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How to Expand PVS vDisk Size

Hello everyone,

There will be a situation where you may need to increase your Vdisk size, may be due to the long time your Vdisk stayed fine or may be because an application need 14 gigs of your Vdisk space 😁 (I'm not faking, I have 1 app, which is 14 gigs and we need to keep 2 versions of it 'n' and 'n-1') so I need to extend my Vdisk space.

How do I do it.

There is Citrix article providing us details.

https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX206898

If there is already an article from Citrix, why Natesh is spending time in writing this article?

I found some of the things need to be explained it was not done in the Citrix article

1. For both versioning as well as copy paste method you use to update, instructions are same. However only one one thing which you need to take care during the versioning is to murge all delta versions.

2. You no need to change the vdisk to standard or private mode it actually works in both mode.

3. Also you don't have to worry about if the vdesk is in use or not. You can extend your Vdisk even if it is in use status by your servers. However the changes you made while the Vdisk is in use will only be reflected once you restart the server.

4. In the fourth step: "expand vdisk maximum=60000" this 60000 in the command is the total vDisk size after the expansion which you are expecting your vDisk to become after expansion.
For example: if your Vdisk is currently having a 30 gb of space and you are planning to increase it by 20 GB, which is 50 gb Vdisk total.
Now you need to mention in the command as 50000 not 20000.

Open cmd or powershell as administrator on your PVS server, where Vdisk is copied.

1. "diskpart" 
2. "Select vdisk file="<path to your visk> eg V:\store\my.vhd" "
3. "list vdisk" (you should now see your vdisk and the path)
4. "expand vdisk maximum=60000" (This is the size in megabytes of the size you want to extend, so 60000 is 60Gb, total size of Vdisk expected after extending)
5. "attach vdisk"
6. "list disk" 
7. "list volume" (take note of the Volume number of the your vdisk, you should see the old size)  
8. "select volume 5 (or whatever volume number from list volume command) 
9. "extend" 
10 "list volume" (you should now see the size you want for your disk. This should also be seen in the pvs console)
11. "detach vdisk"  
12. "exit"

Write Cache

We use PVS to provision XenApp servers from Vdisk or also known as Golden Image. Easy to update, easy to manage.

While we do updates to the Vdisk and assign to servers, we select write cache. what is write cache and what are the different types we have. It is well narrated in the below Citrix article.

https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX119469

PVS packaging/sealing the image

Ha ha, I got a chance to do the changes to the image and package it as read only image for end users.

XenApp servers packaging is simpler as it seems but need to be very careful which version you are doing changes to. .

Will give a complete instructions on how I achived it, steps and best practices.

Keep me following

My life in IT in past 7 years.

Hello Guys,

After almost 3 years, I now logged into this Blog and want to become active again.
All these years.. hell lot of changes happened in virtualization and mostly with Citrix and its game of changing names of their products. Beginning from MetaFrame, Presentation Server, XenApp and XenDesktop Application sharing.  Yes, I know, its annoying. . .

OK, lets forget all these which everyone knows.

Why I'm back and starting blog is, not to forget what ever I started learning and commit to memory in these 7 years of XenApp administration and managing IT of different clients who are from different culture.(Yes, Culture matters mate!)

New things into my profile in recent days are as follows:

1. XenApp 4.5, 6.5
2. VMWare
3. Provisoning services of Citrix
4. App-V (Basics)
5. XenDesktop (Basics)
6. Citrix User Profile Management.
7. Netscalers (What needed basis)
8. Web Interface
9. Windows 2008 (Yes, It was hard to move from 2003 after 5 years )

Thanks to Ashish Ambasta and Kapil Singh, for their patience in teaching me and answering all sort of really silly questions.

More to come. .

 


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