XenDesktop Changes made outside of console

If you are a PowerShell scripter like myself, you have likely ran into an issue with XenDesktop and XenApp 7.x where using Studio and PowerShell interchangeably can result in the error message “Changes made outside of this console, such as in PowerShell or management tools from previous versions, resulted in a discrepancy between policies. The assigned objects for policy “PolicyName” must match…”

The following screenshot is an example that I recently encountered:

Ironically enough, the way to fix this is to use PowerShell. In order to fix this issue, do the following:

1. Open a PowerShell window on a Controller (DDC). You may want to run it as an administrator to avoid potential issues with permissions.
2. Add the Citrix PoSh Commandlets by typing: asnp Citrix* 
3. Mount the Citrix Group Policy Provider by typing: New-PSDrive XenPol -PSProvider CitrixGroupPolicy -root \ -Controller localhost
4. Navigate to the mapped Policy provider: CD XenPol:\User
5. At this point you can type the dir command here and you will see your policies. Given the error message that we saw in Studio, we need to find the name of our policy, in our example above it was “WH_Profile_Store”
6. Rename the Policy in order to fix the discrepancy by typing: ren ‘PolicyName’ ‘PolicyName2’ in our example above, the command would have been ren ‘WH_Profile_Store’ ‘WH_Profile_Store2’ 

You should now be able to log back in to Studio.

Note: This issue only occurs when using Studio, I have not seen this issue when leveraging the GPO version of Citrix Policies. This issue has not ben fixed as of version 7.6