Dear Readers,

I haven’t posted anything in such a long time mainly because I’ve been so busy with my new role as Consulting Architect and all the cool things I’m learning in the field. Anyway, the PVS Guy is NOT dead. In fact, he is more alive than ever 🙂 – and I am planning to revive the website starting NOW. I am launching a new category called XenDesktop to share some tips & tricks from my VDI projects.

Today we’ll talk about an error I came across recently that can be often seen in recently upgraded XenDesktop environments (5.x – 7.x) and parallel implementations. As most of you are aware, when creating a new machine catalog with MCS, the Delivery Controller uses the vCenter host connection and service account configured at site setup to request actions from the VMware hypervisor. If you happen to use the same account on a 7.x DDC that you used in 5.6 without changing any permissions in vCenter, MCS will most likely fail to create the catalog. If you export the error details to a text file (as you always should), you will see the following exception:

Terminating Error:
An error occurred while preparing the image.
Stack Trace:
at Citrix.Console.PowerShellSdk.ProvisioningSchemeService.BackgroundTasks.
ProvisioningSchemeTask.CheckForTerminatingError(SdkProvisioningScheme
Action sdkProvisioningSchemeAction)
at Citrix.Console.PowerShellSdk.ProvisioningSchemeService.BackgroundTasks.
ProvisioningSchemeTask.WaitForProvisioningSchemeActionCompletion
(Guid task
Id, Action`1 actionResultsObtained)
at Citrix.Console.PowerShellSdk.ProvisioningSchemeService.BackgroundTasks.
ProvisioningSchemeCreationTask.StartProvisioningAction()
at Citrix.Console.PowerShellSdk.ProvisioningSchemeService.BackgroundTasks.
ProvisioningSchemeCreationTask.RunTask()
at Citrix.Console.PowerShellSdk.BackgroundTaskService.BackgroundTask.
Task.Run()

DesktopStudio_ErrorId : UnknownError
ErrorCategory : NotSpecified
ErrorID : FailedToCreateImagePreparationVm
TaskErrorInformation : Terminated
InternalErrorMessage : Either the account is not granted sufficient privilege or disabled or username/password is incorrect Either the account is not granted sufficient privilege or disabled or username/password is incorrect Permission to perform this operation was denied.

That’s because XenDesktop 7.x requires two additional rights assigned in vCenter that were not required for 4.x and 5.x:

VirtualMachine.Config.AdvancedConfig ==> Virtual machine > Configuration > Advanced

VirtualMachine.Config.Settings ==> Virtual machine > Configuration > Settings

For a full list of VMware service account permissions for XenDesktop, click HERE for 7.x and HERE for 4.x and 5.x.

Ah!! Tricky, isn’t it?! 🙂