Nutanix AHV and Citrix MCS: Adding a persistent disk via Powershell

PRISM UI

Yet another powershell blog, this one is about adding a persistent disk via powershell on an AHV hosted non-persistent VM created with Citrix MCS. The use case here would be persistent write cache for App-V cache, AV definitions, log files etc.

Here’s another blogpost about writing scripts, just to make sure; the last few scripts can be found here:

One of the comments I hear from time to time on using MCS vs PVS is the option to have a writeable volume added to the Target VM for things like AV definitions, logfiles and App-V or UEM caches. Albeit fully supported by Citrix there’s no UI workflow in Studio to add this persistent disk using Citrix MCS. This means you’ll have to assign that secondary disk using other means, in my world this typically means scripting.

Using Nutanix ACLI this should be pretty straightforward and my options are outlined by -tab-:

A simple onliner could be used to add a 10Gb disk to this VM:

Although this is a good start it doesn’t allow us for bulk changing VMs and it doesn’t allow a wildcard for the VM name so back to posh to loop through the VMs and add a disk based on a wildcard:

This resulted in the following output when running it against my AHV cluster:

Powershell output
Running the script

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Kees Baggerman

Kees Baggerman is a Staff Solutions Architect for End User Computing at Nutanix. Kees has driven numerous Microsoft and Citrix, and RES infrastructures functional/technical designs, migrations, implementations engagements over the years.

One comment

  1. […] writing this blogpost on  Adding a persistent disk via Powershell with Citrix MCS running on Nutanix AHV I got an email from one of our senior system architects, he […]

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