Virtual Apps and Desktops – 1912 LTSR is breaking Delivery Controller Unattended Installation

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When doing unattended installation of the Citrix Delivery Controller take care when you are planning to move to the latest 1912 LTSR release which was released before Christmas. After changing the installation sources from the previous Current Release (1909) the installation process was broken. To be more specific the site database could not be created with the “New-XDDatabase” PowerShell Cmdlet.

Error: There was a problem with the communcation with the Server

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There have been other people in the community who encountered the same issue. Until today I didnt had time to look any further into the problem. Christmas was quiet busy and the New Year startet with a lot of work already.

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First of all I though the problem must be related to my lab environment because there have been changes regarding the SQL Server, .NET Framework and Windows Updates. After a series of different deployments  I could say for sure that this is ONLY happening with the 1912 LTSR. Previous versions like 7.15 CU5, 1903 and 1909 haven’t been affected from this problem. Where should we start troubleshooting? We never can fail with a ProcMon Trace..

NonWorking.PML: 1912
Working.PML: 1909

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ProcMon was telling me that it could not be a SQL issue because the 1912 Delivery Controller did not even try to communicate with the SQL Server. I did not expect a SQL issue because other releases have been working with the identical SQL 2017 Express server. If you are interested in the ProcMon filter I used:

2020-01-12 16_15_02-mRemoteNG - confCons.xml - MDT-01

My first guess: There must have been a change regarding the “New-XDDatabase” command. Time to have a closer look at the Debug-Log of the Citrix PowerShell SDK. You will find it under: “C:\Log\adminSdk.txt”

2020-01-12 16_27_02-adminSdk.txt - Editor

Bingo! There was happening an Invalid Operation Exepection. This is something we can work with. This was making me curious and I checked if all the Citrix Services have been up an running what maybe would explain this behaviour. Guess what? Only some of the Citrix Controller services have been running.

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I waited some minutes and verified if the services have been running by now. Okay this looks promising. After starting my “Configure Site” PowerShell script the installation of the Delivery Controller completted succesfully.

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2020-01-12 16_50_05-mRemoteNG - confCons.xml - XDC-01

After this enlightenment I was doing a small change to my script, which is verifying that all the Citrix Services with the Startup Type “Automatic” are in “Running” state before configuring the Citrix site.

Seems like Citrix made a change regarding the services startup with the 1912 LTSR.  Hope this is saving all the people out there some headache. Happy Automation 🙂

3 comments

  1. Hello, happy new year. i get this error when trying to launch apps ”Citrix Reciever app error: Your apps are not available at this time. Please try again in a few minutes or contact your help desk with this information. Cannot contact storefront.” What do you think could be the issue?

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