Koetzing IT
Thomas Kötzing - Freiberufler, Analyst - MVP, CTP
Citrix released StoreFront 3.5 and for me the one that finally killed Web Interface! You should get your Hands dirty with 3.5 :-) First lets have a look what has been added to the 3.5 release of Citrix StoreFront.
Icannot belive it myself but it's has been ten years when I launched my web site with my name ThomasKoetzing.de! Two years before I still had my site CITRIX4GE running and was reffering to my Citrix forum account "Citrix for Germany".
2006 was quite a year for me! Beside opening up my new site, I was also annaounced Microsoft Most Valubale Professional - RDS and Citrix Technology Professional and actually a founding member of the CTP program. As if the awards where not enough, it was also the time I went independed and is a huge step for everyone to get "on your own" to make money for a living.
I have lately dropped here and there comments about Citrix Universal Printer Server code name "Phaser" and actually some Citrix guys make fun of me because I'm so persistent with that topic since 2009! Why 2009? Well at iForum 2009 in Las Vegas, Citrix developer Gary showed the first bits (really just some command line exe) of project Phaser. Since then I keep telling Citrix to get it out of the door every time I have a chance. Now it seems it will finally happen after three years!
Ever heard of the Web Interface Session Sharing Key? Probably not but my guess is some companies are having issues with it without knowing. Of course they see sessions are not sharing and even open different sessions on the same XenApp server. I wrote an article about Understanding Citrix Seamless Engine some years ago and the article explains sharing issues with published applications but the Web Interface session sharing key is another story that I will explain here.
The Session Sharing Key plays a role when:
Many Citrix or terminal server farms have problems with printer drivers and sometimes even the Administrator is not aware of that. Drivers that are not 100% multiuser aware can have a bad influence in many different ways. Often those buggy drivers can slow down the login process or cause high CPU consumption. In worst cases, printer drivers can even stop the login process for the whole server, kill the spooler service or can cause a blue screen of death (very rare with Windows 2003 and up). For the first two issues, the Citrix health monitor can help tracking the problem.
Ever heard of "context switches"? If yes, then you are probably an Administrator for a Citrix Presentation Server farm. Now this is not a Citrix related problem but the context switches are one of the default performance counters in the Citrix Resource Manager and obviously the most often raised alert. Other systems might also have issues with context switches but if there isn't an alerting monitor you will never know.
