VDA/VDI Host Management Support
M
Mark Holden
We currently use Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and Citrix Cloud, both of which support deleting unused hosts and rebuilding them on demand.
It would be highly beneficial if Huntress could better accommodate these environments by enabling continued management of these ephemeral VDA/VDI machines. Ideally, this could be achieved by:
Allowing the Huntress agent to automatically uninstall itself when the host is decommissioned (e.g., on shutdown).
Providing an API-driven method to remove agents from hosts that have been deleted in the VDI platform.
This functionality would ensure that ephemeral VDA/VDI hosts are properly tracked, avoid stale agents, and maintain clean licensing and reporting.
R
Runar Verwaal
Agree on this.
We are using Both Azure AVD, Citrix PVS and Parallels RAS templating, and have been struggeling with a lot of "Orphans" in Huntress console.
Still after changing deployment to re-register on each boot, Orphans sometime reappear after deployments.
An apporach like adding /VDI install argument where machine re-register automatically during boot based on computername (OR optionally mac-address, IP address) would be great.
These machines would then maybe not keep the templates UUID/Cache/settings for next boot, but re-register fresh with the current computername each boot.
One thing we are missing with all the "orphans" being created and deleted now is a continous history for the clients, getting fragments of history being deleted for each time a machine is booted or provisioned from template.
Also keeping a timeline is difficult when a Terminalserver vm is spread acreoss multiple and maybe deleted Huntress agent containers.
Edit: Forgot to mention that most of the features for automatically deleting unresponsive agents (as in VDI/Sysprep guide) will remove history / Tracking for a VM like Citrix PVS, that in nature is read-only and living a groundhog day every day.
Also an action of auto-deleting these agents after "7 days" is bad in larger datacenters with hundreds of servers where malware like Crypto24 is actively trying to stop EDR agents from running. That would also make other serves agents uninstall when example huntress services is stopped running for a few days in stead of reporting as non-responsive and handled by technicians.