Citrix Provisioning Services 6.1 and Vsphere 5.1 vm BSoD

Citrix

If your running both Vsphere 5.1 and Provisioning Services 6.1 you may have come across an issue with your vm’s suffering from a BSoD.

 

Symptoms of this issue include the master target device booting without issue in private or standard mode, however adding subsequent devices to the image result in a 7b BS0D. Also creating another vm without a hard disk attached but manually assigning the same MAC address to the vm ensures a successful boot.

To start with Provisioning Services supports VMXNET3 vnics and not the old E1000’s so if your still using E1000’s then please change them for VMXNET3’s . Also a few steps will need to be taken to resolve this issue.

 

Firstly you’ll need to ensure that the issue is the same by looking at the the configuration parameters of the master target device and then the other devices in the collection.

 

Stage One

1/ Shut down the master target device and right click the vm and select edit settings.

2/ Click the Options tab and then the General menu item and then the Configuration Parameters button.

3/ Scroll to the item entitled ethernet0.pci and take a note of the value associated with it.

4/ Repeat the steps on the other devices in the collection and if the values are the same then the issue above becomes a little clearer. If they are different try changing the values to match the master target device and try again.

pci

 

 

Stage Two

 

Next you will need to ensure that there are no ghost network cards within the target device disk.

 

1/ Boot the master target device from its original hard disk from which you created the vdisk.

2/ Start a command prompt in elevated mode and type “set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1”

3/ Then type “Start Devmgr.msc”

4/ Click View within device manager and click on show hidden devices

5/ Expand the network node and if any network cards appear grayed out then they remove them (apart from the RAS device which is required and windows will complain profusely)

6/ Run the Provisioning Services imaging wizard again and recreate the vdisk. Test the vdisk to see if the same issue occurs if so read on if not go and make yourself a cup of tea and congratulate yourself on a job well done.

 

 

FIX

 

The issue I’ve encourted requires a microsoft hotfix to be applied to the master target harddisk before installing the target device software and running the imaging wizard This does not mean that you have to rebuild the target harddisk though.

 

1/ Boot your master target device with the original hard disk and log in.

2/ Run the add/remove wizard and uninstall the Citrix Provisioning Services Target Device software and when it complains open services.msc and stop the Citrix PVS Device Service and hit retry where it will complete the uninstall correctly.

3/ Register and download the microsoft hotfix for the correct version the device is running

Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2344941

Windows 7  and Server 2008 R2 SP1 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2550978

Windows Vista (shudder) and Server 2008 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2487376

 

4/ Before you run the installation if you have previously run the optimization wizard during a vdisk creation you will need to delve back into services.msc and change the Windows Update service from disabled to manual.

5/ Run the hotfix on the device and then reinstall the Provisioning Services Target Device software and run through the imaging wizard again.

 

 

Hopefully you should find that this now cures the BSoD issue for all the subsequent devices you choose to associate with the vdisk.

 

Author: Dale Scriven

7 thoughts on “Citrix Provisioning Services 6.1 and Vsphere 5.1 vm BSoD

  1. I am currently building a test environment using Provisioning Services 6.1 and VMWare 5.1. All servers I provisioned boot with the bsod. I do not have any ghosted network cards on the server that I am creating the master target from, I have also made my template from this server so they should be identical. I have checked the number of the ethernet0.pci in vmware and the number is the same as well as the other items. I am not able to run the hotfix listed as it says it “is not applicable for this computer.” Since I am running Windows 2008 R2 SP1, I think this patch is already installed.

    Do you have any other ideas why my provisioned servers will not boot? Am I missing something? Any help is appreciated.

    1. Hi Tina,

      It appears that I’ve made a bit of a typo in my hotfix linking, the link that says windows 7 sp1 is actually relevant to 2k8 r2 sp1 as well. I’ll update my post to reflect but try the hotfix at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2550978 which should hopefully help you out. Please do let me know how you get on I would be interested to see how it pans out for you.

      Regards
      Dale

    2. Hi Tina, did you resolve your BSOD issue Im having the exact same problem and have tried all the workarounds you have mentioned with no luck.

      1. Yes, as the admin above mentioned, the hotfix for Windows 2008 R2 was listed incorrectly. Once I installed the correct hotfix, it worked.

  2. Hi, had the same issues at a customers. The Microsoft hotfix was already installed, but did not help at all.

    The solution was to reimage the vDisk and update the VMware-Tools from 8.x to 9.x. After this change, everything worked fine. After that there where no more 7B-bluescreens.

  3. I am now having this issue again too. The hotfix is installed and my VMware tools are at 9.0.5. I can try to uninstall and reinstall the hotfix but not sure if that will work. Any suggestions?

  4. I not have issues with the network card, my problem is the write cache on client’s HD i got a message “Windows created a temporary paging file on your computer because of a problem that occurred with your paging file configuration” only in standard mode not in private mode.

    Disk configuration: C:\ (OS, PageFile=None), D:\ (CD-ROM), E:\ (WriteCache, PageFile=2048)
    Memory Configuration: 1GB
    CPU Configuration:1 vCPU 1.8 Ghz

    Any suggestion?

    Enviroment: PVS Server 6.1 Windows 2K8R2 SP1 x64, Master Device Win7SP1 x64, ESXi-5.1.0-799733, vShpere 5.1.0-799733

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