This is something that has kept me busy for a while. For the past 2 years there were some challenges with regards to the use of MCS and XenDesktop/XenApp in combination with vSAN. In fact, Citrix never supported vSAN and MCS, and it actually did not work either. PVS worked great in combination with vSAN however. Some customers though prefer to use MCS. After various discussions, emails and engineering discussions it seems that the problem customers faced has finally been resolved.
Citrix recently announced a hotfix that will allow you to use MCS with XenDesktop/XenApp 7.12 and vSAN version 6.0, 6.2 or 6.5. You can find the hotfix and details here: https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX219670
I would like to thank a couple of folks for making this happen, from Citrix: Christian Reilly (Thanks for connecting me to everyone!), Vishal Ganeriwala, Paul Browne, Yuhua Lu, Rick Dehlinger, Amanda Austin and from VMware Weiguo He, Tony Kuo and Sophie Ting Yin. Thanks everyone for making this happen in between releases. I am certain our joint customers will appreciate this! Note, that it is not a full statement of support (yet), but a great step in the right direction!
For those interested in XenDesktop/XenApp with vSAN, make sure to read this great reference paper by Sophie Yin. It provides a lot of detail around performance etc.
Yay finally….. been having this ‘support’ issue with MCS on a VxRail cluster since last year!
Hopefully Citrix will announce their support in the next few weeks…… it’s dragged on far too long!
While this hotfix is great news, there are a couple of important things to call out here.
1) this is not an official support statement from Citrix
2) this is only for VSAN 6.2
It is not supported indeed, which I stated already. Citrix engineering shared with us it was tested with 6.5 and 6.0 as well.
Any updates on this ?
Have a look at this thread on Citrix’s community forum: https://discussions.citrix.com/topic/387106-xenapp-713mcs-and-vsan-65/
Looks like Citrix didn’t quite fix the issues with MCS on vSAN, but some of the replies seem to indicate there’s another hotfix available!