I want to preface this post by saying that if you're not interested in just a backstory jump to the synthesis section for a summary ...
Coming from a consulting environment I learned the hard way that you should always check the compatibility of all components in a project. Since VMware vSphere 5 has released many people have found the hard way that Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) was not supported on the latest platform of the VMware hypervisor. People without thorough knowledge of the battery of the Citrix solution can be read XenDesktop 5 was supported on vSphere 5, but in reality, that meant when using machines Creation Services (MCS). This forces companies to have to make difficult decisions. You can either go in the direction of the use of MCS with vSphere 5, or go with Provisioning Services on vSphere 4.x Hopefully most of the clients consulted with their Citrix trusted adviser before making this decision. Even as recently as a few weeks ago, the lines were blurred when it came to the help of PVS with vSphere 5. One of my clients was having problems with PVS on vSphere 5 for nearly two months. There are two flat months Citrix does not support this configuration. Citrix Technical Support will generally give a better effort to help in these situations, but at the end of the recommendation is made to return to vSphere 4.x. Unfortunately, returning to vSphere 4.x was not an option for my particular client because there were many hours of work put to build their infrastructure vSphere 5 and they had a deadline closing in fast food to start their desktop virtualization pilot. I just started working with the client it a few weeks ago and did not know all the pain they had been having with Provisioning Services on vSphere 5. In a last effort of the PM for the project reached my ERM (Enterprise Resource Manager) and asked if there was anything they could do to get PVS to work before the end of the week, otherwise they would have to remove the driver. In theory, they could have used MCS for XenDesktop and XenApp servers provisioned manually for the pilot. The problem is a government client, and architecture approved and all pre-implementation documents was built on the principle of PVS. Essentially, they would have to start over, and this was not an option. When my ERM sent me the request of the client using that I was afraid the driver would fail because of PVS will not be supported on vSphere 5, but I wanted to do everything I can to help. The issue of customer saw was when starting several target devices to a vDisk in Standard mode, they would simply hang a black screen with white. I saw this question on a previous project I worked before coming to work for Citrix, and at the end we had to resort to using MCS. I started digging around to try to find all the updates on issues related to PVS on vSphere 5, and I quickly learned that we were able to hit the jackpot!
About a week before jumping to help this client I remembered Provisioning Services 6.1 is out, so the first thing I checked was if Citrix eDocs ESXi 5 had added to the list of supported hypervisors for PVS 6.1. I am disappointed that only ESX 4.1 was listed as supported, and even as I write this post ESXi 5.x is still not listed (see here). Then I started searching the Citrix forums, who pointed me in the direction of this article Citrix KB that was just updated March 26, 2012 on how to obtain PVS 5.6 / 6.0 work on vSphere 5! While on a GoToMeeting with the customer that I had to pull up the article and they quickly said they had tried this resolution a few days before with no luck. Before going, I was walking through the article with them and we double checked everything was set correctly. The PVS server boot file has "Interrupt safe mode (check if the device freezes at startup)" as the resolution of the article said, but the issue was still ongoing.
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- Figure 1
Many people, including myself sometimes will go to the "Resolution" KB without reading all the "transmit section" section. in this case, the kb article above indicates that only the VMXNET3 virtual network card is supported, not E1000 most commonly used virtual NIC. When checking the target devices and PVS parameters of the virtual machine I noticed that they were still using E1000 virtual NIC. the mentioned technical support Citrix client told them in a previous call not VMXNET3 use because it has not been stable, with PVS. in fact, it was fairly well known in the world of consulting that caused problems with PVS VMXNET3 so we usually used E1000 NIC. Here are a couple of people older KB discuss the matter with VMXNET3, CTX1280 and CTX125361. at this point, I had the customer to modify the parameters of the virtual network adapter on the two target devices and virtual servers to use PVS VMXNET3. Next, we define the vDisk in standard mode, and started several target devices. Here is! The vDisk was broadcast without problem on vSphere 5 !!
Abstract:
Many clients running Provisioning Services on vSphere 5 were to see them hang target devices at a time of the black screen booting in a vDisk standard mode. On top of that Citrix does not support running Provisioning Services on vSphere 5 that people had to change their architecture or use MCS on vSphere 5, or Provisioning Services on vSphere 4.x The good news is Citrix now officially supports running procurement services on vSphere 5.x (ESXi 5.x)! The caveat to this, you must use the virtual NIC VMXNET3 vSphere on your target devices. If you use Virtual Server Provisioning you must also use virtual NICs vmxnet3 on VM. The last thing to be done is to configure the Provisioning Server bootstrap file for "Interrupt safe mode" as shown above in Figure 1. I also recommend the implementation ESXi 5 Update 1 in the referenced article below in the third chip. ESXi 5 Update 1 resolved a similar problem with Provisioning Services on vSphere 5.
References:
- vSphere 5 Support Provisioning Server 5.6.x and 6.0 (I can confirm this article also applies to PVS 6.1 as well)
- XenDesktop hypervisor Citrix product support - this is a helpful matrix product edition that clearly indicates that hypervisors are supported by the different versions of XenDesktop and Provisioning services.
- another important article was published by VMware regarding a separate issue with vSphere 5 and Citrix Provisioning Services. Essentially, the article says ESXi 5 Update 1 fixes the problem mentioned in the article.
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