Hi All, We have a customer currently running VMware together with Citrix App Layering (ELM version 24.9.0.1). We are about to start a XenServer POC, where we plan to build a dedicated XenServer pool for Windows 11 VDI workloads. We already have an OS Layer and a number of App Layers built on top of it. VMware Tools are installed in the OS Layer. As a product, App Layering is supposed to be hypervisor-agnostic and able to support multiple platforms using a single OS Layer. My question is: Will this setup work without rebuilding the OS Layer or uninstalling VMware Tools from the OS Layer? Can we simply build a new Platform Layer for XenServer, using the existing OS Layer (which has VMware Tools installed)? Does anyone have real-world experience with a similar situation?

We've been testing a similar scenario, where we leave VMware tools in the OS layer, but add a version for Nutanix's VirtIO driver. IIRC, you don't need the XS agent in order to boot a VM on it, so you should be able to simply build a new Platform layer with the XS agent in it. Should be easy enough to test/validate.

Ok, thanks. And your test scenario with the Nutanix driver has worked fine? The XS VM should boot fine without the XenTools. This will obviously be one test case in the POC. I’m just curious to hear if someone already has some insight into how it will behave, and if there will be any problems or corruption when we have VMware Tools on the underlying OS layer and install a Platform Layer with XenTools on top of that.

So far it has. Rob Z may chime in here, but I am 99% sure that what you're about to try is recommended practice from Citrix.

Nick is correct just create a platform layer on xenserver and add the xen server tools there.