Citrix: Citrix XenApp 6 and IMA Service won’t start

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Kees Baggerman·Senior Technical Director at Nutanix – Former Citrix CTP – NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor – 15+ years in EUC

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I recently build a Citrix XenApp 6 deployment using RES Automation Manager but encountered problems with some (not all) installations. After a default installation the IMA service couldn’t start.  When looking at the eventlogs of one of those specific servers I found the following errors:

Failed to load plugin C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\System32\Citrix\IMA\SubSystems\ImaAppSs.dll with error IMA_RESULT_WRITE_TO_LOG_FAILED

Failed to load initial plugins with error IMA_RESULT_WRITE_TO_LOG_FAILED

and further on in the eventlog the following error was presented:

When searching on the internet I found the following fix:

Well apparently this is a Citrix common item because the Citrix tech went straight to this registry key and changed it.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Citrix\IMA\RUNTIME

Then blanked out the following keys:
CurrentlyLoadingPlugin
ProductPlugins

After that, IMA magically starts and all services come back up and running.

So based on this I took one of the XenApp 6 servers and blanked those keys:

After this I could start the IMA service again and I was able to launch a published desktop on this server again.

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Kees Baggerman

Kees Baggerman is Senior Technical Director — Performance & Solutions Engineering R&D at Nutanix, where he leads a global team responsible for defining how enterprise applications are delivered on the Nutanix platform. A former Citrix Technology Professional and NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor, he has spent 15+ years driving EUC strategy and technical direction across architecture, product, and customer success. He has been writing here since 2011 — sharing what he learns at the intersection of platform engineering and enterprise IT.

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Kees Baggerman

Senior Technical Director at Nutanix - Former Citrix CTP - NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor - 15+ years in EUC

Kees Baggerman is Senior Technical Director — Performance & Solutions Engineering R&D at Nutanix, where he leads a global team responsible for defining how enterprise applications are delivered on the Nutanix platform. A former Citrix Technology Professional and NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor, he has spent 15+ years driving EUC strategy and technical direction across architecture, product, and customer success. He has been writing here since 2011 — sharing what he learns at the intersection of platform engineering and enterprise IT.

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