• Category Archives Windows 2008

  • Citrix Configuration Logging Error

    Posted on by Phillip Jones Comment

    Sometimes old bugs come back to bite us when we least expect them, we believe them to be solved. This has been the week of old bugs. On a deployment of Citrix XenApp 5.0 on Windows 2008 (x86) I was setting up Configuration logging.

    I should get the following message upon completion of the wizard.

    Instead I was greeted with the following message
    Invalid username or password.

    With some healthy google searches, I happened upon the following Citrix Forum post describing what I was experiencing.. I then asked the customer if they had a capital S as the first character of the password. BINGO.

    We created another account for configuration logging, tested and bingo we were able to set up the connection to the database, we verified the issue also by testing it first with a capital S and without and were able to duplication the issue.

    Issue: Configuration logging fails for administrators whose SQL Server password starts with a capital letter S.

    Resolution: Change the password to not use Capital S as the first character or use a different account for Configuration logging.

    Note: This issue has been resolved in most of the current releases of Citrix via hotfixes and rollup packs but currently there is no hotfix for XenApp 5 for Windows 2008.

     


    Capital S Citrix Configuration Logging Error invalid username or password password Windows 2008 XenApp 5

  • Shrinking VHD Files for Xenserver and Citrix PVS

    Posted on by Phillip Jones 1 Comment

    A question that often comes up when working with Dynamic vDisk when using Citrix Provisioning Server is does PVS automatically shrink the vDisk or is there a built in method to compact them. Citrix PVS does not have a way to do this automatically but with a few steps this can save some disk space on your storage.

    ** Update: 9/23 You can find the PowerShell script to Shrink VHD files here

    A good use case is lets say you clean up your images and remove old programs, installation files and things you no longer need, you will notice the file size does not go down. In order to maximize your storage investment, you want to keep these images as small as possible so you can do this on a regular basis.

    This method can also be used to shrink any VHD files which are used by Hyper-V, Citrix PVS, and you can even configure Windows 2008 and Windows 7 to use VHD files.

    Basic steps

    1. Make a copy of the VHD file that you have to compact 
    2. Open Server Manager
    3. Expand Storage
    4. Right-click on Disk Management on the server.
    5. Select Attach VHD.
    6. Select the required VHD File (The VHD appears as a volume on the server.)
    7. Defragment the drive for performance and storage optimization. (After defragmentation and optimization, the data on the VHD is now all at the beginning of the disk and defragmented.)
    8. Detach the VHD from within Disk Management. (Ensure that you do not delete the VHD when you are detaching the VHD.)
    9. Run the DISKPART command from a command Window.
    10. Run the following commands, substituting the path to your VHD file
      1. select vdisk file =”c:pathvdisk.vhd”
      2. attach vdisk readonly
      3. compact vdisk
      4. detach vdisk 
      5. exit

    Coming soon I will write a script that will execute against a folder and compact all VHD files in the folder. Keep an eye out here for that script 🙂 


    Citrix Compact Hyper-V Provisioning Server PVS VHD Windows 2008