A couple of weeks ago Citrix released XenDesktop 5.0 SP1, which fixes a number of bugs. Last week I attended Citrix Synergy 2011, and talked to an employee about SP1. He said that the service pack fixes many more bugs than the short list included in the release notes. In fact, his comment was that more than 600 bugs were fixed. So given my experience with the GA release, which you can read about here, I thought I’d give SP1 a whirl to see if the bugs I encountered were fixed.
- Using a PVSCSI controller in the guest VM on ESX 4.1. Fixed!
- Using a dvSwitch (such as the Nexus 1000v) on ESX 4.1. Fixed!
- Guest VM does not unmount an ISO image when cloned on ESX 4.1. Fixed!
- ESX 4.1 VMX/nvram settings not copied from master VM template to clones. Still Broken.
It’s great to see Citrix fixing many of the VMware related bugs. SP1 officially supports ESX 4.1 U1, so that’s also good news. But it is disappointing that the VMX and nvram settings are not copied to the cloned VMs. This is a big security issue, since our VMX files contain dozens of required lockdowns. The nvram settings also control floppy drive settings. Since that gets reset all of our VDI VMs have a floppy drive shown. Yes we can use a GPO to hide the floppy, but this really should be handled by Citrix.
In case you missed, it, Citrix also has publicly released a ‘technology preview’ of the next version of XenDesktop, likely version 5.5. Details on this release can be viewed here. Cool new features include Windows Aero redirection, enhanced Flash redirection, improved WAN scanner support, and HDX 3D Pro support. You can download the full package from here.
