PVS benefits:
Storage foot print would be very small for PVS. Using cache on ram, would give a better performance on overall VDI performance. Citrix Admins have complete control over user’s VDI. Windows updates in normal scenario take lot of network bandwidth and storage - With PVS, only one image should be updated, rest of all are done with a reboot. With dynamic VDIs, we can power manage them as per user shift timings.
PVS Services:
SOAP Service: Simple object access protocol. This is the XML based service which communicate between applications. Soap Service is for PVS Console and management operations only and will not effect streaming at all. If this service is stopped any activity that involves the PVS GUI console will stop. You cannot connect to your PVS environment using PVS console. Soap service is for console to communicate with the pvs server.
We have two vDisk modes:
Standard Image – Select this mode if a vDisk is shared by multiple target devices (write-cache options enabled). Private Image – Select this mode if a vDisk is only used by a single target device (read/write access is enabled). Standard Image mode Standard Image mode allows multiple target devices to stream from a single vDisk image at the same time. This mode reduces the amount of vDisk management and reduces storage requirements.
Follow below steps to load balance citrix delivery controllers with netscaler:
Make sure you have snip configured in netscaler. Create monitor using monitor type as citrix-xd-ddc. You can configure interval and time-out values if you need. Check validate credentials check box and enter your citrix site, service account credentials. Goto servers option and add all your citrix delivery controllers there. Click services option and create load balancing service for each delivery controller by specifying your servers from above step 3 and add monitor from step 2.
Below are the steps to perform to point your on-prem VDA to WEM on citrix cloud:
Login to citrix cloud portal and setup resource location. Download cloud connector software to a windows server machine, and install it. Connect to your cloud account after cloud connector software is installed. Now copy the WEM admx and adml files on a win 10 machine, to c:\windows\policydefinitions or copy them to your AD server and configure a GPO to point to your wem agent on win10 to cloud connectors.
some or all steps are required to add external authentication on netscaler 12 and above:
Create LDAP Server (authentication server). Create LDAP policy. Bind the LDAP policy globally. Add AD groups to netscaler to restrict access to management access. Optional Restrict normal users to netscaler gateway. Optional Create LDAP Server (authentication server):
To create LDAP server follow below steps. This LDAP server can be used for authentication for all users who login to netscaler portal (netscaler gateway) and for administrators who can login to netscaler management ip for admin purposes.
To change the XML port in XenDesktop 7.x, complete the following steps:
Open command prompt and navigate to cd “c:\Program Files\Citrix\Broker\Service” Type BrokerService.exe /show and press Enter to show the current ports. To change the XML port type, BrokerService.exe -wiport (storefrontport) port and press Enter. For storefront it would be BrokerService.exe -StoreFrontPort PortNumber. The Citrix Broker Service will then automatically stop and start to apply the change. Run the BrokerService.exe /show command again and validating the Storefront Port value to confirm.
There are multiple ways on how we can find citrix xendesktop database server name:
via powershell: Use command Get-ConfigDBConnection (or Get-BrokerDBConnection) on the delivery controller. Both these commands will show your database server, instance name and database name. Using registry: Navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\XDservices\ ConfigLoggingSiteSchema\DataStore\Connections” registry key on the delivery controller and check value of key, ConnectionString. This will have same information as above powershell command. This will be useful if server is not responding to any powershell commands.
On PVS 7.15 LTSR, with server 2016 OS, you might end up with below error while using xendesktop setup wizard or streaming wizard:
You might install your vcenter server certificate on your pvs server and navigate to https://vcenterserver/sdk without certificate errors, but still it wont work. On 2012 OS, TLS is enabled by default, in 2016 we have to manually enable it. Follow below steps to do so:
Goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\.NETFramework folder.
Issue: copying OS via pvs imaging wizard in pvs base machine, would show a green status bar with the progress. It completes till the end, you wont see Done button. It will be in green progress bar forever. You might see an error in pvs event log:
Event id: 11
Detected one or more hung threads. Please send Stream.log to support.
In other event id 11 entry, you would see, Terminating StreamProcess.
