Citrix Provisioning Services 5.1 Released.

Citrix has released a new update to Provisioning Server (now known as Provisioning Services).  The release notes can be found here : https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX121336

Lots of new enhancements and fixes in this release make it worth upgrading to.  Two in particular that Chris Hahn made me aware of were Offline Database support and a new fix in BindCFG.exe.

With Offline Database Support, Citrix has introduced a local database cache for provisioning services, which they call “offline database support”.  Unlike the IMA local host cache though, there is no local file cache, the database is just cached in memory according to this thread –

https://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=248041&tstart=0

This is obviously useful when the Provisioning Database is located on a separate database server outside of the Provisioning Server and connectivity becomes an issue.  Although administrative features will be temporarily disabled when Offline DB Support is engaged, client connections will not be interrupted when rebooting the Database Server for example.

A less flashy yet very useful enhancement is BINDCFG.EXE’s new ability to bind to Non-Present NICs.  This means you can install the Target device software last, after setting up / testing the image on multiple hardware types.  You also no longer need to revisit each hardware type when updating the target device software.

Below is an example screenshot.

Prior to this update, running BindCFG would remove bindings to all but the PRESENT hardware making multi-hardware images more difficult to update and maintain.