I was working on a new Citrix PVS image for one of my current projects and the test before running the P2PVS.exe were good, all my apps worked like they should so I prepped the server for the imaging (preparing antivirus, last PVS optimizations and a full pre-scan of my VM) and I ran P2PVS.

After a successful P2PVS I ran into a couple of problems: The RES Workspace Manager Service didn’t start and one of the key components of this image (an outlook plugin) gave a weird error that didn’t show up at first. I did some troubleshooting and found that the RES Software WM Service couldn’t start because the executable wasn’t found, I could browse to the directory and the res.exe was there. Luckily Barry Schiffer came up with the idea to check the shortnames which are used to start the RES WM Service and a lot of software still use the shortnames for the Office folder as well so apparently we had shortname issues with Citrix XenApp and Citrix PVS.

I soon realized that I used the XenApp 6.x (Windows 2008 R2) – Optimization Guide to optimize the image and one of the recommendations was to disable the NTFSDisable8dot3NameCreation:

Note: Even in 2012 some applications still rely on 8.3 names. Scanning the for commonly used director names (i.e. C:\PROGRA~1) can help revealing affected programs.

After changing this value back to “0” we were able to run a successful P2PVS and the errors in RES Workspace Manager and the key application were gone. Here’s some background info on why to disable shortnames and how to check this from the command line.

To disable/enable 8.3 naming convention, users can issue the set command as follows:

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I also received this MS page on 8.3 name creation with the following sample commands

The following command disables 8dot3 name creation on all volumes:

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The following command disables 8dot3 name creation on the C drive:

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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.

Latest posts by Kees Baggerman (see all)

• Nutanix AHV and Citrix MCS: Adding a persistent disk via Powershell – v2 - November 19, 2019
• Recovering a Protection Domain snapshot to a VM - September 13, 2019
• Checking power settings on VMs using powershell - September 11, 2019
• Updated: VM Reporting Script for Nutanix with Powershell - July 3, 2019
• Updated (again!): VM Reporting Script for Nutanix AHV/vSphere with Powershell - June 17, 2019