Citrix: Windows 8 CP and the VDA installation, how it still fails..

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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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As the Customer Preview of Windows 8 was released yesterday and I had some additional time today I wanted to install the VDA in the Windows 8 CP. I already tried the VDA installation with the Windows 8 developers release but that wouldn’t work, it came up with the Windows 8 version of a BSOD. So with this new release and the release of VDA Version 5.5.100 I thought why not just try again.

So I installed VMware Workstation 8 and loaded the Windows8-ConsumerPreview-64bit-English.iso and followed the install steps on HelmersBlog, after installation I downloaded the VDA as mentioned above.  When I tried the installation it gave an error that Windows 7, Vista or XP (strange how 7 is listed first btw) was needed to install this VDA.

Next step was to download ORCA to create a MST file so this requirement wasn’t bothering my installation again, after the download and installation I opened the MSI, created an MST and edited the LaunchCondition. After saving the MST I could run the command to install the MSI using the MST without the version check:

XdsAgent_x64.MSI TRANSFORMS=DisableVersionCheck.mst

After running this command I could get past the version check but the installer warned me about the .Net Framework 3.5 SP1, this is a default Windows 8 feature so I could enable it from the Control Panel – Programs and Features:

But during the installation it went to a BSOD with the stopcode STOP 0x0000001E: KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED, I’m going to look into this but according to Barry Schiffer it has something to do with the graphics so I guess I’ll be fooling around some more with this install. I’ll keep you posted and if you have some suggestions just let me know!

[Update]

Got an update last week from Martijn Bosschaart (System Engineer Citrix BeNeLux:

“There are some architecture changes within Win8 which you will not hack your way around at this point ;)”

So there’s no way this will work using the current available VDA.

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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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