The Citrix Desktop Service failed to obtain a list of delivery controllers with which to register.

Funny little problem.

So I installed VDA 7.13 on a brand new Server 2016. Did the usual to create a catalog etc. But the VM doesn’t register with the Delivery Controller. Application event logs are filled with messages like these:

I am not looking to AD etc. for the list of Delivery Controllers, so why this error? Open up regedit and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\VirtualDesktopAgent\ListOfDDCs has the correct names too. So what gives?!

Turns out when I put in the Delivery Controllers name here I had set them as “DC1.fqdn. DC2.fqdn.“. I could ping either of these and connect to the ports etc from the VM, but just on a hunch I removed the “.” in the “fqdn.” and tada! it began working. :)

Moral of the story: Citrix Desktop Service expects Delivery Controllers to be of format “DC1.fqdn DC2.fqdn“. If it sees a dot it ignores the ListOfDDCs key and looks towards AD. It doesn’t tell you that it’s ignoring the registry key, so you are stuck wondering why it’s looking towards AD. :)