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When Citrix first acquired Ardence I made it no secret that Provisioning Server (PVS) is one of my favorite new technologies. That was two years ago. Even today, I still believe in the product despite the lack of traction in the market. Yes, I understand XenDesktop has changed this somewhat but I’m largely referring to the market adoption of Provisioning Server for use with XenApp. With the recent addition to the XenApp Platinum entitlement I hope see more XenApp deployments utilizing PVS.
For smaller environments, PVS doesn’t always make sense. Building two Provisioning Servers to manage three XenApp servers seems a bit excessive to me. But for larger deployments (I am thinking 10 servers or more) I believe the benefits are there.
I’ve noticed a few things over the last couple of years in terms of managing large silos or Logical Management Groups (LMGs) as Citrix calls them. First, I’ve seen server configurations drift over time from a myriad of reasons. From troubleshooting to testing to application updates and upgrades, at some point in time the servers are no longer identical. This makes troubleshooting much more difficult trying to pin point why one server works and another does not. Rebuilding the problematic server from a script or image can mitigate this problem but that leads to my second issue. As soon as the initial deployment of XenApp servers are done, either through scripts, images or a hybrid, the method used is becomes obsolete. I have found that script and image management are difficult things for an administrator to get a handle on. Not because of their skill sets, but because of the time involved to keep everything in sync.
So how does Citrix Provisioning Server fit in? By using a common image, a XenApp Server will revert back to a good known configuration every time the server is restarted. Any changes made during the previous cycle will be discarded. As for image management, it will always be up to date. By the very nature of booting from an image, in order to make a change to the environment entails updating the image.
While not the only benefits for using PVS with XenApp I will argue that the two benefit I've describe in this article are at the top of the list (My list at least). Hopefully, as time permits, I’ll be able to write about additional benefits and use cases.
I’d like to hear from you! If you use Provision Server for XenApp, what was your business case? If you do not use Provision Server, what are your barriers to adoption?
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