Pablo Legorreta

Now that Citrix XenServer's feature set has expanded one of the questions that I commonly get is "How do you monitor XenServer?" While this will greatly depend on how complex the environment is and what the administrators would like to ultimately monitor. For starters, most of the data that can be collected from XenServer will be in the form of an RRDTool file as the performance monitoring counters are stored in that format. Some of the tools that I have seen customers use in the past are:

In recent conversations with enterprise customers, it has become very noticeable that Provisioning Server 6.0 and 6.1 have multiple issues that span anywhere from vDisks not being able to connect to their respective servers, black screens when attempting to stream an image to a target device, problems with IPs and DNS entries not working properly on those devices and failures to capture an image.

With the new installment of Citrix XenServer, there have been some modifications to the CLI commands, Bjorn Andersson from Diverse Tips has created a very nice printable PDF poster that encompasses all of the XE commands available for this new version of XenServer. The image below is a preview of what is available on this PDF poster.

In Citrix XenServer environments I have seen issues with logs filling up the entire Dom0 storage allocation. The reason behind this is that XenServer logrotate feature can break as it cannot parse the size parameter properly and this results in the dom0 Storage allocation becoming full, caused by overgrown Log Files. Since Citrix frowns upon the modification of the default size of this drive, there are a few things that can be done in order to avoid this issue.

Upon working in environments with the brand new Provisioning Server 6.0, I have ran across a bnistack corruption issue. This issue exists in PVS 5.6SP2 environments and ended up in the latest releases of PVS 6.0. If you are running into some weird profile corruption problems or random loss of data within a Provisioned image this could very well be the reason why. Citrix currently does not have an official hotfix release for this problem, however, this issue can be fixed for both PVS 5.6SP2 and PVS 6.0 using the hotfix that is available here:

With the new release of Provisioning Server 6, there are already a good number of reported hotfixes. Of particular attention is the last patch listed below which can make PVS stop working all-together.

I have noticed that quite a large population of people are having issues with Provisioning Server 5.6 SP1. Knowing that it is difficult to keep track of hotfixes that are sometimes not even listed under the Citrix support site, I decided to compile my own list of current hotfixes. I recommend looking into the following hotfixes if you are implementing or upgrading to this solution in a production environment:

The following are the latest available hotfixes for XenApp 6.5 along with their highlights: