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.