Are you setting up a new Proof of Concept 
Citrix Provisioning Services 5.6 is out and I have finally had time to play around with it in my lab. There are a lot of bug fixes and great improvements when it comes to Simplicity. In this post I will show you some new GUI screenshots and in my next blog post about Provisioning Services I will show you how to successfully upgrade to Provisioning Services 5.6 from previous versions.
Validate Store path during configuration :
Provisioning Services Image Wizard :
Provisioning Services Auto-Add Wizard :
The new Auto-Add Wizard makes a big different compared to the old PXE Auto Add function. You are now able to define Computer name prefix and suffix according to your naming standards. The only thing I miss now is Auto Computer Account creation, because you still need to do this via the PVS Console and then reboot the new Target Devices.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
With Provisioning Server I’m using this at work and have come across a small problem. We are using Provisioning Server to create a new XenApp 5.0 farm with only one vDisk. Due to the Citrix environment having very importnat clinical systems the questions being asked are referring to updates of the applications.
At the moment from what I can Provisioning Server only allows to update a vdisk whilst the target device(s) are shut down. Within our environment it is nor acceptable to shut down every system just to update a vdisk. Is there a way to dynamically update the vdisk and just have schedule reboots so that the target device picks up the new vdisk changes?
Hi Robert,
What you do is make a copy of the existing vDisk e.g XA5 Rev 1 – new vDisk XA5 Rev 2. Then you attach this image to you lab VM in private mode, install the updates and Windows updates, then shut it down and put it into Shared Mode. When you raise the version number of this vDisk, all your XenApp Servers will pick up this new image at next reboot, you could also drag and drop it to your collection. Good luck.
We have just installed this and have it setup for both our production and disaster recovery locations. We have already performed an update to a vDisk and everything is working like it should. This is truly a great product of Citrix Admins and this should def be part of the infrastructure design for anyone working with XenApp.
The one thing we are not 100% sure about is the use of caching to RAM. We have 33 blades with 96GB of RAM each, with 200 users connecting to each blade, we don’t know what we should set the RAM cache to. Has anyone had experience with that setting? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Fares.
Citrix Provisioning Services is an superb product and all our customers are in the process of migrating to PVS. With the brand new PVS 6.0 released last week the management get even easier and you’ve got an separate image for automatically applying Windows Updates. Regarding your question, we’re always caching to local storage on the Blades. This saves traffic and the performance is awesome. For this reason I cannot provide any feedback in terms of cache to RAM. How many VM’s are you running per blade, and which OS are your running on?