off and the way to prevent that from happening is execute the following command:

Set-BrokerDesktopGroup -Name "Desktop Group Name" -ShutdownDesktopsAfterUse $False

More information can be found in the following Citrix KB:

How to Configure the Logoff Behavior of a Desktop Group in XenDesktop 5
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX127842

With the reboot issue out of the way, let’s look at what configuration changes were required to get the applications to launch:

Step #1 - Registry Additions to the XenDesktop DDC

The first change the Citrix engineer had me make was the following registry key we had to add on both of our XenDesktop DDCs:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\DesktopServer
XenAppLicenseEdition
REG_SZ
Value: PLT

***Note that we’re using the Platinum version of XenDesktop so the value was set to PLT.

Step #2 - PowerShell cmdlets on XenDesktop DDC

The second change we needed to make was to execute the following cmdlets on one of our DDCs:

Set-BrokerSite -DesktopLicenseEdition PLT

To set up VM hosted apps to use Platinum edition:

Set-BrokerSite -AppLicenseEdition PLT

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Once we completed steps 1 and 2 as well as the PowerShell cmdlet:

Set-BrokerDesktopGroup -Name "Desktop Group Name" -ShutdownDesktopsAfterUse $False

… the published applications were now able to launch and the virtual desktop hosting the application no longer rebooted when we closed the applications.