I have noticed that quite a large population of people are having issues with PVS 5.6 SP1.  Knowing that it is difficult to keep track of hotfixes that are sometimes not even listed under the Citrix support site, I decided to compile my own list of current hotfixes.  I recommend looking into the following hotfixes if you are implementing or upgrading to this solution in a production environment:

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX130662  (PVS Device Hotfix)

  • BG- 35711: Target freezes during high disk utilization, this hotfix will resolve some, not all, target device hanging situations.
  • BG-27643: When target fails to initialize local write cache and fails over to server-side for caching, a socket error causes an unnecessary reconnect even though the fail-over is successful.
  • BG-26245: In certain Provisioning Services deployments, target devices cannot do local write-cache and fail over to server-side for caching.

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX130661 (PVS Server Hotfix)

  • BG-18672: A Citrix Provisioning Services streamed target might hang or crash during shutdown. During the shutdown the network stack shutdowns before the storage driver and the storage driver keeps on waiting for the network stack to complete an outstanding I/O, this causes the system to be unresponsive. This may not occur on all the systems and is also not reproducible all the time, as this seems to be a timing problem.

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX128603 (PVS Server Hotfix)

  • BG-28082: Citrix PVS Soap Server crashes due to heap memory overrun.

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX130275  (PVS Server Hotfix)

  • BUG-28678: When PVS Console timeout happens while displaying targets, it crashes after reporting the timeout error.
  • BG-18449: The silent configuration wizard corrupts the bootstrap which leads to the console crashing when configure bootstrap is used.
  • BG-25161: The Provisioning Services Console cannot handle NULL values for login polling timeout and general timeout in the bootstrap.
  • TR-9985: Device Administrator cannot open Device Properties for an Active Device.
  • TR-10022: When Provisioning Services Console is started, the “Connect to Farm” dialog should default to the last server connected.
  • TR-10023: If a PVS server suffers an unrecoverable error and becomes “Offline”, that server can never be deleted from a site.

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX130664 (PVS Server Hotfix)

  • BG-18441, 46577: Some system types of target device may randomly hang during booting if NIC-teaming is enabled.
  • BG-28055: NIC teaming on non-Provisioning Network bonds do not work.
  • BG-32170: resolve a potential buffer-overrun.

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX128591 (PVS Server Hotfix – Only applicable when upgrading from 5.6)

  • BUG 27688: Upgrading a Citrix Provisioning Services 5.1 Service Pack 2(w/hotfix CTX127164 or CTX126804) to Citrix Provisioning Services 5.6 Service Pack 1 will make all of the other Citrix Provisioning Services 5.1 Service Pack 2 Servers in the farm appear offline once the database is upgraded to 5.6 Service Pack 1.
  • BUG 27692: Upgrading a Citrix Provisioning Services 5.6 server to Citrix Provisioning Services 5.6 Service Pack 1 causes all the target devices to failover to the new 5.6 Service Pack 1 server.