Citrix Provisioning Server 5.1 and XenDesktop Setup Wizard

With the new version of Provisioning Server Citrix changed the management console ports from 8000 and 8001 to 54321 and 54322. The reason for this change is so that PVS can be installed on the XenDesktop Desktop Delivery Controller without port conflicts.

The port change breaks the the XenDesktop Setup Wizard because by default the setup wizard tries to communicate with PVS on ports 8000 and 8001.

To fix this you must edit the SetupToolApplication.exe.config file that is located in the “C:\Program Files\Citrix\XenDesktop Setup Wizard” folder and change the two ports from 8000 to 54321 and from 8001 to 54322.

The Provisioning Server 5.1 release notes states that you only have to change the 8000 port but in my experience I had to change both.

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX121336

Hotfix Recommendations for Windows 2008 XenApp Servers Streamed with Provisioning Server 5.1

I did a migration last week at a clients site from Windows 2003 Presentation Server 4.5, Provisioning Server 4.5 and Web Interface 4.6 to Windows 2008 XenApp 5, Provisioning Server 5.1a and Web Interface 5.

During the image build for Windows 2008 XenApp I had a few issue that were resolved by installing these 5 Windows 2008 hot fixes from Microsoft.

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951149/en-us – “Stop error on a Windows Server 2008-based terminal server when the server is running under a heavy load: 0x0000000A”
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949914 – “Citrix ICA clients may crash when they are connecting to a Windows Server 2008-based terminal server that has Citrix Presentation Server installed”
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/955625 – “Mandatory user profiles do not work as expected on Windows Vista-based and Windows Server 2008-based client computers when the %LogonServer% environment variable is set in the profile path”
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953531 – “A  0x0000007E Stop error occurs in Windows Server 2008 after you unmount and delete a persistent VSS snapshot”
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958652 – “Some Citrix commands do not work correctly in Citrix XenApp 5.0 for Windows Server 2008”

Citrix Provisioning Server 5 Sp1

I was looking at the PVS support site and noticed the release notes for PVS 5 Sp1. I thought this was strange since Provisioning Server 5 Sp1 hasn’t been released yet.

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX119159

I was looking at the new features of sp1 in the release notes and came across this –

• Difference Disk mode – Allows for the persisting of user data and settings upon reboot.

I had heard that this vdisk feature was coming but I was thinking in the next major release version.

This is a feature I have been asked about several times. I can see this being nice for training classes where students need to ability to reboot and keep their changes.

PVS 5 also changed the vdisk format from a proprietary format to the VHD format. With this new format you can create a thin provisioned vdisk. Thin provisioned vdisks will be great for XenDesktop because in most XenDesktop environments the vdisk I/O is probably 90% – 95% reads.