VDI desktops in a XenDesktop environment need to be able to register with a controller or multiple controllers so they can be managed by the broker and allow connections by clients.
In XenDesktop 4 the default was having the controller information held in an Active Directory OU. During installation you specified an AD OU and the controller installation added the AD objects to the OU so the Citrix Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA) that is installed within the guest OS could find the correct delivery controllers.
This has changed in XenDesktop 5 where the controller information isn’t by default added to AD and the client VDA is configured with the DNS names of the controllers (best to have at least two for redundancy) in the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Citrix\VirtualDesktopAgent\ListOfDDCs (REG_SZ)
In this example my controllers are lonxd01.lab.int and nycxd01.lab.int
I think storing the controller information in AD which was the default in XenDesktop 4 was a great way of doing things as it gave you one less client VDA configuration setting to manage. If the controller information is stored in the registry and you need to add or remove a controller you have to reconfigure every client which can be a lot of work. If the controller information is stored in AD you can amend the setting in AD and all clients will be able to find the new controller without any VDA configuration change.
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Citrix XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1 is the latest release of XenServer but it is not supported as a hypervisor with either XenDesktop 4 or XenDesktop 5.
Have a look at the Citrix eDocs for Host Requirements / Hosting Infrastructure.
XenDesktop 4
http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/index.jsp?topic=/xendesktop-bdx/cds-hosting-infrastructure-reqs-bdx.html
XenDesktop 5
http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/index.jsp?topic=/xendesktop-rho/cds-sys-reqs-host-rho.html
XenServer 5.6 Feature Pack 1 has been out since 15 December 2010 and the release notes specifically mention enhancements to Provisioning Services and XenDesktop (only coming in a future release)
Provisioning Services improvements to Windows volume license (MAK and KMS) support.
XenDesktop platform enhancements. Provides local host caching of VM images to reduce storage TCO for XenDesktop VDI deployments. (Note: these platform enhancements will be enabled by a future version of XenDesktop).
XenDesktop 5 was released on 3 December 2010. OK, that’s only 12 days before XenServer FP1 but surely Citrix would have made the enhancements to XenDesktop 5 to support XenServer 5.6 FP 1…obviously not.
I’ve heard from Citrix that XenServer 5.6 Service Pack 2 is due for release soonish and will be supported by both XenDesktop 4 and 5. This does contradict somewhat with the release notes which state support will be in a newer version of XenDesktop rather than a newer version of XenServer.
If you are running XenDesktop 4 or 5 with XenServer 5.6 as the hypervisor, don’t upgrade to Feature Release 1, rather wait for Service Pack 2.
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