Script for automatically restarting XenDesktop Dedicated Pools VDIs

I recently had the opportunity to work with 2 consultants from Citrix Consulting Services for a client who has been experiencing performance issues in their remote office and one of the recommendations was to schedule weekly reboots for their dedicated desktops on a weekly basis to eliminate any issues caused by memory leaks in the Windows 7 operating system.  This, as some administrators know, can be done by using the Set-BrokerDesktopGroup cmdlet with the -ShutdownDesktopsAfterUse while playing around with the Power on/off machines option to force VDIs to get powered up after it has been shutdown.  The challenge with this is that you may have a window where the VDIs are shutdown and if you need to simply do a quick restart every day or every week, this may not work.  Furthermore, the client that I’m working with would like a restart prompt presented to users who are logged on at a set time with the option of allowing them to either allow a reboot or cancel it.

After doing a bit of research, I came to realize that one of ways to do this was to use a batch file and the best one I found was here:

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/256591-afterhours-power-conservation-shutdown-script-with-prompt-to-allow-user-cancel

@ECHO OFF

:myLabel

SHUTDOWN /S /F /T 600

SET /P continue="Your computer is about to shutdown in 10 min do you want to abort (y/n): "

IF %continue% EQU y (

SHUTDOWN /A

)

The batch file command above shuts down the desktop so a small change needs to be made to the switches so it looks as such instead:

@ECHO OFF

:myLabel

SHUTDOWN /R /F /T 600

SET /P continue="Your computer is about to restart in 10 min do you want to abort (y/n): "

IF %continue% EQU y (

SHUTDOWN /A

)

If you launch these commands in a batch file, you will get a cmd prompt window open allowing the user to hit Y to abort the restart and N to allow.  In addition to the cmd prompt window, a regular Windows window would pop up indicating that the computer will be restarted in 10 minutes and if shutdown is aborted, the user will see a small notification bubble at the task bar reading:

Logoff is cancelled

The scheduled shutdown has been cancelled.

With this batch file in hand, you can then create a new GPO to assign to the Active Directory OU containing the computer objects as such:

Note that it is obviously not best practice to user a regular user account for this so create a proper service account to run this scheduled task:

Configure the frequency of the restart:

Place the batch file to a network location:

Once this GPO is created and the desktop has refreshed Group Policy, you should see the scheduled task as such:

The small batch file may not be the most visual appealing but I can see this being useful to have whether it’s used for a virtual or physical desktop.