One of the issues I came across recently is, users complained that their VDIs are either not responding on Monday i.e., they just spins for ever or desktop viewer shows up with a gray screen. They have to call helpdesk to reset their VDI. Then they can login and use it till friday. On Monday same issue re-occurs.
I first checked the tasks history on user’s VDI in VMware. I noticed that there are power on events in VMware almost every day.
Steps to resolve certificate issue in Macbook (1) Log in to a Windows installation and use Internet Explorer to browse to the Citrix connection URL. This will force your Windows system to evaluate the SSL certificate chain used by the site and install any missing intermediate certificates into the Windows certificate store.
(2) Open Internet Options from Internet Explorer and got to the “Content” tab and click “Certificates”, select the “Intermediate certification Authorities” tab in the following dialog window.
One of the issues where users might end up in bad mornings is at loading their VDI. If their UPM profile is huge, it takes long time for them to login. In case if we end up a user with long logon time issues, we will first have a look at user’s citrix UPM profile. We have to identify the exact profile folder and rename it or identify huge files in UPM folder and move them to other location.
Issue “The desktop ‘xxxxxx’ is temporarily unavailable due to planned maintenance” error for a xendesktop VDI. Registration state shows registered, but for user it always shows the error.
Solution Login to the desktop as Administrator. Restart the Citrix Personal vDisk Service. In Studio, check if Registration State is registered and PVD State is not failed. If not, reboot the desktop and check both registration and PVD state again and then try to launch the desktop.
Issue: Citrix VDI specs: Windows 10, 1607 version.
User’s end point specs: Dell windows 10 1709 version.
Start webex meeting in citrix VDI - works fine. But when webex video is started, it crashes the citrix HDX engine stopped working.
Event viewer entry:
Faulting application name: WFICA32.EXE, version: 14.9.4000.9, time stamp: 0x5b7a823f Faulting module name: swscale-4.dll, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x5807d28d Exception code: 0xc0000005 Fault offset: 0x00030922 Faulting process id: 0x4330 Faulting application start time: 0x01d44cab61bfe2d1 Faulting application path: C:\PROGRA~2\Citrix\ICACLI~1\WFICA32.
Tools that I came across in my day to day troubleshooting:
Autoruns - shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and when you start various built-in Windows applications like Internet Explorer, Explorer and media players. CDFControl - CDFControl utility is an event tracing controller or consumer for capturing CDF trace messages displayed from various Citrix tracing providers. Refer to CTX111961 - CDFControl to download the CDFControl utility.
Citrix Provisioning provides an auditing tool that records configuration actions on components within the provisioning farm, to the provisioning database. The auditing tool provides administrators with a way to troubleshoot and monitor recent changes that might impact system performance and behavior.
Administrator privileges determine the audit information that can be viewed and the menu options that are visible. For example, a Farm Administrator can view all audit information within the farm.
The administrative role assigned to a user, or a group of users, controls the ability to view and manage objects within a Citrix Provisioning implementation. All members within a group share administrative privileges within a farm. An administrator may have multiple roles if they belong to more than one group. Groups are managed at the farm level through the Console’s Farm Properties window.
The following roles exist within a Citrix Provisioning farm:
Citrix Provisioning is software streaming technology that delivers patches, updates, and other configuration information to multiple virtual desktop endpoints through a shared desktop image. It centralizes virtual machine management while reducing the operational and storage costs of a virtualized desktop environment.
Using citrix provisioning, you can stream OS from a single vhd/vhdx file to multiple VMs in your data center. Some of the benefits with citrix provisioning include:
This would reduce your storage footprint, as all the VMs would get OS from a single vhd/vhdx file from PVS.
When offline database support is enabled on the farm, a snapshot of the database is created and initialized at server startup. It is then continually updated by the Stream Process. If the database becomes unavailable, the Stream Process uses the snapshot to get information about the Provisioning Server and the target devices available to the server; this allows Provisioning Servers and target devices to remain operational. However, when the database is offline, Citrix Provisioning management functions and the Console become unavailable.
