Recently, we had to change the display name for one of our delivery groups. This group is deployed as static assignment group, meaning private assignment, one user to one VDI, assigned on their first login to that VDI.

When you create delivery group, you set a display name for your desktops/VDIs that you want users to see when they login to your citrix portal.

Below are some points to note:

• If user is not assigned to VDI, Display Name value from your delivery group’s desktop assignment rule, is shown your citrix portal. Meaning user is added to delivery group’s AD group, he/she is logged into citrix portal, but still didn’t click on any VDI. So, a VDI is still not assigned to them yet. In this scenario, delivery group’s display name value is shown to users in their citrix portal.
• If user is assigned to VDI, Delivery groups’s Published Name property is used. Meaning, if user clicks on the VDI, then published name value is displayed to users.
• If published name is not set on delivery group level, delivery groups desktop assignment rule’s Display Name is used for all user assigned VDIs.
• If both displayname and published name are NOT set on delivery group, delivery groups’s Name is used as display name in storefront no matter if user clicks or doesn’t click on the VDI.

When you create a Delivery Group, the Published Name property gets its initial value from the Delivery Group’s Name property. If you later rename the Delivery Group, the Published Name property’s value is not changed. You can set the Delivery Group’s Published Name value to whatever value you want using the Set-BrokerDesktopGroup cmdlet.

In order to change display name for some users, you can use Set-BrokerPrivateDesktop cmdlet.

If you have multiple delivery groups, you can grab the list of machine names using:

Get-BrokerDesktop -DesktopGroupName DeliveryGroupName | select HostedMachineName

use

Set-BrokerPrivateDesktop MachineName -PublishedName NewDisplayName to change display name of individual VDIs.

From my experience:

We didn’t have desktop assignment options on delivery group earlier. We had to manually pick a free VDI from the delivery group, assign it to users manually on one to one basis. Later we created AD group and added it to this delivery group and created desktop assignment rule, Here I have gave a new display name. Users were receiving this new name as their display name in storefront, but after provisioning  more than 1000 machines, some users randomly got delivery group as their display name. I cross verified display name value is correct, but it is still showing the delivery group name for machines created after 990+ machines. So, I used the same display name and set it as published name as:

Set-BrokerDesktopGroup DeliveryGroupName -PublishedName DisplayNameValue

(from delivery group)

So finally, my display name value in delivery group’s desktop assignment rule, my published name property in set-brokerdesktopgroup values are same. So, all users got the new display name as their display name in storefront.

Update from CTX224451

If you want to change your user’s VDI display name in storefront, in(and above) XD 7.8 you have to first clear the published name for all the existing VDIs, and then set a new published name for your delivery group, as shown below:

Set the ‘Published Name’ attribute for all machines in a delivery group to null using the following command,

Get-BrokerMachine -DesktopGroupUID ## | Set-BrokerMachine -PublishedName $Null

Now change the delivery group name using the following command,

Get-BrokerDesktopGroup -UID ## | Set-BrokerDesktopGroup -PublishedName "New Delivery Group Name"

Finally, if you want to change user VDI display name for whatever reason, make sure you have the same name, at display name, and set the same name using set-brokerdesktopgroup cmdlet. Also, when you change the display name and description in delivery group, desktop assignment rules option, it will only apply for future VDIs. Not existing VDIs. When you want to change display name or description for your users, change the display name and description in delivery group, desktop assignment rules option, and use above commands to change the display name and description for existing machines.

Change description of existing and new VDAs:

In delivery group settings, if you change description, it would be displayed only for new VDAs. To change description of existing desktops use below command:

Get-BrokerDesktop -DesktopGroupName "Delivery group name" | Set-BrokerPrivateDesktop -Description "New description"

This will change description to all existing machines in the delivery group you specify.