XenDesktop 5 Woes

I was recently put in charge of updating a small Xendesktop 4 Proof of Concept to a full Xendesktop 5 infrastructure. The project didn't go smoothly and there are a few significant problems that I don't know where else to turn on. Our consultants can't figure it out, they've had 3 support instances with Citrix and they can't figure it out.

First (and most problematic) is that the XenDesktop sessions freeze on the end user's computer when they connect on the WAN. It isn't the virtual desktop freeze but the PNagent itself goes non-responsive. Closing it in task manager and reconnecting on the website quickly reconnects them to their session. We have reports of users losing a lot of chargable time fighting with this.

The second is we are getting protocol driver errors every time they launch from the web interface. It's just an annoyance. Turning off session reliability showed that it was an SSL error. Our certificate is correct, current, and works. We don't currently have an internal CA. I can build one if we need it to fix this but I'm not sure if it would make a difference.

There don't really seem to be many good citrix discussion groups/forums out there other than the official ones. Even if nobody has seen this does anyone have good resources they can suggest to me?

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Comments

Crucio666

i'm currently working on a project to deploy XD 5.0 and migrate our XD 4.0 environment which i built.

are there any freezes on the local lan?

how do users connect from the WAN?

jibbajabba

You could try to get in contact with Elias Khnaser from Trainsignal maybe .. He's also doing consulting for Xen 4/5 info@eliaskhnaser.com

tbgree00

Crucio666 wrote: »

i'm currently working on a project to deploy XD 5.0 and migrate our XD 4.0 environment which i built.

are there any freezes on the local lan?

how do users connect from the WAN?

Our remote site that uses Xen as their primary desktop are rock solid. 20 MB dedicated pipe between HQ and that office. They're fast and stable.

Remote WAN users out at a client site or home connect through a Virtual netscaler using Access Gateway enterprise edition web interface. Everyone has version 12.1 of the online plug-in, site in trusted sites, etc. Our biggest X factor is antivirus. I don't have control of the settings on most of the people reporting issues and they are restricted and can't turn it off to test.

Some tips that we learned along the way: Don't set the NetScaler or Access Gateway behind a web filter, use DMZ. Remove AD GUIDs from the registry on your Xens or they will time out trying to local DDCs through AD. XenDesktop 5 can't display WDDM display drivers so make sure you're using VGA or SVGA drivers. That's a bigger problem if you're using VMware to host since tools 4.1 install a WDDM driver by default.

jibbajabba wrote: »

You could try to get in contact with Elias Khnaser from Trainsignal maybe .. He's also doing consulting for Xen 4/5 info@eliaskhnaser.com

Good idea. I'll run it by the boss and see if he would want to buy an hour to talk to him.

Zaits

Just wondering, but do you guys run XenApp along side XenDesktop? If so do you experience the same issues with XenApp?

Thanks,

tbgree00

Zaits wrote: »

Just wondering, but do you guys run XenApp along side XenDesktop? If so do you experience the same issues with XenApp?

Thanks,

We run XenApp 5 with a number of published applications and also a published desktop to Windows Server 2003. It doesn't have the stability problems as far as I know. The majority of the people with the problems are from a recent combination so they never used the old system.

Most of the published apps are used in house though. I don't really know how to work in them or I would stress test it on a MiFi.

The funniest thing is that my manager and I were connected via 3G with 3 bar coverage using vSphere Client connected to consoles and RDPing through Xen with no slowness, freezing, etc. These users have freezes using outlook and excel. They have a lot of plug-ins but disabling them doesn't help.

I'm currently creating a vDisk from scratch to see if it's legacy settings from the XD4 proof of concept.

VirtualTal

tbgree00 wrote: »

I was recently put in charge of updating a small Xendesktop 4 Proof of Concept to a full Xendesktop 5 infrastructure. The project didn't go smoothly and there are a few significant problems that I don't know where else to turn on. Our consultants can't figure it out, they've had 3 support instances with Citrix and they can't figure it out.

Hey there.. I run Tech Marketing for Citrix and contacted our support team with this thread. They'd love to get in touch with you to help out. We'd like to have a better understanding of the sort of trouble people are running into when doing POC's/Upgrades so if you're interested in talking to us, we'd love to try and help.

Feel free to contact me direct at tal.klein@citrix.com and I'll hook you up with one of our support ninjas.

Thanks,
Tal