I was setting up a new lab environment based on vSphere 5.5 and XenDesktop 7.6. When I wanted to deploy a new image within XenDesktop I got an error message ‘Unable to upload disk’.

I was running this setup on Nutanix hardware which I split up into two different Nutanix clusters to do some inter-cluster testing. My lab setup was built with vSphere 5.5, vCenter 5.5 and 2 VMware Clusters, again 2 clusters to do some inter-cluster testing.

From a Nutanix perspective I’ve created two storage pools and two containers.

Just for the general understanding of our definition of a storage pool and container:

Storage Pool

• Key Role: Group of physical devices
• Description: A storage pool is a group of physical storage devices including PCIe SSD, SSD, and HDD devices for the cluster.  The storage pool can span multiple Nutanix nodes and is expanded as the cluster scales.  In most configurations only a single storage pool is leveraged.

Container

• Key Role: Group of VMs/files
• Description: A container is a logical segmentation of the Storage Pool and contains a group of VM or files (vDisks).  Some configuration options (eg. RF) are configured at the container level, however are applied at the individual VM/file level.  Containers typically have a 1 to 1 mapping with a datastore (in the case of NFS/SMB).

I created the XenDesktop environment, the Windows 7 image and was ready to start deploying desktops and was expecting a blazing performance.. Instead of pushing out desktops the XenDesktop console threw me an error: ‘Unable to upload disk’.

First thing I started on was to run all the tests within the XenDesktop console just to make sure that the XenDesktop installation and configuration was ok (which it was of course :)).

Next step was to run the error through Google and apparently I wasn’t the only one with this issue:

• FailedToCreateImagePreparationVm – XenDesktop 7.x …
• XD7 – MCS with vSphere 5.1U1 – Unable to upload disk …
• Failed to upload disk, Xendesktop with vCenter / vSphere 5.1

None of them resembled my exact issue tho, so I took another look at my environment and found that I’ve made a rookie mistake by creating two containers with the same name within the same VMware vCenter config (2 different clusters) which resulted in one datastore in VMware (vSphere actually merged my two different datastores based on the name) and there was only one cluster configured in XenDesktop and thus failing the upload of the disk.

Within the ‘passive’ Nutanix cluster I removed the old container and created the new container (Did I mentioned it took me about 5 minutes to do that?) and after that I was able to deploy the newly build image.

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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