Koetzing IT
Thomas Kötzing - Freiberufler, Analyst - MVP, CTP
The Citrix universal printer driver (UPD) can generate big spool files. Printing within the LAN and big print data is not dramatic, but over WAN connection the print data can become a massive issue. Quite often printouts from Adobe documents but also other files like Word etc. can become very big.
How does it come to such big print data and how to avoid it? If you know about it, then you can reduce the size by 99%!
After implementing Citrix Universal Print Server (UPS), you might run quickly into error message "0x00000709", when printing. The reason for that is that Printer vendor set their printer to RawOnly, even the printer can work with different format like EMF. Citrix UPS uses EMF only and the source of the error message.
I had several incidents now with customers and the Citrix universal print server (UPS) that I like to share with you. Many complain that UPS is not working are based on missing information not published by Citrix.
Slow logons are already an issue but when it gets to a certain duration then it causes massive problems when using only publish application. Things can get even worse when Citrix user profile manager automatic configuration has not been disabled. Automatic configuration of UPM enforces profile streaming and it might and can cause further issues when dealing with a lot of small files like ini files, cookies, bookmarks and others.
Citrix XenDesktop Desktop icons are by default the same pictures for all delivery groups and quite boring. Back in the old XenApp days, the icon for Desktops could simply be picked during publishing. With XenDesktop, you have to use PowerShell (welcome to the future!) and with version 7.13 the get-ctxicons (Retrieves icon data from various sources) was removed and makes the process more difficult.
The interactive session is probably the most time spent during logon, according to Citrix Director. What is, actually, the interactive session and how can it be reduced? For many customers and users the logon duration is important and, therefore, you might want to minimize the time. This is nothing new and I have written and talked about the Windows logon a lot in the past because it's an important topic, once you steal the user's PC and replace it with a Thin Client.
Citrix released XenDesktop/XenApp 7.12 and with it some features that have been around for a very long time in the IMA architecture, that is up to XenApp 6.5. If you have worked long enough with XenApp 6.5 or before, you might be thrilled to know those features are back, or at least something close to it.
Here are some things (not all) that I picked from the release that I found worth mentioning.
