How to keep the user sessions on the same host without separate delivery group

[Leslie Lei]

Problem Facing:

One of my clients is using FSlogix in their XenApp environment.  Everything was working perfectly with one RDS host in the past.  Since the user workload is getting heavier, they add the 2nd host to balance the users.  We found the FSLogix is getting lots of troubles when working in two hosts.  The problem is the Citrix DC always attempt load balance the host by user sessions or load.  For example, if User1 logged in and start working a published App on Host-A.  Few minutes later, he opens the published Desktop.  If the published desktop opens the session on Host-A, there is no problem.  However, if the session opens the published Desktop on Host-B, the user will get the FSlogix error because the Profile and Office containers are already mounted on Host-A.  We don't want to use the muti-session option in FSlogix because that is going to make one of the sessions in Read Only mode which create other troubles.  By checking the load management options in the Citrix Studio, it only offers the option to balance the CPU, Memory or sessions.  I can't find anywhere can balance the users.  The only resolution we can find is create two delivery groups, each delivery group contains one machine catalog, each catalog contains one Host.  Split the users to two different AD groups and assign them to two delivery groups.  This way we manually separate the users in two hosts.  Users in AD Group-A always log in to Host-A, AD Group-B always log in to Host-B.  This setup temporarily solves the problem of multiple hosts fighting to mount the same VHDX files in FSlogix container.  However, it won't be able to seamless pickup loads when one of the hosts hung or crash.  Because the users are force to login to one of the hosts.  When that host get trouble, they won't be able to automatically use the other working host.  

Resolution looking for: 

Is there a way to get the delivery controller to always keeps the user sessions on the same host when delivery group contains multiple hosts?  Meaning if a user started a session on Host-A, when the user opens more sessions later, all other session should always open on Host-A even Host-B get much free resource.  We want the users to be able to dynamically place in any host when they login with the first session.  Once they logged in the first session, they need to stay in same Host no matter how many sessions they open until the last session is closed. 

[James Kindon]

Your challenge is a combo of desktops and apps, they are treated differently

Do you need to use FSLogix? Do both sessions need the profile to be loaded? If you do, you can look at the Citrix capability to compliment FSLogix https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/profile-management/current-release/configure/enable-multi-session-write-back-for-profile-containers.html 

Often the challenge lies more in the choice of profile management tooling than a challenge with the delivery mechanism. You can use tags and all sorts of things, but I'd go back to the basics of why a profile for both sessions to start with 

[Jeff Riechers]

Here are my recommendations.

1. Don't use Profile and Office Layer.  Office Layer should mainly be used with other profile solutions, such as mandatory, or TS Roaming.  Full profile layer can do everything, and reduce redirections.

2. Force workstation connections to be Desktop preferred.  Then when you launch published apps inside the session they will stay there.

3. If they aren't using Onedrive, and have a fast internet connection, use attempt for read-write, failback to read only, and set Outlook to not used cached mode.