Folks,

I hope Y’ALL had a great weekend!
Going back to PVS I wanted to share the resolution to an issue I came across recently during a client implementation. Instead of confusing you with a big giant paragraph, I’ll use one of my favorite templates back from my years on the Citrix Escalation Team.

Environment:

Citrix Product: Provisioning Services 7.6
VHD Storage: EMC Isilon NAS (w/ CIFS shares)
PVS Server OS: Windows 2012 R2 SP1
VHD OS: Windows 7 SP1

Issue:

Attempting to create a vDisk on shared storage failed with Error Management Interface (Management Interface: Operating System error occurred). The same error was thrown both when creating it from the PVS Console and from the target device using the Imaging Wizard. Also, when validating server paths in the vDisk Store Properties, randomly Path Not Found message is displayed.

Resolution:

On all Provisioning Servers in the environment, run the following command in PowerShell as an Administrator to disable Secure Negotiate in Windows:

Set-ItemProperty -Path “HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters” RequireSecureNegotiate -Value 0 -Force

Explanation:

This behavior can be caused by the Secure Negotiate (also known as Secure Dialect Negotiation) feature added by Microsoft in SMB 3.0 for Windows 2012 which requires that error responses by all SMBv2 servers including protocols 2.0 and 2.1 are correctly signed. If the correct signature is not received back from the SMB client, the connection is cut off to prevent Man-in-the-Middle attacks. Some file servers don’t support this feature and that’s where you would see the most failures. Check out Microsoft’s article on Secure Negotiation by the Open Specifications Support Team HERE (they’re pretty technical BTW! 😉 )