Can I expand ISCSI HBA connected to XenServer 6.0.2 online ?

Yes you can and CTX 120865 works like a charm. Make sure from the storage system the lun has been expanded to the desire size. Now ensure all the VM's on that lun is power off to be on safer side.  Below example where SR is expanded from 1 TB to 2TB

1. Run the xe sr-list and note down the UUID for the SR as shown below

2. Now perform the following steps as shown below. Unplug/Replug/resize/rescan

3. Xencenter will show the correct size of SR now. Power on all the VM’s

Hidden Ghost Network Driver on VM running over XenServer

When the network interface is removed or VLAN is changed this can create ghost network driver. When you try to IP the nic it will throw error message "Multiple Default Gateways are intended to provide redundancy ". These are common with VM's running on different hypervisor . 

This can be removed by setting nonpresent devices to show. Run exactly as shown below

Check "Show hidden devices" and this will show all the ghost nic driver . Uninstall and  reboot the VM

Citrix Provisioning Service (PVS) and Windows 7 KMS- A जुगलबंधी

जुगलबंधी- means Combination or entwined twins Source wiki. If you want PDF format then click Here

Finally I left my work early and decided to author this article as I myself struggle which is not my domain :)  Much discussed and written several times , tons of blog and articles are  available on Internet so why the hell Vikash decided to blog and waste his time. I just wanted to clarify few points with which people are still confused .

1. Should I uses KMS or MKS when using Citrix Provisioning Service ?

2. How many client do I need?

3. Will office 2010 which goes into base image is also supported?

In the below example I have used PVS 6.1 and XD 5.6 along with windows 7

So what provisioning service (PVS) does that KMS become so difficult to implement. Well PVS provide read only image to multiple targets. What it means , once image (Windows 7 or windows 2008) is provided it will be in read mode. So after reboot all the change will be vanish.

Situation: You have VDI initiative going on and as per best practice KMS is recommended for all the image since it will be streamed via PVS. So these will first KMS deployment in the environment which will be service office 2010 and windows7 as well as windows 2008.

What kind of KMS should I go with Windows 2008R2/Windows7? It does matter because you cannot use windows7 KMS to activate windows 2008.

Now the question raised do we need 25 virtual or 25 physical devices to activate or else it will throw error 0xC004F038

The answer is you need just 25 PVS streamed VM which can be destroyed latter if you need less than that and it is KMS count to reach 25 and above.

From MS link

Installation of KMS is very easy . Download the KMS from MS and activate the OS on which it has been installed. Always use KMS key while activating as listed here

I have used following version of activation tool

Make sure the DNS TCP has this SRV record for KMS server. This may need to be created manually with highlighted setting. Make sure firewall is either made ON or necessary exception is added.

Now answering other question: Do I need windows 7 professional/Enterprise /Ultimate. So answer it does not matter for PVS which edition you are running on VM.

How to proceed :

1. Install OS and everything which is required on base OS.

2. Capture the OS using imaging wizard and make sure it becomes your golden image.

3. Now boot the image in private mode and make sure following is selected under private image

4. Now make sure you rearm the OS by running following command and when it prompt to reboot shut down the OS

5. Once target is shut down make sure you choose KMS under vDisk properties and mount it as standard

6. Once image is in standard mode , create atleast 30 machine using XenDesktop setup wizard. Login to any machine and run slmgr /dlv and it should show up like this. This mean machine is getting unique CMID . If not then grace period will be something different which I will explain latter.

7. While you run the same command slmgr /dlv on KMS server you will see the count starting from 1 and slowly increase. This counter increase over 60sec. So patience .

Add all the machine into VAMT console .

Once all the machine added update the status of machine. This scan PC using WMI for install MS product .If office is installed it will update the same

This will show all the office and windows 7 product

Now we need to activate all the product office as well as

If counter is reached to above 25 then for sure all the OS instance will be activated.

And you will see this message under windows properties

And on KMS server this is what you got

There is no separate setting for Office 2010 and it just worked without any count for 25 or anything :)

'

 

TROUBLESHOOTING:

If the counter is not increasing then you need to check if all the CMID are unique or not .If not then following blog from askcore

Also make sure you are using correct product key which is listed here.

Make sure you follow CTX128276 line by line . I spend two days because I did not follow following highlight

XenDesktop 5.6 PeakbufferSize and offpeakbuffer size reveled : Why only 3 desktop is powered ON

You may have 10 desktop in a desktop group but even after defining peak hours for 24 hour , desktop does not get into ready mode. These are personal desktop ,streamed pooled with PVD.

Still we have only 3 desktop powered ON

But if you see properties of Shared desktop you can find that , you have an option to increase or decrease the number of desktop

This is how the properties for desktop group look like

This is by nature  “A buffer is an extra, standby set of unallocated machines that are turned on, ready for users to connect. For shared desktop groups and unallocated machines in private desktop groups, desktops in the buffer are turned on when the number of machines in the pool drops below the threshold set by the buffer size. This is a percentage of the desktop group size (default is ten percent). For large desktop groups, a significant number of machines might therefore be turned on when the threshold is exceeded”

And to check this you can run following command

To change it you can just run the following command

Set-brokerdesktopgroup -name <insert desktop group name> -offpeakbuffersizepercent 100 -peakbuffersizepercent 100

Protocol Driver Error and SSL Error 29 : Proxy Access Denied

While launching desktop via AGEE , I started getting "Protocol error "

 

Under Virtual Server STA (DDC) were showing up and running

On web interface setting "Secure Access Setting"  all the  STA has been listed .

Desktop shows session has been initiated

After  un-checking  "Enable Session reliability " we gone ahead with Protocol driver error message

But now we started getting SSL 29 error . Though we were launching XenDesktop we were seeing XenApp related error.

From NetScaler we tried pining box and found box were reachable . But found that routing were undefined. We created IP subnet and then defined the VLAN .This allowed to launch the XenDesktop.