If you’ve ever had to face the time-consuming task of manually replicating vDisks across PVS servers and farms, then a new offering from Citrix is likely going to be of interest to you: the vDisk Replicator Tool.
Citrix just announced the new tool after several rounds of testing. The vDisk Replicator Tool is most useful for Citrix administrators who want to cut out all the tedious work involved in manual intervention when replicating vDisks across servers.
What you can use the vDisk Replicator Tool for
There are a few different scenarios where you might find the vDisk Replicator Tool useful. And there are a few other purposes that are unsupported at this time.
Currently, both inter-farm replication and intra-farm, inter-site replication are both supported. But intra-farm, intra-site replication and shared storage are not.
How to use the vDisk Replicator Tool
You can use the tool in a couple of different ways. You can call it from the command line with all parameters specified at runtime. Or, making things even easier, the tool also includes a graphical user interface. You can select your source and destination, select which vDisks you’d like to export and duplicate, and then the tool will copy the desired items.
There are a few prerequisites before using the tool. Citrix notes that “Administrators must have local administrator rights on each PVS server, as well as PVS administrator rights on both the ‘source’ and ‘destination’ farms.”
Citrix is also planning to update the tool over time. There are some features that didn’t make it into the initial version that you might like to have access to in the future. Citrix is currently conducting a survey to determine the most important features for future versions. So you can share your thoughts in the announcement linked above.
Photo credit: Flickr / dariorug
