Citrix Provisioning Services 5.6 is out and I have finally had time to play around with it in my lab. There are a lot of bug fixes and great improvements when it comes to Simplicity. In this post I will show you some new GUI screenshots and in my next blog post about Provisioning Services I will show you how to successfully upgrade to Provisioning Services 5.6 from previous versions.

Validate Store path during configuration :

Provisioning Services Image Wizard :

Provisioning Services Auto-Add Wizard :

The new Auto-Add Wizard makes a big different compared to the old PXE Auto Add function. You are now able to define Computer name prefix and suffix according to your naming standards. The only thing I miss now is Auto Computer Account creation, because you still need to do this via the PVS Console and then reboot the new Target Devices.

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Every Citrix Web Interface Server (WI) without any form of load balancing is a potential single point of failure in your environment. Network Load Balancing is available in both the Standard and Enterprise Editions of Windows 2008 so there shouldn’t be to many excuses for not implementing. This picture tutorial will take you through the process of creating a Network Load Balancing Cluster for your Citrix Web Interface Servers.

IP Address Overview :

winlb1.ctxlab.local    10.0.10.40
winlb2.ctxlab.local    10.0.10.41
nlb.ctxlab.local         10.0.10.42

Configure Citrix Web Interface :

1. Assign static IP Address to both nodes in the NLB Cluster
2. Install and create a Site on Citrix WI on Node A
3. Install and create a Site on Citrix WI on Node B
4. Customize, test and replicate WI Site from Node A to Node B
5. RoboCopy c:\inetpub\wwwroot\Citrix \\winlb2\c$\inetpub\wwwroot\Citrix /MIR

Configure Network Load Balancing :