Wednesday 6 July 2011

XenApp 6 – Hotfix 068 fixes UI and server capacity issues

Citrix released Hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64068 last week – available here: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX129741

This interestingly includes several previous hotfixes, including the quite recent public hotfix 056, which improved the stability XenApp 6.0 considerably, especially when combined with Windows 2008 R2 SP1.  This fix therefore now addresses 13 separate issues.

Most interesting in the list of new fixes for me are those relating to screen flickering, windows maximising over the taskbar and poor server performance over about 70 connections:

  • Dock bars of published applications might overlap and obscure the local Windows Taskbar. This is the server-side component of the fix. To resolve the issue in its entirety, you must also install a client-side hotfix that contains Fix #206851.
    [From XA600W2K8R2X64068][#210857]

  • Certain applications can perform slowly when run in seamless mode.
    [From XA600W2K8R2X64068][#257490]

  • The CPU consumption of the winlogon.exe process can be higher than usual and cause new connection attempts to fail once a server hosts 70 connections or more. Eventually, servers can experience a fatal exception and need to be restarted.
    [From XA600W2K8R2X64068][#LA0032]

These issues have been seen on and off since we starting to run large number of user sessions on XenApp 6 servers.  Anecdotally, the issue of the Start Menu being obscured by Citrix sessions is quite widespread (though obviously more of an annoyance than anything).  We know that sessions can flicker when being shadowed using Remote Assistance or SCCM if the client version is older than v12.1 – hopefully this is also fixed now. The last one, servers behaving badly with over about 70 connections, is also just what we have seen, with far less user density (number of user sessions on each server) possible than we expected to be the case from benchmarking. We’ll allow more sessions now and see whether the servers behave better.

Incidentally, the “client-side hotfix that contains Fix #206851” mentioned in some of the issues fixed was included in the Citrix Online Plug-In v11.2 and is presumably in later releases as well.

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