XenAppPrep is here!
October 27, 2008 18 Comments
I’m at Summit this week working in Tech Lab. This is the second Summit I’ve been to in the past two and a half years and as always its been a fun experience. This year its in Orlando, FL at the Dolphin Resort in Disney. If you’re here, I’d highly recommend stopping by our booth to check out our latest and greatest technologies and chat with some of the engineers that brought them to life.
I’m also proud to announce the release of XenAppPrep at http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX116063. I’d love to hear any and all feedback, so feel free to post your comments here.
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Hi Shannon,
Thanks for this tool.. It’s working perfectly…
Shannon,
Thanks for putting the time and effort into this tool.
We’re experiencing problems in a XA 4.0 w/ PVS5 on XS5 environment where when the PVS managed VMs boot up from the shared vDisk, the LHC isn’t recreated.
Is this something you’ve seen before and can you offer any suggestions on where to look first when troubleshooting?
Did a little more digging and it turns out this was happening because something was restarting the IMA service.
I stopped all services related to Citrix (EdgeSight, CPM, XTE, XML, etc.) prior to performing the image build this time and it seems to have resolved the problem.
Hi Shanon – The tools is working great – one exception – the citrix encryption service does not start on the cloned machines, I get error 1069 – service cannot start due to logon failure
Any advice is appreciated
Paul
Hi Ben,
By chance, when you created your PVS image did you restart your server after running the tool? When using the /pvs switch, the XenAppPrep tool expects you to shutdown the machine before running it.
When the tool is run with the /pvs switch, it will stop and set the IMA service to manual start. The XenAppPrep image must be in this state to be deployed via PVS. The next time the image boots it will set the IMA service to start-up automatically and kick it off. If you took an image when the server is in this state and deployed it via PVS, you would see a behavior similar to yours.
Hi Paul,
Which version of XenApp are you running? The tool doesn’t actually update the Citrix Encryption Service.
The service is probably set to run as the wrong account (e.g. \). Could you try see if the service is running as a local account? If it is, please change the service to run as a different account and then set it back to the original account name. Let me know how it goes!
Hi Shannon,
Thanks for the reply.
I did not reboot the server after running the tool prior to capturing the disk image.
I experienced the behavior where IMA would spontaneously restart multiple times but have not seen it since stopping the other services on the computer as I detailed above.
IMA does stop successfully upon running the XenAppPrep tool and seemingly randomly restarts during the image build even though the service is set to manual start in the services console. It wasn’t happening with any regularity as far as the time to occurence so I can only assume that something is causing it to restart.
I noticed in the eventlog that the message may have been different for the different Citrix services that XenAppPrep stops, others seemed to say “set to manual” while IMA said “set to demand start” but I’m unable to verify that until Monday.
Hi Shannon,
Thanks for following up.
The service is running as NT Authority\local service. I am a bit concerned about changing this – i’ll look into how to get the password so I can change it back and let you know how it goes.
It is Xenapp 4.5
Hi Shannon.
I bookmarked this page last year and have been looking forward to getting a chance to use it however when I click through to CDN to download it, I get an access denied error, something about page level permissions. Was it released and then removed again?
Yeah, it was recently removed from CDN and published as a Citrix download at http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX116063.
Shannon-
In regards to your reply to Ben’s post:
Hi Ben,
By chance, when you created your PVS image did you restart your server after running the tool? When using the /pvs switch, the XenAppPrep tool expects you to shutdown the machine before running it.
When the tool is run with the /pvs switch, it will stop and set the IMA service to manual start. The XenAppPrep image must be in this state to be deployed via PVS. The next time the image boots it will set the IMA service to start-up automatically and kick it off. If you took an image when the server is in this state and deployed it via PVS, you would see a behavior similar to yours.
I have the same behavior, where the services will not start.
Are these the desired steps ? (This is what I did.)
1. Install and configure XenApp
2. Restart Master Target Device
3. Install PVS DC client and shutdown
4. Add target device to PVS DB and configure it to boot from HD
5. Boot target
6. Install and run XenAppPrep
7. XenAppPrep.exe /Pvs
8. Start…progs….pvs….Client Image Builder
9. Build vDisk
10. Shutdown master target device
11. provision new vDisk
This is what I have done, and my services will not start. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Kyle
Hi Kyle,
Are you using the latest version of XenAppPrep? v2.01 was released back in February. In this new version when the /pvs switch is specified the XenAppPrep service always starts the XenApp services (they’re set to manual), versus setting them to automatic.
Also, between steps 7 and 10 the XenApp services should not be started. Do you see this happening in your Event Log? Any IMA service errors from your Event Log could help shed some light too.
Yes, I am using the newest version.
When I run the /pvs switch, they stop them, and get the server ready for generalization. I then run the image builder.
Then I take the newly created vDisk and ad it to a XenServer VM, and it boots, but the IMA service never starts. I combed the event logs and found nothing.
When the VM boots up, is the XenAppPrep service running? Also, is the IMA service’s startup mode still set to manual? What happens if you start manually?
XAP service is running.
IMA still set to manual
When I try to start manually, it gives teh generic -2######### error. Usually that means it cant talk to the datastore.
Right now I am having an issue where none of the VM’s will even boot all the way up. Just a gray screen.
It sounds like XenAppPrep reinitialized the system. To confirm this, you can check the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Citrix\IMA\Logging\Hostname key and it should be set to the new machine’s name. I’m also assuming there were no errors from XenAppPrep in the Event Log and your VM is joining an existing farm that’s being hosted on a non-Access database.
Before you ran XenAppPrep on the server, were you able to verify the installation was in working order (e.g. by launching a session)? I’d recommend contacting Citrix Support where someone will be able to investigate this issue further.
Shannon,
In regards to that earlier item I posted about the IMA service restarting after generalization while building the vDisk, I now suspect that a Group Policy hardening template that was setting the IMA service to Automatic during a Group Policy background refresh caused the IMA service to restart.
Ben
Love this tool, so much better than doing this all manually. I did notice that the IMA Service didn’t start after the shutdown and power on even though it was set to automatic. I just ran the dsmaint tool and it worked a charm. Thank you!