You can easily jump over to the Citrix http://support.citrix.com/product/provsvr/psv5.1 to review the entire listing of new features but I thought I would point out a few of the features that I am most excited about.

• NIC Teaming – this is huge for environments that are taking advantage of Provisioning to physical hardware for things like XenApp servers as you can now add some redundancy at the network level.
• Offline Database Support – similar to the local host cache functionality in a XenApp environment, Provisioning Server can now survive even if connectivity to the SQL database is lost.
• Windows XP Embedded Support – streaming an operating system to a thin client… what could be better?  I can’t wait to make my own Ardence video with a room full of thin clients booting into Windows XP, Vista, 7, and Red Hat!

There are still lots of other features that have come out with this new release like the offline support with Hyper-V, user assigned vDisks, and the ability to store multiple partitions within a single vDisk.

First off it is definitely worth mentioning that this service pack (like the service pack before it) is a complete reinstall.  Now you won’t lose any configuration data or any virtual disks but it probably wouldn’t hurt to take a backup.  Then just to be on the safe side… take a backup of the backup… Ok maybe just one backup will do!

So far I have done two installations with this new service pack and both installations required the uninstall, manual removal, reboot, and finally a reinstall to get the Provisioning Server Console to work.  In my experiences the console will crash when you try to do things like create or modify Active Directory objects.  If you get a nasty MMC error then you’re probably in the same boat.

No worries, its relatively easy to recover:

1. Uninstall the Provisioning Server Console using add/remove programs.
2. Manually remove any file structure that was left behind (i.e. C:\Program Files\Citrix\Provisioning Server Console)
3. Reboot
4. Install the Provisioning Server Console from the service pack 2 media.

Yes the installation could be a little bit easier but trust me it is well worth the hassle to put in this service pack for new deployments as well as existing deployments.

Citrix has done a lot of work on getting the Active Directory integration pieces smoothed out in this release.  See CTX120420 for the official release notes.