Problem with Cloning Citrix boxes

[JackelBarrett]

Hello All,

I am having a problem that is becoming quickly annoying. We are not in production yet, we are still testing our overall Citrix setup.

Situation: 60 servers. ONE person connects to each server due to the software we use per server. (Also, this is an education environment). These machines will be reimaged every Friday for a new class that comes in the following week.

Now....even though the Citrix documentation says that you can't clone a machine with the access data store on it, we are doing it anyway.

Now....If I clone one machine at a time, everything works happily. However, if i clone a group of them, then it seems that I am unable to connect to the any of the Citrix boxes.

I get this error "The Citrix Server you have selected can not be located."

In fact, I see this error all the time. Even though everything is setup identically, with identical hardware.

Could this be a MasterRanking issue? What can I do? It seems to be that the machines are cancelling/conflicting with each other.

Any thoughts would be appreciated!!!

Thanks

 

[zaneryrie]

How do you assign a unique name to each machine that you clone?

 

[JackelBarrett]

Each machine uses Sysprep 1.1 before the image process is setup. The system's name, IP, and SN are all input upon being restored on the boxes.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

You are effectively making each Citrix Server the first server in its zone, and the Data Collector at the same time. This won't work, as you are discovering. This is by design.

If you want to clone your Citrix servers, you should clone any Citrix server except the DC. As you suspect, it is to do with ranking. CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[JackelBarrett]

"CitrixEngineer" and others, thank you for your assistance.

Well, I have a problem with the Citrix configuration. For our purposes, we require the boxes we use to be the Data repository (collector). I know this seems weird, but if I were to tell you what we work on, you would go "OHhhhh. "

So, it there a way to change the master ranking of the boxes? What I discovered last night, is that If I took the "first" box out of the loop, then BANG, every machine can connect again. So is there a registry entry I can change? I saw the Local/Software/Citrix/IMA/Runtime entries. I have to delete these entries before I use Sysprep. Can I do something more to them to ensure no conflicts?

Thank you all.

 

[DaSmee]

Each server will need to be in it's own Zone, go into the Properties of your Farm and move each server into it's own independant Zone.

 

[JackelBarrett]

Yes, DaSmee....that was the issue. I found that before Sysprepping the systems I needed to delete a few keys from the registry so that the system would regenerate random keys on reimage.

Thanks

 

[wilsona]

Another solution is to take the server out of active directory, remove metaframe, put it back in and re-install metaframe! Bingo - works and only takes 5 minutes.