Personal VDisks Backup and Restore Process

Citrix have an detailed article on Managing Personal Vdisks and backing up and restoring them.
This is detailed in the E-docs here

http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/xendesktop-7/cds-manage-personal-vdisks.html

The following shows the process used by RealServe IT in our labs to test the process.

This process is designed to help move a users Personal Vdisk to another catalog.
This could be used to migrate users to a newer environment or recover from a failure.
Essentialy the scripts attach the users personal Vdisk to another Virtual Machine.
The document says the personal Vdisk can only be moved however to a catalog with a master related to the original catalog the Vdisk started life from. This could limit the flexibilty of this process.

Vmware Powershell CLI

Download the Vmware PowerCLI tools. (eg. Vmware-PowerCLI-5.1.0-793510)

I installed this onto my DDC where i am going to run the scripts.

Citrix Scripts

I grabbed the Citrix scripts from the Xendesktop source media.
(inside \support\tools\scripts)

Certificate Error

When running the script I received a certificate error for Vcenter. Im not sure why as my VSphere client works as expected from the same box. 

I found a workaround is to ignore cert errors. To set this run the following powershell commands

ASNP VM*

Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -invalidcertificateaction ignore

Backup Script
From the DDC with the Vmware PowerCLI installed i ran the migration-backup.ps1 script.

VM not Assigned

When running the migration-backup.ps1 script I was getting an error VMs not assigned. This was correct, some of my VMs were not directly assigned to a user yet. This is just a warning.

Restore (Option 1)
Create a new catalog from the same master as the original catalog.
Assign the new catalog to the same delivery group
Put the delivery group into maintenance mode and shut-down machines
Move the Personal Vdisks as required to new storage (xxx_pvdisk.vmdk)
Edit the XML file changing "diskname" to the new storage location
Run migration-restore.ps1 , choose new Catalog, Choose storage, Choose XML file

(Note : I received an error about maintenance mode, however the process worked)
(Note : The original Catalog with PVDisks remain and can be deleted once we are happy the process has worked)
(Note : to use powershell to check no-one is assigned to the machines use the following code
     get-brokerdesktop -machinename domain\machinename