Thursday 28 April 2011

XenApp 6 and Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2

No-one who has had a production XenApp 6 system since mid-last year would claim they have had no issues, but with all the latest hotfixes from MS and Citrix we do seem to be getting closer to stability, and a big part of this is Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2. 

This is something of a relief after I tried using the beta of SP1 last year – that broke XenApp altogether!

Citrix have said that they support the use of XenApp 6 with 2008 R2 SP1, and I can confirm that I have SP1 servers in production already and they are working perfectly – well, at least no worse than the non SP1 servers!

Citrix do have a page of known issues with SP1, though they appear to be fixed if you have installed the first XenApp 6 hotfix

Known issues: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX126711

Hotfix: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX125388

Apart from any general improvements and security fixes Microsoft have made, there are several which appear to be included in SP1 and are especially useful for XenApp 6 servers:

  • KB975777 (delays shutting down systems)
  • KB979530 (connections denied during heavy logon and logoff conditions)
  • KB980663 (stop error during heavy logon and logoff conditions)
  • KB2265716 (server stops randomly if heavily using group policy and SCOM)
  • KB2383928 (remote sessions to not completely exit)

I would still install this post-SP1 patch by the way:

  • KB2465772 (causes XenApp to stop randomly with lots of 7011 errors about services being unresponsive – a very long standing problem for us)

Personally by the way, I would probably rebuild servers with SP1 installed from the start, rather than add SP1 onto a server which has been in use for a long time.  But then XenApp servers like being rebuilt now and then.

As a note, when I installed Service Pack 1 on a server which was already operational and had the EdgeSight Agent running, I then got an EdgeSight Operational Alert:

Error:  An unrecoverable, fatal database error has occurred.  Shutting down the Citrix System Monitoring Agent.

Nice.  EdgeSight carried on working afterwards though.

1 comments:

faruk said...

vary good windows server tips.thanks
alherabd

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