Archive
Category: Provisioning ServerCitrix Provisioning Services™ uses streaming technology to dynamically deliver server workloads and desktop images on demand to any physical or virtual machine, reducing IT capital and operational costs while increasing business agility.
Provisioning Services 6.0 adds new features that enhance your ability to manage and deploy shared vDisk images.
Group Policy Preferences (GPP) can be used to enforce best practices on Provisioning Servers.
There are a couple of well known registry tweaks that Citrix recommends for Citrix Provisioning Servers. Here’s an example of how you can ensure the registry modifications are added to all of your Citrix Provisioning Servers. (Older operating systems require GPP Client-side extensions and some additional prerequisites.) continue reading…
If you automated your Provisioning Server builds using the silent installation wizard then the Provisioning Services Console crashes when you try to configure a server’s bootstrap. continue reading…
You might want to give this article a read if you’re upgrading XenServer to Feature Pack 1. We haven’t experienced any errors during our testing with clean installs of XenServer FP1 and Provisioning Server 5.6.
The cause is my favorite part of the article.
I’m setting up new Provisioning Servers in my lab. Here’s a step by step guide for adding a second Provisioning Server. continue reading…
I’m setting up new Provisioning Servers in my lab. Here’s a step by step guide for getting your first Provisioning Server up and running. continue reading…
Citrix released a hotfix that corrects the issue I reported in part 1.
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX128591
BUG 27692 Upgrading a Citrix Provisioning Services 5.6 server to Citrix Provisioning Services 5.6 Service Pack 1 causes all the target devices to failover to the new 5.6 Service Pack 1 server.
I’m testing the hotfix in the lab later today.
If you want to use Provisioning Server auto-add then it’s a good idea to setup a default auto-add device collection. Auto-add will create a target device in the farm and assign a blank vdisk to the target device. The device will be added to the default collection and will be configured to boot from the device’s hard disk (which is helpful if a device boots from the network but isn’t a PVS target device). continue reading…
Spoiler alert there isn’t a true “upgrade” for PVS 5.6 SP1. The “upgrade” involves uninstalling Provisioning Server 5.6, installing Provisioning Server 5.6 SP1 and then upgrading the farm’s database to 5.6 SP1. I decided to work through the upgrade process in the lab so I built a couple of 5.6 Provisioning Servers, copied over one of the production XenApp vdisk, created 10 target devices and started streaming. Each provisioning server started streaming 5 target devices – so far so good.
I wanted to keep the lab upgrade as close to what we would do in production as possible so I stopped the streaming service on the second provisioning server (PVS02) and the target devices rebalanced to the other provisioning server (PVS01). I started the “upgrade” process on PVS02, uninstalled PVS 5.6, rebooted, installed PVS 5.6 SP1, upgraded the database to 5.6 SP1 (joined the farm), opened the 5.6 SP1 console and verified bootstrap configuration, disk stores, etc. Smooth sailing… now for the testing.
I rebooted all 10 of the target devices. I expected 5 target devices to stream from each provisioning server but all 10 devices started streaming from the 5.6 SP1 server. Not good. I decided to try and force the target devices to use the 5.6 server so I shutdown the target devices and stopped the stream service on the 5.6 SP1 server. I started the target devices up and they wouldn’t boot – “No servers available”.
I called our Citrix TRM and he was able to reproduce the issue in his lab. I’ll post when I have an update.