Citrix Provisioning Server High Availability

Since this week is a short week for us, being that Thanksgiving is tomorrow, we decided to work with our Disaster Recovery specialist on certifying our XenDesktop, XenApp, and Provisioning Server Infrastructure. Let me note that most DR tests that are conducted here usually take a full week. Being the overconfident guys that we are, we scheduled 3 days. This is where this blog starts to unfold as I explain an issue we had during our testing.

Print Spooler Crashing - HpTcpMon.dll

Today I ran into an issue on my own PC *gasp*. I was chugging away at creating some documentation and when I finally finished the document I needed to print it out. I clicked on Print and suddenly.....  No Printers Found. I scratched my head for exactly 3 seconds (not really, but figured I would add some intensity) and started looking into why I had no more printers. The first thing that I looked at was to see if the Print Spooler service was running, of course, it was not. I started it up and it started successfully, I then looked at my SCCM guy and blamed him for a patch that he must have snuck on my computer.

Some Tips for Provisioning Server 2008 R2 Images

I was building a Citrix Provisioning image today and ran a couple of steps for performance reasons and figured I would share some of the things I usually do every time I put a vdisk in Private mode. This is of course not all of the performance tips I do, just some of the ones that came up today.

Introduction

Since this is my first blog and I am completely new to blogging, I might as well introduce myself and elaborate on some of my goals. First of all, my name is Jonathan. I am currently a Network Administrator for an enterprise sized organization (14,000+ employees). I have been in Information Technology for about 9 years and started by working at a call center. There are many things that one can learn from a call center, specifically customer service. How come no one every called me to say hello and let me know that their service was still up and running? I always had to deal with the customers who lost service, or had performance issues. Of course, somehow that was my personal fault... but we must take it in strides.

Since then, I have moved my way up the technology tree to where I am today. Although my title says Network Administrator, my primary focus is on anything and everything Citrix related. I deal with XenApp, XenDesktop, XenServer, Netscaler, and all the pieces the are required below and above those technologies to keep them running.

The primary reason I wanted to start writing a blog was to keep myself keen on new technologies as well as taking the opportunity to sharpen my writing skills. My hope is that I will be able to help other people in resolving some of their issues that cannot be easily found using <*pick your favorite search engine*>.

Please enjoy.