This is the second part of an ongoing series around enhancing Citrix MCS within Azure. The first post focused on optimizing identity disk costs via PowerShell and Azure Automation. This is post will tackle one of the biggest impacting performance optimizations you can make to machines within Azure: Accelerated Networking. Accelerated Networking is defined by... Continue Reading →
Enhancing Citrix MCS and Microsoft Azure – Part 1: Identity Disk Cost Optimization
Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS) is commonly utilised to deploy non-persistent workloads into Microsoft Azure, providing image management and provisioning at scale. MCS in Azure uses on-demand provisioning which means for pooled or newly provisioned workloads (in the case of dedicated) that when the machine is not powered on, it simply does not exist. The... Continue Reading →
Citrix Workspace, Azure AD & DSAuthAzureAdNestedGroups
Citrix Cloud and Azure Active Directory is a logical combination for many customers. The integration makes sense to provide a high level of security and access controls via the Microsoft Azure AD Conditional Access engine. There have been instances, where integration with Azure Active Directory has not always consistently behaved as one might expect, in... Continue Reading →
Azure Site Recovery and MCS Provisioned Workloads
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is Microsoft’s multi-faceted solution for performing services such as Disaster Recovery (DR), Business Continuity Planning (BCP) execution and migration services (these days primarily wrapped into the Azure Migrate service). When deploying dedicated/persistent machines on the Microsoft Azure platform, it is often desirable to protect these workloads via ASR, providing cross-region failover... Continue Reading →
Impacts of CVAD 2003 support changes and LTSR 1912 relevance
A significant number of changes on support stances are being introduced with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 2003 Current Release. These changes will directly impact the supportability of many environments and need to be considered when scoping or performing any form of upgrade/implementation works. The most impactful change is the new stances on public cloud... Continue Reading →
Improve the WEM Cloud Service Agent Processing Speed
The Citrix Cloud WEM Service looks and feels, for the most part, the same as the On-Premises iteration of the solution, however, there are some challenges which have been known to introduce, let's say "a less than desirable experience" when moving to the service release. In this post, I will focus on the challenge introduced... Continue Reading →
Architecting for FSLogix Containers High Availability
FSLogix Profile Container is becoming the go-to solution when it comes to profile management. Even before the Microsoft acquisition, FSLogix was a popular solution, however now that it is effectively an entitlement for the majority of customers, its use will be greatly increased. Implementing the solution is relatively easy. Dealing with high availability and navigating... Continue Reading →
Migrating GPO settings to WEM
A consistent challenge when beginning the adoption of WEM services into an existing environment, is the analysis and migration of existing GPP and GPO settings into the WEM way of processing. Moving policies full of printers, drive maps, logon scripts, files and folder options along with registry keys, be it single or collection based, is... Continue Reading →
Citrix WEM User Logon Service
Back in the 1812 release of the Citrix WEM Service Agent, Citrix released an additional Windows Service named Citrix WEM User Logon Service which started showing up during the logon process with a slight delay. Fast forward to the 1906 release of WEM, and that same service exists and now clearly displays a significant delay when... Continue Reading →
Leveraging your Citrix Current Release investment – Director Style
I originally posted this article under the CUGC community site here. For customers on the Current Release path for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, one of the best features available to you is the ever-growing list of cool stuff that Director Introduces. A few features that I find have not gained enough love given how... Continue Reading →