Neils personal site

I've been spending some time recently on a proof of concept for Citrix Provisioning Server.

The client is using Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition for their XenApp servers to allow large memory usage (memory hungry apps!)

For performance, I wanted to use the local discs in the Blades for the provisioning server write cache, but every time I booted a provisioned client in shared disc mode, the local disc would disappear, and the cache would revert back to the PVS which killed performance (swap file over the network..ouch)

After some digging, I discovered that in Enterprise edition of 2003 server (and Datacentre edition), Microsoft have disabled the auto-mounting of disc volumes (Something to do with SANs)

The fix is to run "mountvol /e" against my master image which re-enables the auto-mounting and allows provisioned client to see their formatted local cache drive.

My next task is to auto-format the local discs on first boot-up!