A Provisioning Services vDisk boot menu appears when the user is starting a provisioned Virtual Machine, but what if you want to start the Virtual Machine unattended.
Author Jack Posted on October 19, 2012 Categories Provisioning Services Tags 6.1, boot menu, Citrix, CTX135299, default, Provisioning Services, PVS6.1, vDisk Leave a comment on Setting vDisk boot menu as a default option.
Caution! This fix requires you to edit the registry. Using Registry Editor incorrectly can cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. Citrix cannot guarantee that problems resulting from the incorrect use of Registry Editor can be solved. Use Registry Editor at your own risk. Be sure to back up the registry before you edit it.”
- There is a registry setting that also tells PvD to not cache the profile (and thereby save PvD disk space). This is required when managing the profile with a separate technology such as Citrix Profile Management to prevent PvD from redirecting the profile onto the vDisk configure: KEY: 'HKLM Software Citrix personal vDisk Configuration'.
- This version is unavailable until the merge completes. After the merge completes, the status of the new version depends on the access mode selected on the Mode to set the vDisk to after automatic merge drop-down list (Production, Maintenance, or Test). The default Farm Properties setting is available on the vDisk Versions tab.
- Also you can specify the size of the personal vDisk, by default it’s divided by a ratio of 50 by 50% for profile/personal data and installed applications. This ratio will not fit most organizations and can be changed via registry settings as described in this article by Nick Rintalan.
- Set the boot option as the first option in the start menu.
Setting Vdisk Boot Menu As A Default Optional About Citrix Account
- On all Provisioning Services servers, open the Registry Editor and browse to HKLMSoftwareCitrixProvisioningServices
- Right-click Provisioning Services, click New, then DWORD Value “SkipBootMenu”.
Setting Vdisk Boot Menu As A Default Optional About Citrix Workspace
- Double-click the new DWORD and give it a Value data of 1 (a value of 0 will enable normal boot menu behavior).
- Restart the Citrix Provisioning Services Stream Service on the Provisioning Services server(s).
View the original post here on the Citrix Knowledgebase.
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By James Rankin | 28th February 2012
Bit of a digression from my usual fare, but I thought I’d briefly share this as it was a slightly strange problem, and one that had me in a flap for a few minutes 🙂 I was booting a XenApp server from a shared Provisioning Services 5.1 disk image in Standard (read-only) mode a few days back and I noticed that on my Start Menu was a whole list of programs I’d just used before the restart. Now that shouldn’t have happened….and a quick look at the PVS notification area icon confirmed that indeed the disk was in Private (writable) mode. Cue me moving straight to the console – where this disk was listed as being in Standard mode. Yeah, what?
To make matters worse the server had started up in an OU where software was deployed via startup scripts (I know, horrible) so if the disk image really was in Private mode I’d just baked a whole host of apps (and static routes as well – ugh!) into an image that was intended for use by a whole slew of different customers. Why on earth was there a discrepancy between what the server using the image reported, and what the console thought was going on? Making me even more confused was the fact that another server was using the same image and had it showing correctly in Standard mode.
Naturally my next move was to have a look at the vDisk files on the stores in the PVS servers. And this is where I found out that these vDisks were being replicated by DFS – but someone had gone and helpfully turned the replication off. I don’t know a lot about PVS (yet – Mr Webster is constantly feeding me new titbits about it), but the timestamps of the image files were different on one PVS server to the other, and this is what made me go and check the DFS settings (which to be fair, you wouldn’t expect to be disabled). I don’t yet know how PVS replicates information like the startup mode, but it seemed to me that this was what had made one server think it had Write access to the vDisk. Once I assigned the PVS image to the server with the latest timestamp, rather than using the load-balanced pair, the image booted up in Standard mode on all systems as I would have expected.
So, if you see a discrepancy like this, take a look at the timestamps on the actual vDisk files. If there’s a big difference, you may have an issue with your replication.