XenApp Power and Capacity Management with provisioned machines

Provisioning XenApp 6 Servers is very easy and make everything very simple but using third party Citrix products like EdgeSight or Power and Capacity Management can be tricky in order to make it work properly with provisioned services.

The last issue I had was with Power and Capacity Management but before explaining everything, a quick remind :

Citrix XenApp Power and Capacity Management can help reduce power consumption and manage XenApp server capacity by dynamically scaling up or scaling down the number of online XenApp servers. Consolidating sessions onto fewer online servers improves server utilization, while providing sufficient capacity to handle load while minimizing unnecessary power consumption. As users log on to the system and reduce the idle capacity (how much capacity is available for additional sessions), other servers in the workload are powered up. As users log off and idle capacity increases, idle servers are shut down. This helps optimize capacity for XenApp workloads.

When installing PCM on the PVS master virtual machine to update the vDisk, everything ran smoothly, no problem at at, service was set to automatic. The service name is “Citrix XenApp Power and Capacity Management Agent” (PCMAgent) and have dependency toward “Citrix Independent Management Architecture (IMA)” and “Remote Procedure Call (RPC)”. I assumed the service will wait XenApp is done launching IMA Service and then PCM Service would be able to launch. (more…)