Unable to Delete Resources: There is currently an active background action

An addition to CTX138318 about how to delete an old Citrix Studio Hosting connection.
Instead of deleting every task manually we make use of PowerShell piping and Out-GridView.

Today in Citrix Studio I discovered a dead Hosting connection I set up years ago for some MCS tests. When I tried to simply delete the connection, I received the following message:

The error message leads to the following (helpful!) KB article: CTX138318

After following the different steps outlined in the article …

… I ended up with something like this:

Which I should process via:

Which I didn’t want to do manually for each entry. But I remembered the session from Andreas Nick at the TecCon2018, where he showed examples about how to pipe the output of a command to a select grid. I’m not good at PowerShell at all, but I wanted to try it anyways. So after two hours of straight web research I ended up with the following code, which simplified this process a lot!

To explain each step in detail:

Line 1 Make PowerShell aware of the Citrix cmdlets.
Line 2 Switch to the Hypervisor Hosting connections of XenDesktop.
Line 3 Write the HostingUnitUid of the affected connection into a variable after a GridView Select.
Line 4 Create a list of all pending tasks and …
Line 5 Present it in a second GridView Select so you could delete all or selected tasks. The selection is being piped to the Remove command.

This will look similar to this:

Select Hosting
Select ProvTasks

In the Out-GridView you will first select the affected Hosting connection and in the second windows you will select all ProvTasks you may want to remove. Most of the time this will be all. There are certainly better ways to solve this, but the intend of this post is just to show you with how little work a repetitive task can be optimized with simple PowerShell tricks.

This worked great for me, but you should test this first!

Sometimes it can happen, that a ProvTask is “Running” and you can’t remove it. For this case I found a hint at discussions.citrix.com linked at the bottom.

Sources:

This post was previously posted on mycugc.org.

Author: Marco

Marco is an IT-System administrator and IT-Consultant with 10+ years experience. He is specialized in the delivery of virtual Apps and Desktops with Citrix solutions. In 2017 he has been awarded Citrix Technology Advocate by Citrix for his community work (#CTA). His second core area is availability & performance monitoring with Zabbix, a leading open-source solution. His employer is the German IT-Company ANAXCO, which is developing a Transport Management Software (TMS) based on Microsoft Dynamics AX. More about Marco

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