Shortname issues with Citrix XenApp and Citrix PVS

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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 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:

C:\Windows\system32>fsutil 8dot3name set /?
usage : set [0 through 3] | [<Volume Path> 1 | 0]

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:

fsutil 8dot3name set 1

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

 fsutil 8dot3name set C: 1

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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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