Creating new Catalog in Desktop Studio intermittently fails with an error referencing the Citrix article CTX127068 or the error message: “An unhandled error was thrown by the service. The Machine Creation service could not start the task to copy the master virtual image, imageName, to the host storage, dataCenterName.”

Ran into an interesting issue a month ago just before my vacation when trying to create a new catalog with XenDesktop 5.5’s Desktop Studio where the creation would intermittently fail with an error referencing the Citrix article CTX127068 (sorry, don’t have the screenshot here) …

… or the error message:

An unhandled error was thrown by the service.

The Machine Creation service could not start the task to copy the master virtual machine image, imageName, to the host storage, Datacenter name.

What it ended up turning out to be was that I only had the vCenter’s self signed certificate installed on one of the two XenDesktop DDCs in the Trusted People certificate store.  If you have, say, two DDCs named:

1. XenDDC01
2. XenDDC02

… make sure you have the certificate installed on both of the DDCs or you’ll have intermittent failures when creating new desktop catalogs.