Citrix Provisioning Services DB Offline support

With the introduction of Citrix Provisioning Services 5.6 and 6.x, there is a feature that is sometimes overlooked which will allow your Provisioned hosts to remain up in the event that the SQL database is down.

Environment:

• Windows 2008 R2
• XenApp 6.5
• XenDesktop 5.6
• UPM 4.1
• PVS 6.1

Issue:

• The PVS Stream service is down due to unavailability of the PVS SQL database causing ALL streamed servers to stop responding and bringing all your XenApp/XenDesktop hosts down
• This issue also occurs in a highly available environment (2 provisioning servers or more).

Now lets remember that one of the responsibilities of the PVS Stream service is to communicate between the provisioning servers and the SQL Database, when the SQL database is down, and offline support is not enabled, the Stream service cannot function properly.

When this service is down, all Streamed servers/desktops stops functioning.

Solution:

Enable the DB Offline Support feature in the Provisioning Services Farm