Endpoint Protection

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  • 1.  SEP 12.1 + Citrix PVS with Personal vDisk

    Posted Nov 03, 2013 10:20 PM

    Hey all,

    I'm currently building a Ctrix PVS (Version 6.1) with Personal vDisk (Version 7) Gold Image (Windows 7 x86 SP1)

    The issues I'm currently having are as follows.

    User comes along and spins up a new PVS machine, the machine boots and the user logs into the Gold Image which contains SEP 12.1... according to SEP everything is functioning correctly and has the green traffic light to indicate this.

    User decides to do a reboot of the PVS machine, as they are using a PvDisk with PVS it will retain all their custom software and system personalization's, the machine reboots and the user logs in... SEP indicates with a yellow traffic light that Download Insight is having issues due to the File System Auto Protect... but everything else SEP seems to be working as per normal.

    User decides to do another reboot of the PVS machine, the machine reboots and the user logs in... SEP is no longer appearing in the system tray... a quick look and it appears that the SEP SMC.exe service is stopped, when you attempt to start the services it just fails and refuses to start. (Can supply event code)

    I have followed most of the best practice guides for SEP and PVS, for example I have a Powershell script that resets the Hardware ID's on boot of the Gold Image, and also made the required changes on the policy side of things.

    I am yet to work out why SEP seems to get worse and worse every reboot to the point that it actually stops working all together, when SEP is in this broken state it also plays nasty with the network traffic, for example it will stop communication with the VDA so it will not register or connect the PvD... I have proven that SEP is the creator of these issues by removing it and doing a number of reboots with out any issues.

    Would appreciate any feedback / experiences people have had when using SEP and Citrix PVS with Personal vDisk

    Cheers



  • 2.  RE: SEP 12.1 + Citrix PVS with Personal vDisk

    Posted Nov 08, 2013 11:05 AM

    Hi,

    We had very similar issues as you describe above. We have PVS and XenDesktop versions 7 and Machine Catalogs or Collections consists of non-persistent VDIs with personal vDisks using PVS.
    There are some best practices how to setup the SEP polices on the web but our problem was the version of SEP client.
    At the beginning we were testing the SEP client versions 12.1 RU2 and RU3 and we were unable to have it done so that all works just fine.
    The VDI machines were always in pretty strange state. After the first start it equipped with Antivirus Solution, after second start it was without any of Symantec technology, definitions etc. The SEP client showed "No Symantec protection technologies are installed" but the SEP services were running.
    Per discussion with Symantec support we tried to install into the master image this version 12.1.1000.157 RU1 and it stared to work fine.
    So our fix was to use the 12.1 RU1 version of SEP client.



  • 3.  RE: SEP 12.1 + Citrix PVS with Personal vDisk

    Posted Dec 06, 2013 02:53 PM

    There was a fix done by Citrix by the way for this issue (fix was 100% in Citrix side). Caveated- if indeed is the identical matter.

     

    If you have this same issue, it was reportedly fixed sometime late October/early Novemeber by Citrix but please check in with them. I do not have status if the fix is in the latet code from Citrix

    http://discussions.citrix.com/topic/330203-installing-symantec-endpoint-protection-on-a-vdi-with-personal-vdisk/

    On the Symantec side, reference an internal incident 3237225. 

     

    The reccomendation is you should work with both vendors with support cases, just in case. I would start though with Citrix, and see if the fix is out. No harm in opening a case on the Symantec side. Above details should shortcut the issue.