Citrix VDI

Haven't had much time to post lately as we're deep in our Citrix VDI build at work. Our lead VDI engineer left the firm about the same time our hardware arrived, which means I am not the full time engineer on the project, which I'm sincerely enjoying as it affords me the opportunity to learn and really familiarize myself with our XenDesktop 4, PVS 5.6 SP1, XenApp 6 environment. The downside is I definitely am caught spinning my wheels sometimes simply because I'm not that familiar with the technology. As a result, below is a list of a few things that I've learned thus far that is not documented on Citrix's site that may be useful for others experiencing similar issues:

1. When installing UPM on Windows XP VDIs, change the default installation location to C:\Citrix\ProfMgr. Supposedly, it can handle 8.3 filenames (filenames like C:\Prog~\Citrix\Prof), however we never got it working in our environment, even though 8.3 filenames are enabled.
2. When working on the GoldenImage or vdisk in private mode, make sure you delete all domain user profiles before XenConverting or putting the vdisk in standard mode. Otherwise UPM will complain of log file issues as it can't write to the log file because the log file is read-only, imprinted in the user profile on the vdisk, which is read-only
   
3. XenDesktop 4 does not like MS SQL 2008 SP2. While SQL 2008 is not officially supported, we've had no issues using it until SP2 was applied. Once SP2 was applied, XenDesktop continued to work, but could not reliably determine the power state of the VDIs and the XenDesktop Setup Wizard would always fail on the PVS with an error of "Invalid Host ID" when trying to create the desktop gropu
   
4. Make sure to check the "Manage Machine Account Password" on the VDisk File properties! Otherwise you'll have a nightmare of AD issues and the VDIs won't register using the Desktop Agent to the DDC
5. In a somewhat unique environment, we are required to stream to two separate VLANs. To accomplish this, we teamed two of our physical NICs on our PVS servers and trunked the teamed connection to each VLAN. This alone will not accomplish streaming to both VLANs as both the TFTP service and Provisioning Server Two Stage Boot Process only listen on one NIC by default. If you try opening the tftp.cpl control panel, it only allows you to check one adapter for the service. As for the PVS two-stage boot process control panel (.cpl), we couldn't even get it to open on our 2008 R2 Server. To allow the services to listen on all adapters, go into the registry HKLM\System\Controlset001\services\\parameters, clear the value of the "Adapter" reg key. If you run a netstat -a you'll see the service is listening on 0.0.0.0 *.*
6. Due to a client security requirement, TFTP is disallowed in the environment. As a result, we use boot ISOs to boot to our VDisks. Through trial and error, we discovered that to boot to an empy vdisk for the first time, you must use PXE boot (and subsequently, TFTP). You cannot use a boot iso when first creating a vdisk.

Off the top of my head, that's all I can think of right now. As we continue through our build phase, I will continue to supplement this list.