This article provides information about write cache usage in a Citrix Provisioning, formerly Provisioning Services (PVS), Server.

Write Cache in Provisioning Services Server

In PVS, the term “write cache” is used to describe all the cache modes. The write cache includes data written by the target device. If data is written to the PVS server vDisk in a caching mode, the data is not written back to the base vDisk. Instead, it is written to a write cache file in one of the following locations:

• Cache on device hard disk
• Cache in device RAM
• Cache on device RAM with overflow on hard disk
• Cache on server

When the vDisk mode is private/maintenance mode, all data is written back to the vDisk file on the PVS Server. When the target device is booted in standard mode or shared mode, the write cache information is checked to determine the cache location. When a target device boots to a vDisk in standard mode/shared mode, regardless of the cache type, the data written to the Write Cache is deleted on boot so that when a target is rebooted or starts up it has a clean cache and contains nothing from the previous sessions.

If the PVS target is using Cache on Device RAM with overflow on hard disk or Cache on device hard disk, the PVS target software either does not find an appropriate hard disk partition or it is not formatted using NTFS. As a result, it will fail over to Cache on the server. The PVS target software will, by default, redirect the system page file to the same disk as the write cache so that the pagefile.sys is allocating space on the cache drive unless it is manually set up to be redirected on a separate volume.

For RAM cache without a local disk, you should consider setting the system page file to zero because all writes, including system page file writes, will go to the RAM cache unless redirected manually. PVS does not redirect the page file in the case of RAM cache.

Cache on device Hard Disk

This cache type was deprecated in PVS 7.12. 
It use is not supported due to interoperability limitations with Microsoft ASLR creating system instability. 
The recommendation is to use Cache on device RAM with overflow on hard disk.

Cache in device RAM 

Requirement

• An appropriate amount of physical memory on the machine.

The cache is stored in client RAM. The maximum size of the cache is fixed by a setting in the vDisk properties screen. RAM cache is faster than other cache types and works in an HA environment. The RAM is allocated at boot and never changes. The RAM allocated can’t be used by the OS. If the workload has exhausted the RAM cache size, the system may become unusable and even crash. It is important to pre-calculate workload requirements and set the appropriate RAM size. Cache in device RAM does not require a local hard drive.

Cache on device RAM with overflow on Hard Disk

Requirement

• Provisioning Service 7.1 hotfix 2 or later.
• Local HD in every target device using the vDisk.
• The local HD must contain Basic Volume pre-formatted with a Windows NTFS file system with at least 512 MB of free space. By default, Citrix sets this to 6 GB but recommends 10 GB or larger depending on workload.
• The default RAM is 64 MB RAM, Citrix recommends at least 256 MB of RAM for a Desktop OS and 1 GB for Server OS if RAM cache is being used.
• If you decide not to use RAM cache you may set it to 0 and only the local hard disk will be used to cache.

Cache on device RAM with overflow on hard disk represents the newest of the write cache types. Citrix recommends using this cache type for PVS, it combines the best of RAM with the stability of hard disk cache. The cache uses non-paged pool memory for the best performance. When RAM utilization has reached its threshold, the oldest of the RAM cache data will be written to the local hard drive. The local hard disk cache uses a file it creates called vdiskdif.vhdx.
Things to note about this cache type:

• This write cache type is only available for Windows 7/2008 R2 and later.
• This cache type addresses interoperability issues with Microsoft Windows ASLR.

Cache on Server

Requirements

• Enough space allocated to where the server cache will be stored.

Additional Resources

Selecting the Write Cache Destination for Standard vDisk Images

Turbo Charging your IOPS with the new PVS Cache in RAM with Disk Overflow Feature