As many Citrix environments have grown organically, I have noticed that unchecked logon times can creep up and impact user productivity and satisfaction. This could be because of upgrades, application installs, or general infrastructure that is not right-sized for the increased user population accessing virtual apps and desktops. I’ve seen this personally in the healthcare space when it comes to accessing an EHR – upgrades in Windows OS, changes in the EHR, and accumulating system tools all add up to create a sub-optimal experience. This article aims to cover how to improve logon times using some of the newer tools at a Citrix administrator’s disposal and highlight some lesser-known tools and techniques.
Establishing a baseline
The first step in speeding up logon times is establishing a baseline and identifying the top troubleshooting areas. Using Citrix Director (or Monitor, if you’re using DaaS) is a great starting place to determine your current state. While Director’s main page will show an aggregated logon time across all logins, it’s also worth looking at individual Delivery Groups because one use case may have varying logon times from another. Director breaks down the session logon duration by categories such as GPO, Profile and HDX connection. For GPOs and profiles in particular, you can drill down and look at the impact of those particular components, like which GPO is taking the longest, what the profile size is, and how many files are on the desktop or documents. Once you have a baseline, you can start breaking down the logon time problem into multiple parts, as sectioned below.
Director screenshot of logon performance by delivery group
Profiles
Profiles are probably the most common area to which logon time troubles are attributed. In particular, with Citrix Profile Management, there are official Citrix docs on Citrix Profile Management best practices. Here are some tips:
- User personalization is based on the user requirements, and you typically want the lightest solution to meet those needs. If saving settings and files are not required, then a mandatory or local profile is best. A mandatory profile offers a pre-configured user profile that bypasses some environment initialization procedures, which can speed up login. All user-based changes are also discarded, which promotes better logon time consistency. Multiple roaming profile options, including Citrix Profile Management (CPM), are available if personalization is required. CPM has both file-based and container-based options.
- If using mandatory profiles, one technique is to store the source profile on the server's local disk (e.g., C:\MandatoryProfile) and configure the path to the mandatory profile to this location. When users log on, the server can load the profile from the local source instead of a network drive, which can save some seconds.
- CPM file-based profiles should be small, as large file-based profiles will increase logon times. The main methods to speed up logins for file-based profiles are using profile streaming and/or folder redirection. File and registry exclusion (and inclusion) rules are also useful to reduce profile sizes. Again, Citrix Director is very useful for displaying profile sizes and revealing what areas can be optimized.
- CPM container-based profiles also help improve the logon experience because when the users log on, the VHDX profile disk is mounted, and profile folders are available immediately. There are a few configuration options with profile containers, including using a single container for the whole profile or listing a few select folders within the profile for a container. The folder selection method can be helpful for scenarios with particular applications that store a lot of data, so using a container for those folders would offload the read/write and alleviate the need to copy all contents to the server or desktop.
- Several Office optimizations can improve login times. OneDrive is another container that can be used to optimize the profile and prevent slow logons from carrying around a large OneDrive cache. There is also an Outlook feature that redirects the Outlook Data File (.ost) and search database outside of the roaming profile, which can also speed up logins.
Director screenshot of profile drill down
OS optimization
For a virtualized environment, it’s important to keep the OS as streamlined as possible so as to minimize resource utilization. The Citrix Optimizer Tool is great for this scenario because it is a simple tool for disabling unused services. The Citrix Optimizer runs through several areas, including disabling unnecessary services, removing built-in apps, disabling scheduled tasks, and other miscellaneous items. In addition to downloading and running the tool on a one-off basis, Citrix Workspace Environment Management can automatically run the optimization weekly.
Here are a few other ideas to optimize your VMs for login times:
- Remove extra apps from HKLM and HKCU Run and RunOnce keys
- Disable auto-launch for non-essential applications in a virtual desktop environment
- Rationalize unneeded applications from Programs and Features
- Antivirus exclusions should be reviewed as the extra scanning/processing could affect those logon times.
- Size VMs appropriately based on user load
GPOs and Scripts
Another key component of logon time is the application of GPOs and logon scripts. The duration of these can vary widely depending on the environment, but this is a key area of investigation as this processing generally happens silently and can be significant.
- Group policies and scripts should be consolidated or minimized to reduce processing time.
- WMI Queries and GPO item-level targeting should be limited because they can add processing time to GPOs. Workspace Environment Management can filter settings without impacting user logon times.
- Moving a test VM to a separate OU with GPO inheritance blocked is one method of creating a new baseline test to see the impact of higher-level GPOs on login times.
Session Prelaunch and Linger
Even after system optimizations, logging on to a VDA will always take a certain amount of time. We can use a session reconnection versus a session logon to workaround this. Session reconnection is faster because we reduce the processing time to the Citrix brokering and HDX connection time while the user login parts have already been completed. Session prelaunch and linger are two techniques to facilitate this. Session prelaunch is created when a user logs on to the Citrix Workspace app or at a scheduled time, which proactively kicks off the VDA login process. There are many configuration options here, such as automatically disconnecting the session (by default after 15 min), terminating the session if unused (by default after 2 hrs), or specifying a particular load to cancel the prelaunched session. Prelaunch is great for predictable usage patterns, for example, for a group of call center or clinical users that access Citrix at consistent times of the day. The following link provides configuration details on prelaunch and linger: https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/install-configure/delivery-groups-manage.html#configure-session-prelaunch-and-session-linger-in-a-delivery-group.
Workspace Environment Management
Workspace Environment Management (WEM) can significantly reduce logon times in Citrix environments through several key features. It optimizes the Windows logon process by processing group policies asynchronously, allowing some tasks to complete in the background. WEM's agent caching mechanism enables agents to retrieve settings from a local cache instead of a remote database, dramatically speeding up the processing of settings. The solution also streamlines profile management by integrating with Citrix Profile Management, enabling features like profile streaming and folder redirection to reduce the amount of data loaded at logon. Additionally, WEM can pre-launch applications and configure startup scripts, further reducing the time it takes for applications to load after logon. Organizations can significantly improve user experience and productivity by minimizing wait times during the logon process by implementing these optimizations. The following link provides more information about improving logon times with WEM: https://community.citrix.com/tech-zone/learn/tech-insights/workspace-environment-mgmt#logon-optimization.
uberAgent
Citrix added uberAgent to the suite of Citrix observability solutions, offering a unique set of data to investigate long logon times. This announcement and Tech Zone article provide a great overview of uberAgent’s capabilities. Specifically for logon times, uberAgent gathers a process-by-process timeline of the logon process, which can be very informative. For example, it will list the specific executable names and arguments that call the associated GPOs, logon scripts, and applications that a to the overall logon time.
Conclusion
Don’t let high logon times get in the way of user satisfaction. By spending some time with these tips and tools, you can scale out the time savings to all users who access apps and desktops every day.
-
1
Recommended Comments
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now