Anyone who has been working with PVS for a while has probably run in to some type of time synchronization or time skew issues on their VMs at some point. This causes issues with the VM clock being off sync beyond the time skew threshold causing kerberos errors and leads to GPOs not being pulled down and registration errors between the VDI and the desktop controller servers (See screenshot below). Some causes of time skew on PVS VMs are due to DST time being configured on a master image that hasn't been updated in a while (More info on DST here and here) and also time synchronization misconfiguration at the hypervisor layer. It is always important to have your hypervisor layer have the time synchronization setup for the hardware/system clock as this is by default sent up to the VM via guest OS tools.
An example of this issue causing registration issues with the Citrix Desktop Service (Event ID 1002):
Although as you can see this problem causes registration errors with the VM it eventually resolves itself after W32time had time to synchronize with the domain and also because the Citrix Desktop Service service has a short retry interval. However, this isn't the case with GPOs as the default refresh cycle is normally 90 minutes. After tieing the process of this all together I came up with a solution below to cover whatever case was causing the time sync issue. The key here was to start up the necessary actions in the correct order W32Time Sync->GPupdate->Start Citrix Desktop Service.
Please note that this is not a recommended solution by Citrix and you should do thorough testing in your environment before attempting this.
***I took the idea from here (at the bottom of the article) and took it another step to resolve the Citrix Desktop Service registration issues and GPO issues. I also found my process worked better by running w32time /resync in my script rather than making my service simply dependent on the w32time service to ensure time sync has fully completed before doing a GPupdate and starting the Desktop Registration process.
The solution (tested for a WinXP machine):
An example of this issue causing registration issues with the Citrix Desktop Service (Event ID 1002):
Although as you can see this problem causes registration errors with the VM it eventually resolves itself after W32time had time to synchronize with the domain and also because the Citrix Desktop Service service has a short retry interval. However, this isn't the case with GPOs as the default refresh cycle is normally 90 minutes. After tieing the process of this all together I came up with a solution below to cover whatever case was causing the time sync issue. The key here was to start up the necessary actions in the correct order W32Time Sync->GPupdate->Start Citrix Desktop Service.
Please note that this is not a recommended solution by Citrix and you should do thorough testing in your environment before attempting this.
***I took the idea from here (at the bottom of the article) and took it another step to resolve the Citrix Desktop Service registration issues and GPO issues. I also found my process worked better by running w32time /resync in my script rather than making my service simply dependent on the w32time service to ensure time sync has fully completed before doing a GPupdate and starting the Desktop Registration process.
The solution (tested for a WinXP machine):
- Install Windows Resource Tool Kit (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17657)
- Set Citrix Desktop Service to manual and stop service
- Create .BAT file with the following, (Optional: convert to .EXE with 3rd party software)
--------------------------------------------------------------
w32tm /resync
gpupdate /force
net start
workstationagent
--------------------------------------------------------------
- Create the "Citrix Startup" service:
"c:\program files\windows resource
kits\tools\instsrv.exe"
"Citrix Startup" "c:\program files\windows resource
kits\tools\srvany.exe"
- Open Regedit and navigate to the following:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Citrix
Startup
Right click Citrix
Startup -> Add key called Parameters -> right click Parameters and create a new string key
named Application -> Fill in path (Ex c:\startup.bat or whatever you named the bat/exe above)
- Add Startup dependencies to the service we created:
sc config
"Citrix Startup" depend= netlogon/w32time
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