How to increase the VCPU of MCS provisioned machines. The VCPU and memory for a machine in the machine catalog is displayed in the Studio. To increase the VCPU follow the following steps 1) On the XenDekstop controller launch the powershell 2) Load the snapins asnp citrix. 3) Run the command Get-ProvScheme “Name of Catalog to Modify VCPU”.
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- Afternoon all, I am trying to link Citrix Cloud in with a clients local VMware infrastructure to support MCS. I am able to add the connection and resources to the point where it then wants a network selected but nothing is available. The connection to the hypervisor works ok, i am able to see the.
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Intro
Considering recent published articles surrounding Citrix Cloud I think it is important to remind institutions out there of the benefits. I will highlight (very briefly) 13 advantages about the Citrix Cloud (There are many more) and provide a link to a great article by fellow CTP Nicolas Ignoto on feature requests that should be incorporated in to the solution.
SQL Backend
This is a big one. If you have multiple resource locations on premises traditionally you are wanting multiple SQL servers for your Xenapp Sites back end. Moving to Citrix Cloud eliminates this. You also now can use WEM as a fully integrated cloud service meaning you do not have to worry about costly SQL. Have you checked how much SQL costs in Azure?
High Availability
All infrastructure is HA (Highly Available). Your Desktop Delivery Controllers (Brokers), license Servers, Studio, Director, SQL. Think of the comparable cost with IAAS or on premises.
Automatic Patching
All infrastructure is automatically upgraded. Citrix takes care of this for you eliminating the need to plan patch management. Hotfixes and Security patches are not your worry when it comes to the infrastructure components.
Always Latest Software
The infrastructure components are automatically upgraded to latest Citrix versions. You are on latest technology that is thoroughly tested before deployment. You get latest features and improvements.
License Usage
With the Citrix Xenapp and Xendesktop Service you can easily control your license usage. The licences are user licenses as there is no concurrent unless you subscribe to the full Workspace services, however you do get 2 for 1 trade up deals and hybrid rights usage. This allows you to continue using your on premises solution whilst migrating (testing) the Citrix Cloud. At time of writing I believe you have a 3 year transition period. The other advantage is you are eligible to release licenses after 30 days compared to 90 days for on premises environments.
Unified Management
You can easily manage multiple resource locations from one single unified management plane. This reduces the need for costly infrastructure at multiple site locations.
Smart Scale
You have the ability of controlling costs by using Smart Scale. This helps reduce the cost of your workloads in Azure, AWS or Xenserver (on premises). Think of the way public clouds incur cost by billing per minute. You can now have workloads running only during core operational hours or reduce workloads as users reduce.
Hidden Costs
Hard one to prove but if you think that there is an additional cost with Cloud you should think of the hidden cost savings also. Reduced tin, reduced operational costs, freeing up time and resource to concentrate on other initiatives, not worrying about upgrade cycles, multiple infrastructure in resource locations, easy central management, easy image management, monitoring capability included.
WEM
This will be a fully integrated Cloud service allowing you to improve the workspace experience for your users. Improve logon times by moving GPP to this service. Apply CPU and memory optimisations. The SQL back-end is managed by Citrix.
Smart Check
This is an automatic health check for your site. No need to deploy agents if you have the Xenapp and Xendesktop Cloud Service. You will receive diagnostics on your sites health such as machines in maintenance mode, services that are stopped and any back-end communication issues.
Simple Image Management
You have the ability to use MCS and PVS (on premises) via the Citrix Cloud. (Granted you do have this ability on premises -So maybe this one does not count.)
Cloud Agnostic
You can choose your Cloud of choice. There is no Cloud lock in. Citrix Cloud is public Cloud agnostic. Managing multiple resource locations in different public Clouds is easy.
Easy On boarding and ability to make POC
The time it takes to request a trial is up for debate but when you compare this to the time it takes to get traditional POC concepts running it is not that bad. This will be improved but it is easy to transition a on premises deployment to a running Citrix Cloud Xenapp and Xendesktop Service. We are talking hours and not days here!
Workspace App
Finally, you are able to take advantage of the Workspace experience using the Workspace APP which is an all in one place to go to use multiple resources you need on a daily basis. Whether it is Sharefile apps, Saas Apps, Web Apps, Xenapp/ Xendesktop Apps, on- premises, Cloud etc, you can browse and search for your resource through one easy to use Workspace App experience when linked to the Workspace in the Xenapp and Xendesktop Service.
Conclusion
Citrix Cloud is evolving and is improving and does have its limitations. I feel it is important to highlight some advantages though in the wake of some recent Citrix Cloud bashing. My fellow CTP’s provide a constructive article on the limitations that are being worked upon that is worth a read. The aim for this article is to provide some Yin and Yang to the pro’s and cons of the solution.
I found out the hard way that there are somethings that should remain untouched when it comes to Citrix MCS and Nutanix AHV. I’m hoping this post help others who may have come across similar issues.
TLDR; Do not delete XDSNAP Snapshots on AHV if you are using Citrix MCS for your Virtual Apps and Desktops with the hosting on Nutanix.
Background
I recently deployed a Nutanix cluster to utilise Citrix Cloud with Nutanix AHV (AOS 5.8.2) as the hosting. This solution uses Citrix MCS with Citrix App Layering for the purpose of image management.
The Virtual Apps and Desktops portion of this cluster is utilising Citrix Cloud in a hybrid setup – Citrix Delivery Controllers are on Citrix Cloud whereas the VDAs and StoreFront servers are on-prem. All on-prem servers are Windows Server 2016 based VMs.
Once all the catalogs, delivery groups and VDAs were all set and tested I decided to do some house cleaning in AHV because I noticed a lot of orphaned snapshots when building Machine Catalogs. So I logged into one of the CVMs and take a look at the snapshots that were on the cluster.
Citrix Mcs Pvs
I noticed a lot of snapshots existed that started with XDSNAPxxxxxpreparationxxx. I noticed that when I create a Machine Catalog a preparation VM is created, booted and the deleted so I just figured the process just doesn’t remove the leftover snapshot. Being the clean freak that I am, I decided to remove these seemingly orphaned and unused snapshots.
So off I went acli snapshot.delete XDNAP*. All went well and the overall running of the cluster and VM was unchanged. Happy with my house cleaning I proceeded to move through the project and started towards a Pilot phase.
Here is where things started to get a little weird.
The Issue
Just before going into pilot I wanted to test image updates and more specifically scheduled restarts from Citrix Studio (Citrix Cloud). So I created a new Image in Citrix App Layering, published to the cluster and then went through the process of updating the Machine Catalog with the latest image ready to update the VDAs during the scheduled restart window that I had configured on the Delivery Groups. This restart was scheduled to restart the VDAs at 1:30am. I finished up for the day and went home expecting that by the time i got back to work the next day the VDAs would be updated with the new image.
When I got to work the next day however, all the VDAs were powered off. I figured that there must have been some sort of glitch so I tried to power on the VDAs from the Citrix Studio console. Nothing. I tried again. Still nothing. Thinking that it might be an issue with that VM I tried to power on another VDA from Citrix Studio in another machine catalog. Nada. Manually powering on the VM from the Nutanix side obviously works and the power state is reflected in Citrix Studio but the VM does not get the updated image as the power on command needs to come from Citrix Studio. Given that the VM was now on, I decided to see if the shutdown command worked from Studio – it did.
So now I was extremely confused. The shutdown command works but not the start command. How was this possible.
I started troubleshooting.
- Refreshed my Citrix Cloud session
- Deleted the VDAs and recreated
- Checked that the HostedMachineID in Citrix Cloud matched the VM ID in Nutanix
- Found the Powershell command to start the VDA from Citrix Cloud – Powershell command was accepted but still nothing happened.
At this point I figured there was an issue between the Citrix Cloud Connector (on-prem VM) where the Nutanix AHV plugin was installed and the Nutanix API to start the VM. So I grabbed the Citrix CDFTrace tool and ran it on the Citrix Cloud Connector VM, Started a trace and tried to power on the VM. There was nothing in the logs from the CDFTracte tool that told me that a command was ever received to start the VM. There was however logs to show me that the shutdown command was sent to Nutanix and that it worked.
There was definitely something going on with the communication from Citrix Cloud to Nutanix. By now I had a case open with Nutanix and Citrix. Neither of which could tell me what was going on or why this was happening. I was confused.
The Resolution
The solution to this problem was super simple. So simple it is almost comedic.
Given that this issue was going on far too long and I know this had worked in the past I decided to go back to square one. I deleted the VMs, and also deleted the Machine Catalogs. I decided to leave the Delivery Groups in place as I would be re-creating the Machine Catalogs anyway.
I created a catalog, watched the preparation VM startup and shutdown and then the catalog was created successfully. I added the VMs created with that new catalog to an existing Delivery Group and what do you know, the VMs started. I wasn’t entirely surprised because I knew this had worked in the past.
Once the VMs had started and the VDAs were registered I did some testing. Shutdown the VM from Citrix Studio and it worked instantly. The real test was powering it back on with Citrix Studio. I crossed my fingers clicked the start button. Waited a few seconds and up came the VM! It had worked! 🙃 I waited for it to register and repeated the process. It had worked a second time.
Now that one of the catalogs was working I set about re-creating the remaining catalogs and performed the same tests. Worked. Every. Time. 🤗
The one ting I did differently this time? I didn’t delete the XDSNAP snapshot that is created when the Machine Catalog is created.
The End
Multiple days have passed now and the VMs are restarting as they should according to their schedules without any issue.
Citrix Cloud Mcs
The XDSNAP is the master vDisk of the Machine Catalog. When you remove it, everything will ok until a reboot. The master vDisk will be the source of all reads at first, later, data is moved locally for performance and scalability hence why it works while still running. Remove it and the initial reads will fail. the only point at which these snapshots can be deleted is when you have pushed an upaded image and all VDAs have rebooted and are now running off the new image.
Citrix Cloud Mcs Aws
Bottom line is – Don’t delete your snapshots too quickly.
Citrix Mcs Azure
Thank you to Kees Baggerman (Nutanix) for the explanation of how the XDSNAP is used.