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“Cannot connect...” when running Citrix PVS Imaging Wizard

“Cannot connect...” when running Citrix PVS Imaging Wizard

Posted by HTG

I recently upgraded my lab environment from XenApp 7.12 to 7.17. As part of this process, I also upgraded the Provisioning Server infrastructure to 7.17 as well. The upgrade appeared to go through without any issues. The only deviation in my configuration from standard was that I used an AD account for the PVS services to run under.

I then spun up a Windows 10 1803 instance which I intended to run the Imaging Wizard on and create a new vDisk ready for deployment. The Target Device software installation went fine, however, as soon as I ran the Imaging Wizard and tried to connect to the PVS farm, I got this error message:-

Naturally, I first wondered if this was an occurrence of the old bug that only allowed connections to PVS server IP addresses instead of host names, but using the IP address gave the same error.

Checking the firewall ports via Telnet revealed that 54321 and 54322 on the PVS server were responding correctly.

Next stop was to check if anything had gone wrong in the upgrade process. Repairing the PVS Server software made no difference, as did a full uninstall, reboot and reinstall.

Next I tested on Windows 10 1709 in case it was an issue with the latest version – still no luck, the same error persisted.

The PVS Imaging Wizard logs in C:\ProgramData\Citrix\Imaging Wizard showed the following information:-

From this log, it seems that for some reason the PVS SoapServer version is not being returned when the Imaging Wizard is connecting to the PVS system, and because it does not match the required version (7.17), the wizard is halting with an error.

I’d used a specific account (-service-pvs) to run the PVS SOAP and Stream services, so I tried changing this to a different account, but that just killed the PVS responsiveness entirely 🙂

Finally, I thought it must be something to do with the database. I’d used an SQL Express 2017 instance for the PVS database, but after checking the supported databases list, it was clear that this was a valid configuration.

So I checked the permissions for the service account under SQL. Expanding Instance | Databases | DatabaseName | Security | Users, I checked the properties of the service account specified and looked at the Membership tab. The service account only had db_datareader and db_datawriter assigned, so I switched this to db_owner and tried again

After making this change, the Imaging Wizard now proceed as expected and connected successfully to the PVS server. So if you get this error message (Cannot connect to server less than version 7.x), checking the service account permissions on the SQL database should help you resolve it.

 

 

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