The desktop virtualization industry is relatively young, but it is already full of myths and tales. One of the most popular -which is told by a number of our competitors whenever they get an opportunity To- is the image management with XenDesktop. It tells customers and partners on how complex image management is to install and it is even more difficult to use.
One of my favorite statements comes from our friends at VMware. They say: "Both PVS and MCS are too hard for leaner IT teams to use, and many XenDesktop deployments blocked by the complexity of managing the image"
in this series. blog, I will try to "myth bust" these claims. But do not I will not worry mention all the "independent" studies! instead, you'll see a bunch of screenshots and videos and I'll try to be as transparent as possible on how the results were gathered.
Now, put on your helmet and follow me down in the dungeon image management see who is called "darkest" of all Citrix technologies by competitors :. Provisioning services (PVS)
This is the PVS console:
Looks scary?. eh ..
here you can see:
to create a new vDisk-which can then be disseminated down to an unlimited number of target Peripherals- you need to have some kind of IP network, a DHCP server and you need to follow these three steps:
- install Citrix Provisioning server
- system installation physical or virtual that can be used as a master
- Install the PVS target device drivers on the master system
Last but not least, you must run the wizard picture on PVS the master. This wizard guides you cross the 7-step process that can be completed in a minute or two. Below you can find a video describing the full procedure:
Now the most complex part of an installation procedure / Procurement Services configuration is finished. In fact, I can already hear our competitors shout "Hey, you skipped network integration portion! Customers should consider DHCP and PXE and BDM and multi-homing and sooo much more ...! ". Well, there are certainly very large scale environments or with specific requirements you really need to spend some thoughts on how to transmit information PVS Bootstrap (DHCP, PXE or BDM) or how the traffic streaming is discharged to the dedicated network adapters (eg multi-homing). But this is not an average customer with a need for couples to hundreds or thousands of desktops. in this case, you just with the default configuration, which means:
- Do not touch your DHCP Ensure your field are available IP addresses
- .. run the PXE service on each PVS server. So do not uncheck that option during installation and go with the default.
- Just use a single network adapter PVS on your server and the target. Even a connection / s 1 Gbit can transfer round about 115 MB per second. That's a lot of data. Much more than a virtual desktop or XenApp server will be read from the disk during normal operations.
If you are one of the clients who can not go with the default configuration, see related article eDocs and the Handbook of Citrix Virtual Desktop, which provides guidance detailed design around it. That being said, back to the previous line of good. We created the new Provisioning Services vDisk. So now you can listen to the newly created vDisk for some physical systems, create a bunch of new virtual machines using the PVS installation wizard that can integrate these virtual machines in XenDesktop immediately ( I'll post a video of that later) or you assign to existing targets. Now some of you may say "Ahh ... here it comes ... This is the complicated part ... That makes PVS therefore unusable ...." I'm sorry, but I have to disappoint you. Assigning a vDisk is actually quite simple You.
- Click on a vDisk
- drag it to a collection of devices
- Click Yes
now we can start the target. So devices, each system is booting from the exact same hard drive (or vDisk in this case). this means that each system has the same configuration and the same applications installed. But although all systems start from the same hard drive, each system has a unique name and is linked to an account single computer in Active Directory. Provisioning Services magic is that these changes are made on the fly during startup. So there is no need to run scripts and start a few times with VMware View Composer. Imagine the power that is in the management of 50, 100, 1,000, 10,000 or even more systems. To demonstrate the power PVS is, I created another short video in which I will deploy Microsoft Office 2013 Windows 8.1 target and then return to a Windows 7 image with Office installed. I know this is not really a use case in real life, but I think it's a pretty nice demo but ... 
I hope I was able to break the myth of Provisioning Server is too complex for most iT staff can not cope.
in the next blog in this series, I'll take a look at XenDesktop Machine Creation Services, another beast in the image management dungeon.
PS: One final note. I am fully aware and I am sure that you are also the management of the image is more than the establishment of infrastructure and delivery of basic procedures I described in this post. We made a number of white papers discuss in detail (eg CTX133786). But the intent of this blog was to focus on some of the technical aspects in XenDesktop / PVS rather than providing an image from start to finish
-Thomas
Follow me on Twitter :. @ Tberger80
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