HOW-TOs

Folks, Prepare Your Environment for the Holidays!

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Happy Thanksgiving, folks!

In today’s HOW-TOs edition, I would like to encourage you to prepare your environment for the holiday weekend if you haven’t done so yet. A nice way to keep an eye on your infrastructure is to set up an alerting system for you to be alarmed via email if an unexpected event occurs. One way to configure proactive monitoring is to attach a task to an Event ID in Windows Event Viewer and tell Windows to send you an email every time that Event ID occurs. Here is a list of IDs with context from sources “StreamService,” “StreamProcess” and “Service Control Manager” that may serve you well when it comes to your PVS servers.

Application Log:

1. Event ID 1 – PVS Stream Service STARTED. <Information>

2. Event ID 101 – Unable to contact Citrix license server. <Error>

3. Event ID 107 – Licensing grace period expired. <Error>

4. Event ID 11 – DBAccess error. <Error>

5. Event ID 11 (again) – StreamProcess IP <IP:Port> is disconnected or non-functional. <Error>

System Log:

1. Event ID 7036 – The Citrix PVS Stream Service service entered in a stopping state. <Information>

2. Event ID 7034 – The Citrix PVS Stream Service service terminated unexpectedly. <Error>

For PVS targets, I recommend setting up an alert for any errors in the Event Viewer from source “Bnistack” as those normally point to retries and/or network disconnections. If you want to take it a step further, visit John Howard’s blog from Microsoft Technet for additional scripting techniques to get the most information from Windows Event Viewer via email alerts.

And last but not least, feel free to leverage WER (Windows Error Reporting) to generate crash dumps across the board or on a per-application basis whenever a relevant process decides to crash, find instructions HERE.

OK, everyone. The turkey is waiting! 🙂 Enjoy a safe weekend!

How to Apply a Cumulative Hotfix on Your PVS Servers?

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Hello Folks,

In today’s HOW-TO edition we’ll cover a fairly simple but very important method: applying a cumulative hotfix that requires a full reinstall of PVS on your two HA configured Provisioning servers. Here are the steps:

1. Download a hotfix such as CPVS61019 from https://support.citrix.com.

2. Stop the Stream service on PVS01. Your targets should fail over to PVS02. Reinstall PVS Console and Server software from the hotfix package on PVS01.

3. Rerun the PVS Configuration Wizard. When presented with farm options, select “Farm is already configured.”

4. Breeze through the Config Wizard. Fortunately, the tool selects by default your previous configuration settings, so no need to change anything unless you really need to. If the process completes successfully, Soap and Stream services will be restarted automatically.

5. Stop the Stream service on PVS02. Your targets should fail over to PVS01. Repeat the same procedure 1-3 on PVS02. You can then rebalance your targets manually if needed.

6. You are done.

Note: I generally recommend scheduling a maintenance window for updating your servers. Even though the procedure can be finished in 10 minutes, you don’t want to find yourself in a situation where HA failover doesn’t work as expected and you lose half of your connections when stopping the services.

Easy wasn’t it? 🙂

 

Which AD Groups Have Access to Your Farm?

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If you ever get locked out of your PVS Console because someone in your organization changed Active Directory membership groups around, you will need to find out what security groups have permission to access the farm. It’d be super-easy if you could just open your Console…Security tab under Farm Properties. But what if you lost access?

…Fortunately there is a way because it’s all in the database. All you need to do is login to your SQL server, launch SQL Management Studio, expand the PVS database, right-click on the dbo.AuthGroup table, select top 1000 rows, and you will see a list of all the AD user groups that have permissions to access the farm. Then you will most likely realize that your Console user is NOT a member of any of those groups!

AuthGroup

How to Reverse Image a vDisk?

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Reverse imaging can be a tedious procedure for some of us but is necessary to keep our vDisks up-to-date with hypervisor tools and cumulative hotfixes for PVS. Here are my 14 steps:

01. Boot your target device to the vDisk you want to reverse image with additional disk attached (same size or larger than the vDisk).
02. Make sure the new disk is visible in Windows Disk Management and mounted as a drive (i.e. D:\).
03. Use BNImage or XenConvert to copy the vDisk to the added drive (both tools are located under C:\Program Files\Citrix\Provisioning Services).
04. Make sure the new volue is set to Active in Disk Management.
05. Set the device to boot from Hard Disk in the PVS console.
06. Boot the device to Hard Drive by manually changing the boot order in BIOS.
07. Remove any antivirus software (Reboot).
08. Remove PVS target device software (Reboot).
09. Update hypervisor tools if necessary (Reboot).
10. Install latest PVS target device software (Reboot).
11. Run the PVS Imaging Wizard (System will reboot automatically and will continue to finish the conversion process). Before reboot change the boot order in BIOS to Network boot.
12. Switch the device to boot from vDisk in the PVS console (in Private or Maintenance Mode).
13. Install Antivirus software.
14. You are done.

What are yours? 🙂