Citrix XenApp/Desktop LTSR 7.15 Azure catalog creation issues

I came across this problem whilst trying to build a lab scenario with an older version of LTSR 7.15 and wasn’t able to find any similar issues documented elsewhere. Essentially Citrix Studio would not allow me to browse for .vhd files when creating a new catalog from an unmanaged disk located in an Azure storage account.

Here’s the troubleshooting process and solution at the end (spoiler – it’s TLS 1.1, 1.2!)

Trying to create a catalog following successful creation of a hosting connection:


Machine creation wizard error

You might find for instance when examining other storage accounts that you are even able to view the name of any named containers e.g. ‘logs’ located within the storage account object, but no obvious difference is possible.

You might try even using PowerShell to examine the hypervisor connection, and by following along will eventually reach a dead end in the communication with Azure:

Add-PSsnapin Ci*
cd XDHyp:\
cd HostingUnits
(dir).PSChildName

Determine the name of your hosting connection, and change directory into it

cd .\YourHostingUnitName\
(dir).PSChildName

Determine the name of your resource, and change directory into it

cd .\image.folder\
(dir).PSChildName

Determine the name of your Azure resource group, and change directory into it

cd .\YourResourceGroupName.resourcegroup\
(dir).PSChildName

Determine the name of your storage account, and change directory into it

cd .\YourStorageAccountName.storageaccount\
(dir).PSChildName

At this point if you attempt to use dir or get-childitem you will receive an error saying:

An exception occurred. The associated message was Error: Could not receive inventory contents from path

In summary you don’t receive very much information from Citrix Studio which might provide further assistance at troubleshooting the issue. Citrix Host Service will generate an Event ID 1007 message including the text:

Citrix.MachineCreationAPI.MachineCreationException: Error: Could not retrieve inventory contents from path /UK South.region/image.folder/YourResourceGroup.resourcegroup/YourStorageAccount.storageaccount ---> Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.StorageException: The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request. ---> System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request.
   at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetResponse()

The solution took quite some comparison between different working environments until I happened on the cause and eventual solution. That is, that the storage accounts affected were configured by default to use TLS 1.2 as a minimum rather than TLS 1.0. Clearly this isn’t ideal but even relatively recent LTSR 7.15 CU5 (and presumably earlier) does not seem to support TLS 1.2 for this type of API communication with Azure.

Simply locate the storage account and modify the following switch under the Configuration page:

Finally (after waiting 30 seconds or so for the storage account change to take affect you’ll be able to open the storage account and view the unmanaged disk VHD blob.

Correctly working master image wizard selection

Switching to TLS 1.1 support does not improve the situation, it will begin failing again – even though the browser in Windows Server 2016 (with recent updates) supports TLS 1.1 and 1.2. So it appears that the code somewhere is out of date in LTSR 7.15 (either Citrix Studio or PowerShell perhaps).

I’ll update this post if I manage to resolve it using another method, but in my experience after testing this problem goes away with LTSR 1912.

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