PVS Targets With Multiple IP Addresses

Last week I had a problem were Citrix PVS targets got multiple IP addresses, one assigned from DHCP and the other one was the IP address of the master. Find my solution below.

Objective

My setup was:

  • VMware ESX 5.5
  • Target OS: Windows Server 2012 R2
  • PVS Server OS: Windows Server 2012 R2
  • PVS 7.6
  • XenApp 7.6 with Hotfixes ICATS760WX64006, ICATS760WX64009, ICATS760WX64012, ICATS760WX64016 and ICATS760WX64032
  • Master and targets configured for DHCP with reservations
  • Both PVS servers and targets had only one VMXNET3 NIC
  • I used XenConvert 2.5 to create the vDisk, not the Imaging Wizard.

After creating the vDisk I set it to standard mode (Cache to RAM overflow to disk) and booted a target. I logged on to windows and noticed that the target had two IP addresses, one assigned from its DHCP reservation and the other one was the IP of the master. The target had only one NIC, but two IP addresses assigned to this NIC.

I tried the following solutions without luck:

Solution

I found the solution in a blog article of Jarian Gibson, although he had issues with black screens and not multiple IP addresses. He says that you should mount the vDisk, load the registry and empty the values DhcpDefaultGateway, DhcpDomain, DhcpIPAddress, DhcpNameServer, DhcpServer, DhcpSubnetMask and DhcpSubnetMaskOpt in HKLM:\System\CurrentControlSet001\services\Tcpip\parameters and HKLM:\System\CurrentControlSet002\services\Tcpip\parameters.

However, I don’t like to do things manually and created a PowerShell script which does the job for me. I create my vDisk fully automated with Microsofts Config Manager and inserted a Task Sequence step which calls the script right before the vDisk is created.

Find the script here: https://gist.github.com/DominikBritz/e82f28bbb5933c2f8397#file-remove-ipinformation-ps1