I'm a fan of using what strategic products offer before considering a 3rd party solution. In some companies, it seems to be common to solve problems or gaps with yet another tool or utility. Those companies have an arsenal of 3rd party vendors and they do not always revisit their decision afterward to determine if it's still necessary to have the 3rd party solution. When looking on an architectural level, then the IT environment should be as simple as possible and for that reason, additional components or software will make it more complex to manage. A wrong mix or configuration can make things harder than they have to be. For that reason, any addition to the environment should be carefully evaluated.

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:

• Using StoreFront/Web Interface site and Citrix Receiver/Workspace App at the same time
• Using StoreFront/Web Interface site to launch a session Desktop and within Citrix Receiver/Workspace App
• Using StoreFront/Web Interface site to launch a VM Desktop (XenDesktop) and within Citrix Receiver/Workspace App

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.

One of the benefits of a third-party add-on product to Terminal Services such as Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server is published applications with seamless windows. In fact the default setting for MPS 3.0 is to only allow users to access remote servers via published applications.