by Dan Schlimme, CUGC Steering Committee
I recently wrote about my experience with migrating to XA 7.6 and PVS. I wanted to go a step further and share some tweaks that I made to my PVS environment that have really helped.
The tweaks were as follows:
- Removing the RDS License Time Bomb Reg Value
- Adding the vDisk Boot Menu as a Default Option Reg Value
- Adding the Prevent vDisk from trying to boot from PVS Server it is not Replicated Reg Value
Removing the RDS License Time Bomb Reg Value
We ran into an issue where randomly throughout the day/week we would have an abundance of sessions on our XA 7.6 farm stuck at prelogon (100+).
After A LOT of investigation it turns out that there were essentially two issues
- Server 2012 R2 has an RDS Licensing issue
- Every PVS server had the Identical RDS Licensing Time Bomb reg key
To resolve this issue, I performed the following steps to the vdisk in maintenance mode
- Navigate to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\RCM\GracePeriod
- Took Ownership of the Key
- Delete the L$RTMTIMEBOMB value
- Shutdown the target
- Promoted to Prod
I referenced the following URL’s for this fix
Preload?? hangs up users (Post 8/9)
No remote Desktop Licence Server availible on RD Session Host server 2012
Adding the vDisk Boot Menu as a Default Option Reg Value
When needing to make changes to our vDisk, we would set the vDisk to maintenance then boot it from the PVS console. One annoying thing was that each time the vDisk booted it would ask if you want to boot your device into maintenance mode or production. As you can guess this is quite annoying, especially if you aren’t logged into the hypervisor console.
To resolve this issue, I performed the following steps on the PVS servers
- Navigate to HKLM\Software\Citrix\ProvisioningServices\StreamProcess
- Create a new DWORD value of “SkipBootMenu” without quotes
- Set the SkipBootMenu Value to 1.
- Restart PVS server
I referenced the following URL for this fix
Setting vDisk Boot Menu as a Default Option
Adding the Prevent vDisk from trying to boot from PVS Server it is not Replicated Reg Value
We ran in to an issue when booting a vDisk that was set to maintenance mode. The issue was that the vDisk would attempt to boot and look at any PVS to attempt to stream the image. Unfortunately we only set the vDisk to maintenance mode on one PVS server and we only needed it to boot from that PVS Server.
By setting this value, every vDisk (prod/maint/test) will only stream from the PVS servers that have properly replicated vDisk.
To resolve this issue, I performed the following steps on the PVS servers
- Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Citrix\ProvisioningServices\StreamProcess
- If not there, create a new DWORD value of “SkipRIMS” without quotes
- Set the SkipRIMS value to 0
- Restart PVS Server
I referenced the following URL for this fix
