Xendesktop 7.6 MCS Static Assigned Dedicated Desktop

[Cody Meyer]

I have a pool of staticly assigned dedicated windows 7 desktops.  I can not increase the size of the disks on the machines after they are created.  Changes all persist to the local C:\ drive of those machines.  Any ideas why I can't do this, is it by design?  I am not using VDisks for these machines, as I stated we want all changes to persist to the C:\ drive.

[CarlStalhood]

One option is to use your hypervisor Mgmt software to clone the machine. After cloned, add it to a manual Catalog. Then you can do whatever you want to the VM.

 

Otherwise, if you expand your master image and push it to the desktops then you invalidate the delta disks and thus lose whatever was changed.

 

I do not recommend using MCS for persistent desktops.

[Adam Bowers]

I have figured out a workaround for this that seems to work in our environment. We are running XenDesktop 7.6 and WMware 6.0. I needed to expand the disk on some Static assigned MCS created VM's so we stumbled upon this. So after the VM is initially created the disk size section in vCenter is greyed out because the VM has a Delta disk. So we migrated the VM to a different LUN and then did Consolidate in the Snapshot menu on the VM and that removed the delta disk and allows the addition of disk space. The VM is still managed and we havent seen any side effects from it. Hope this helps someone out.

[Cody Meyer]

Carl that is what I found.  I had to create a manual pool to do what I needed.  Adds another step for management, but it is for very few desktops - just some special cases where I work.  Thank you very much for the reply!

[See tricks10]

I cloned the VM and renamed it . Expanded the drive.

Imported that VM into a new machine catalog.

When I try to launch it , it does not start.

Also the Vda continues to show as unregistered inspite of reinstalling VDagent manualy

[Crippen Witmer1709159179]

abowers164 answer helped me and worked in my situation.  However, we also found that going forward with our Machine Catalog creation, of these two options (using MCS):

- Use the fast clone for efficient storage and faster machine creation.

- Use full copy for reduced IOPS and better data recovery support.

We previously used the default of the first one, but that's why we ran into the issue of not being able to expand the drive.  When creating a new MC and checking the bottom option, that gave the option to resize the C: drive right out of the gate.  You get these options in the "Virtual Machines" section of the Machine Catalog build stage.

 

Also confirmed this later in an article of Carl's.  https://www.carlstalhood.com/catalogs-delivery-groups/#mcs

 

Hope this helps someone else.