Rebooting the Provisioning server

[Glen Bicking1709152637]

I ran into an issue at a client site where the PVS server got rebooted every Monday but the server's attached to them did not. I am fairly new to PVS but would have thought that if you rebooted the PVS server that held the vDisk on local storage, the VM attached to the vDisk would crash.

So I tested it in my lab. I have a single PVS server hosting a vDisk in Standard mode. I connect to the provisioned desktop, reboot the PVS server and the desktop keeps running. I get a message that the connection to the disk has been lost and things get a little pokey or might lock up temporarily but the desktop certainly does stay up.

I have write cache set to local disk. Is that why it stays up? Would someone mind helping me understand why this does die as soon as the connection to the vdisk and the vdisk itself for that matter is gone.

Thank you.

[Jarian Gibson]

They will stay up on the write cache for a little bit while the server is rebooting. If the PVS server is down for an extended amount of time then they will eventually lock up/freeze.

When you reboot the PVS server this does not mean the target devices will reboot. Like you saw they will work for a little bit. Now if you have more than PVS server and HA is setup they will fail over to the other PVS server when the primary one they are connected to reboots.

[Padraig Sweeney]

That is expected behaviour. The targets will simply wait for the PVS server to become available again. Targets will not terminate just because a PVS server goes down.

- Padraig.

[Barber van den Heuvel]

how long will the server/desktop stay alive?

I assume that as long as the machine requests data that is already in the write cache this will work, and that the machine will freeze/crash when it request data that is on the vdisk located on the local storage of the pvs server?

[Michael Rueefli]

I'd say you're right, yes.

Rgds
Michael

[Padraig Sweeney]

Correct, the target will hang waiting on the I/O request to complete. Once the pvs server comes back online and completes the I/O request, the target will continue to function again.

- Padraig.

[Mark Ellis1709161137]

It is a good practice to reboot your PVS Servers weekly.  I strongly recommend it.

They should be set up in a HA pair or larger group.  If correctly set up you should be able to to reboot any server in the group and have the streaming fail over to the other servers.  I have rebooted PVS servers with hundreds of XenDesktop computers connected and not dropped a user.  Test this in an outage window before using it as a day time party trick!