Missing Active Directory option in Citrix Provisioning Services

I ran across a pretty puzzling situation earlier last week that I thought I would post about.  I was implementing a fairly straightforward XenDesktop POC and had set up some Windows 7 VMs which were pulling their images from a Citrix Provisioning Services server.  The VMs were booting up correctly and PXE’ing their OS but when attempting to log in, I was receiving a pretty familiar ‘Trust Relationship’ error message.  I have written before about trust issues with Citrix Provisioning Services and almost always, it is due to the AD object not being created from the PVS console.  Easy fix.  Head to the PVS console, right click and create the object.

If you look at the first screen grab below though, I didn’t have a menu for Active Directory functions!  I thought I was going a bit crazy.

Incorrect PVS menuCorrect PVS menu

After a bit of Googling around, I discovered that when running the PVS console remotely, (not from the PVS server directly), the Active Directory functions are hidden for security purposes.  Unfortunately, this was not my issue.  I was running the console locally but still not able to access the AD functionality.  I tried a few things without luck before determining it was a database corruption.  Fortunately, I was at the beginning of the PVS configuration so a quick rebuild of the database resolved the issue without much data loss.

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