Citrix VMs. Cloning checklist?

[Cotay]

Does anyone have a Citrix MPS 4.0 virtual machine cloning checklist? Something to the effect of:

1. Remove server from Farm/ Join Dummy farm.

2. Stop IMA service.

3. Convert to template.

4. Deploy new VM from template.

5. Rejoin both servers to existing farm.

Obviously a few more steps are involved...

Any help is appreciated!

[Troy_Clavell]

In my experience when deploying Citrix VM's was to just deploy off of a base W2K3 Template and install Citrix post deployment. We have tried, unsucessfully in creating Citrix Templates and always had some sort of problem. After all the trouble shooting it was decided to deploy off a standard template and install Citrix after. The get a Citrix Server up and running, joined to an existing farm, pointed to a license server.... etc, it really doesn't take all that long, and in my opionion it is cleaner.

my two cents

[Cotay]

Hi Troy,

Thanks for the response. We currenly have a baseline TS template with no Citrix installed and it sounds similar to what you're talking about. My problem is, I have a fairly clean Citrix VM with more than 100 apps installed and countless tweaks. I would like to preserve this as best as possible and scale out from this VM.

Maybe the answer is to take an image level backup of my golden Citrix VM, uninstall Citrix on a test VLAN (so it's not actually removed from the SQL database instance), and create a template from this. I could then restore my image level backup as nothing ever happened to the golden VM.

Just throwing around ideas...

[Troy_Clavell]

Maybe the answer is to take an image level backup of my golden Citrix VM, uninstall Citrix on a test VLAN (so it's not actually removed from the SQL database instance), and create a template from this. I could then restore my image level backup as nothing ever happened to the golden VM.

I think you hit the nail right on the head there! Like I said, in my experience I've just run into problems deploying templates with Citrix already installed.