Provisioning Server

Working with Citrix Provisioning Server, you may have encountered the issue of having a "Found New Hardware" prompt when using Cache on Device Hard Disk.

When provisioning XenApp Servers, this issue's impact is minimized because only Administrators can see the popup.

When it comes to provisioned Desktops, all users are seing the message at every logon, so it's important to find a way to fix it.

Citrix is providing an old Ardence Tool to manage this issue but in somes cases it does not work.

The prompt is related to a new Hard Disk Signature found (actually the Local HD used for cache) and detected as a new hardware by the system.

To detect an Hard Disk, Windows is using a Disk Signature that is stored into the registry. If a new signature is detected, then the prompt is raised.

To overcome this issue, the solution is to ...

Working on a Provisioning Server project, I had to deal with the Trend Officescan product installation.

The problem was really critical because installing the Antivirus Software within the image would lead to a blue screen at boot time.

Not installing the software was not an option, as the Security Administrator would have not allowed that because even if the servers are "Read Only" they could be virus propagation vector.

During investigations we've found that if the antivirus software was installed at each boot (so not incorporated within the image but installed on top of it) the blue screen issue was over and the Antivirus Software perfectly working.

To automate the deployment process we decided to write a script and push it by machine GPO.

To ease administration processes and ensure the Antivirus Installation would never happen within a private image, I've developped the script provided in this article.

Working on a Provisioning Server Project we've decided to use Device Hard Drive Cache.

However during the initial tests, we've faced an issue : How to automate the creation of the Cache Partition on the physical drives ?

To do so, we've developped a little script, launched at Computer Startup by GPO.

At first server boot on image, the local disk is not present, causing Provisioning Server to fallback on Server Side cache.

The following script will then initialize and format the cache partition which will be available for the PVS Client at next reboot.

I've recently faced an issue regarding using Provisioning Server (4.5, & 5.0) to provision XenApp VMs on XenServer hosts.

The VM's were booting properly and were responding correctly through XenCenter but was freezing when accessed through network (either ICA or RDP for example)

I had used all registry tips from KB (EnableOffload reg value turned to 0 ...) without any success getting my VM to work properly ...