Provisioning Services XenDesktop Setup Wizard

Unlike the PVS Streamed VM Setup Wizard, the XenDesktop Setup Wizard is the newer machine deployment option offered by PVS and should in most cases be your method of choice when deploying extra target VMs to your Citrix environment.

The XenDesktop Setup Wizard creates the Delivery Group and imports the created VDA’s in to Citrix for you, automating part of the process.

When would you use Streamed VM Setup Wizard instead? When deploying machines that are not going to be part of your Citrix environment. PVS doesn’t just have to stream Citrix related VM’s. It can also stream non-Citrix related VM’s.

Within your PVS Console, right-click your Site and click XenDesktop Setup Wizard.

1-min

Click Next. 2-min

Enter one of your XenDesktop Delivery Controller addresses. A connection to your Hypervisor must be created in Studio. I am using XenServer. Click Next.3-min

Select your host resources and click Next. 4-min

Select the VM Template you wish to use and specify the VDA version. Click Next.5-min

Select the standard mode vDisk you wish to assign to the new Target Devices and click Next.6-min

Specify to create or use an existing Machine Catalog and click Next.7-min

Select which operating system is installed on the vDisk and click Next.8-min

Since I selected Desktop OS I must choose if these desktops will be persisted or not. Click Next.9-min

Specify the number of machines you want to create and hardware requirements. The hardware requirements are initially pre-populated from the VM Template we specified earlier. Select a local write cache disk size and the boot method. Click Next.

Note: If the vDisk you selected has a write cache such as Cache on server, the option to create a write cache disk will not be given, as expected.10-min

Select to create new or use existing Active Directory accounts and click Next.11-min

If creating new accounts, specify the Organizational Unit where the machines will reside and a naming convention. Click Next.12-minClick Finish after reviewing the summary. 13-min

Click Done once all devices have been created.14-min

The new device appears in XenCenter.15-min

The Target Device has been created along with a Device Collection called DesktopVDA which is the name we specified when choosing our Machine Catalog name. Take note of the MAC address that has been assigned.16-min

Over on XenCenter within the VM properties you can see the MAC is exactly the same. This means the machine is ready to network boot.17-min

The Machine Catalog DesktopVDA is created.18-min

CTXDT01 has already been added to the DesktopVDA Machine Catalog. Nice! 19-min


14 Comments

  • Luis Rodriguez

    April 1, 2017

    Bravo!

    Reply
  • Anonymous

    March 13, 2018

    excellent tutorial.

    Reply
  • Lalit Gopal Bansal

    June 8, 2018

    Hi,

    I couln’t see vdi desktops in Citrix Studio console which were created using xendesktop setup wizard in pvs console. However machines could be seen in vCenter and
    pvs console.
    Any suggestions…

    Reply
    • George Spiers

      June 8, 2018

      Desktops *should* appear under a Machine Catalog in Studio.

      Reply
  • saleem

    October 18, 2018

    I cant see host resources on XD setup though I have hosts connection added in studio

    Reply
    • George Spiers

      October 18, 2018

      What Hypervisor?

      Reply
  • Mahendra

    October 29, 2018

    George , a quick query…can I build a PVS Master image with Generation 2. I tried but it seems pxe boot is not supported by Generation 2. So it is failing everytime at the vdisk creation process.

    Reply
    • George Spiers

      October 29, 2018

      Yes PVS supports Generation 2 VMs, just make sure you are running a recent version of PVS.

      Reply
  • Mahendra

    December 25, 2018

    HI George,

    I am using PVS 7.15 LTSR. When running the XenDesktop streaming setup with BDM option the target device always fail. In the SCVMM console it creates the device assign a Network adapter and then remove it again. No other error logs. Any suggestion? When I run the XenDesktop streaming setup with PXE option it is creating the device.

    Regards,
    Mahendra

    Reply
    • George Spiers

      December 27, 2018

      Not sure, are any disks attached to the VM Template? Are you using HDD or ISO for the BDM media? There must be SCVMM logs to show why the creation is failing. I would imagine that something in SCVMM is causing this.

      Reply
  • Refael Shraga

    December 30, 2018

    Hi George,
    I am using PVS 7.15 LTSR with SCVMM 2016. When running the XenDesktop setup, I do not see all the templates that are currently on the SCVMM . Any suggestion?
    Regards,
    Rafael

    Reply
    • George Spiers

      December 30, 2018

      On a template that does not show, set “Guest OS profile” to “Non – customization not required”.

      Reply
      • Anonymous

        December 30, 2018

        thank you!

        Reply
  • jean-marc pigeon

    September 2, 2020

    Hello, I’m face of a issue when i use the “citrix virtual Desktop Setup Wizard” in PVS. I used the service account in PVS and also in vcenter. if I create one machine with xxx-### (xxx-001) machine that works but after if I want to create xxx-### for having a machine ending by 002. That do not works. if I change the name of the machine, that work….stranger thing. It seams that that can’t enumerate the machine name. and vcenter says that (clone virtual mahcine unable to access the virtual machine configuration”

    Reply

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