GrinchyNet

I have been battling with Citrix for a couple of months now, namely XenDesktop. I had it somewhat working at one point and the somehow broke it, don't remember exactly how but I did. Other projects came up that took my attention away from Citrix until about a week ago. My supervisor tasked me with rolling out 35 thin clients and gave me until this Friday to get it done. I had exactly two weeks to accomplish something I had been fighting and losing badly to for months. Today I finally won.

So I started my task last week and immediately ran into issues. None of the virtual desktops would register with the Desktop Delivery Controller (DDC). I followed every bit of advice I could find online to no avail. Occasionally I would get six out of the 20 to register but that did me no good. The only thing I was hoping for was the release of XenDesktop 4.0 which came out this past Monday.

I battled with this all last week and convinced myself the new version would fix it. Monday morning I came in and promptly downloaded the new version. While that was going on I uninstalled the old version and got to reading the new documentation. Not much had changed as far as installation and management went so that was good.

Once everything was downloaded I got to installing. Everything there went smooth. I then rebuilt my base desktop which was the template for the virtual desktop images. After that was complete I built out 10 of the 35 needed desktops as my base test. Amazingly all ten registered with the DDC without and problems. So far so good.

As an initial test I tried connecting to one of the desktops using the web interface. This is when things went sour. Luckily it was the end of the day so I left it confident I would conquer all on Tuesday.

Tuesday came and I immediately set to work. I tried the web interface again and sure enough it failed. I could see I was making a connection but it would time out and tell me I didn't have a server configured. I did everything any other sysadmin would do. I made sure I had good solid connectivity to the servers by IP and hostname. I double checked all my configuration settings. I could find nothing wrong. So as a last ditch effort I posted to the Citrix support forums. I went back and forth with one guy and did everything he asked but still nothing.
I then had the bright idea that there was something wrong with the web interface. The Citrix interface was sharing a webserver that also had Sharepoint on it. Maybe that was causing a conflict. So as I left for the day I made the decision to take down Sharepoint, luckily Sharepoint isn't being used at the moment.

This morning I came in and dismantled Sharepoint. I redid the Citrix web interface and tried again. No luck. I got a reply on the forum talking about not being able to resolve the hostname of the virtual desktop through the ica connection. So I tried pinging one of the desktops and got nothing. Odd. I check DHCP and notice that my desktops had two IP address leases and both were registered in DNS. Unfortunately for me this doesn't work. I forgot to clear DHCP when I redid the virtual desktops. Since they had new MAC addresses they pulled new IPs instead of using the old lease. Once I cleared that up everything worked smoothly. I was able to get a desktop through the web interface and my thin clients worked.

A lot of learning occurred and that is good. I am planning on getting some Citrix tutorials done up but don't know when I will have time for that. I kind of want to overhaul the site first though but that will have to wait.

Anyone else out there messing with virtual desktops? Have any horror stories to share? I would love to hear about them so I don't feel so alone.