Citrix XenServer robot disappears on reboot

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)

Issue/Introduction

We have installed the robot on XenServers in the environment, and upon rebooting these systems, the installed robot disappears.

We are using Citrix PVS (Citrix Provisioning Service) to install robot on an image and deploy this to multiple servers.

However once the reboot happens all the installer/config files vanish and we receive robot inactive alarms as the robot has been uninstalled/wiped.

Environment

Release : 9.2.0

Component : UIM - ROBOT

Cause

This is related to the way Citrix PVS works and there is nothing in UIM which can control or eliminate this behavior.

Resolution

Your Citrix team may be able help you resolve it as follows, per guidance received in the communities:

Don't pre-install the robot [on the Golden Image].

Create a ps1 script which will run on the box that:

   > Checks if the hostname is the same as that of the golden image name and if so, exit the script.

   > If not, then we know it's a fresh install - then run the robot silent bat file installer which installs the robot fresh.

You can place a request.cfg already in the Program Files\Nimsoft directory and when robot starts, it will call the SuperPack from its local hub's distsrv probe to deploy all the required probes. 

Here is a community thread with some additional discussion (around post 22 is where the dicussion is related to Citrix golden image use.)

https://community.broadcom.com/enterprisesoftware/communities/community-home/digestviewer/viewthread?MessageKey=f47bba56-6fd9-454c-9bef-44a29ee3c3b7&CommunityKey=170eb4e5-a593-4af2-ad1d-f7655e31513b&tab=digestviewer#bmf47bba56-6fd9-454c-9bef-44a29ee3c3b7