Citrix Provisioning 6.1 and ESX 4.1 / 5.0 VMXNET3 NIC driver issue

Before you roll out Citrix Provisioning 6.1 make sure you install the latest Citrix PVS 6.1 Hotfixes. I had some really weird behavior when attemting to boot up VMs both on ESX 4.1 and 5.0

Issue:

I was not able to get target VMs working with ESX 4.1 / 5.0 utilizing the VMXNET3 NIC driver.  As most of you know, this is the recommended NIC to utilize in a VMware virtual infrastructure.  Unfortunately, VMs would not boot and had to rollback to the E1000 driver and run the 5.6 Target Agent (What?).  After successfully booting up the VM, I decided to do more digging on the VMXNET3 issue.

So after a few hours of pulling my hair this is what I found:

Install the latest PVS Hotfixes , in my case CPVS61E010 for PVS 6.1 (basically it is PVS 6.2).  However the following steps need to be followed:

• Completely remove the existing install and re-install the core software
• Upgrade the Database so make sure you have a good backup (the install process takes care of this for you)
• Install the New target Agent.
• This all works under 5.x, for some reason if you are running 4.1 like a lot of people, you will need to apply Hot fix CPVS56SP1E011 (What the heck?)  Once this was done I was able to utilize the VMXNET3 NIC driver on my Provisioned VM.