Troubleshooting PVS™ Streaming Service and console issues

Citrix PVS is a technology that provides us with an alternate procedure to clone and deploy large number of machines efficiently. This technology allows us to create clones for both XenDesktop and XenApp.

We must remember that a PVS Streaming Server or PVS server provides a PXE bootstrap and holds all the records of the target systems via bound MAC addresses in its database. When a target requests a vDisk, the MAC address is checked in the PVS database and the relevant vDisk is provided for the device to boot off of using a TFTP service on the PVS server.

Now the key points to note here are:

• PVS depends upon a network boot using PXE (there can be an exception to it when using a boot device manager to boot vDisks)
• Write cache location required for each target device
• A PVS store where all the vDisks are kept
• A hypervisor layer where all VMs reside

The preceding points are checkpoints before you begin troubleshooting PVS-related issues...