Access Management Console - Discovery Slowness Fixed

It seems Citrix finally fixed the AMC discovery slowness problem. After applying the latest hotfix rollup pack for XenApp 4.5/5.0 for Windows 2003 I found that the discovery process is much faster than earlier, around 30 - 40 seconds for a farm where it was taking 4-5 minutes.

Here is the link to the Hotfix Rollup Pack 7 for XenApp 4.5/5.0: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX127926

Managing multiple farms from a single AMC

Using the Citrix Access Management Console it is possible to manage multiple XenApp farms without having multiple consoles open. As the AMC uses integrated authentication (there is no login prompt when launching the console) there is a mandatory requirement to manage multiple farms, our Admin user must be an administrator on all the farms we are going to manage. This is easy to setup if the farms are part of the same domain or it's also possible with the proper trust relationships and group nesting if they are distributed accros different domains.
Once this requirement is met, all we have to do is to configure the discovery process on the AMC adding one server from each farm. After the discovery is complete, each farm will be displayed under the Presentation Server node.
A downside for this config is that the discovery will take longer than what it takes opening the AMC for each individual farm but it's an option to keep in mind if we prefer using less admin tools.

Web Interface - Slow login

Symptoms: When a user logs in to the web interface, the login page clocks and it takes a long time to display the published applications. This problem is observed when the same web interface site is used to access multiple farms.

Cause: All the servers listed to contact one of the specified farms are not responding. This causes the web interface server to continue attempting to contact that farm during a confgurable time before it fails and display the published resources for the avaiable farms. Possible causes for the servers not responding: Servers are down, the Citrix XML service is not running.

Resolution: Change the servers used to contact the non responding farm for working servers or remove the farm from the web interface site if it's not longer required.

Access Management Console - Discovery Process

If you work managing a mid size/large Citrix environment running XenApp 4.5 or 5.0 for Windows 2003 this will sound familiar, especially if you were used to work with the CMC in 4.0 version.

Citrix moved most administrative functions available in the 4.0 CMC to the Access Management Console in the new XenApp version. First consideration, we have to get used to a new tool to manage our farm which is not a problem on its own but the problem comes when things go worst instead of improve as we expect with a version upgrade.

I've to say that after some time you get used to it after you find different ways to do what you used to do in the past and even you find some features that make this console pretty cool but I'll leave that for another post.

The main problem with the AMC is that you have to run the discovery process every time you open the console and if you manage a large Citrix farm this process takes really long time, we are talking about several minutes. The reason is that up to AMC version 4.6.3 all application specific properties were read for each published app in your farm.

On May 29th 2009 Citrix released the Access Management Console Presentation Server Extension 4.6.4 (http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX120575). On the "Issues Resolved on this Release" section this is the first one:

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In large farm environments, running Discovery can take a considerable amount of time. The issue occurs because Discovery attempts to read all application specific properties. With this fix, application specific properties are no longer read.

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So, this was the fix to apply to resolve the worst issue with the AMC. Not really, I expected that after this patch the AMC behaved similar to the CMC where you were all set to start working after opening the console. This didn't happen, the discovery process is still slow but I noted an improvement of more than 50 % so now it takes less than half of the time to complete the discovery.

I guess it's not the best they can do but it really worth give it a try, 50 % of improvement is not that bad.

Cristian.

My first post

Here is my first post. I've been thinking about this blog for some time and now decided to start. I'm working as a Citrix administrator and the idea is to share some tips, HOW TOs, ideas, opinions and any information that could be useful for anyone working with Citrix technologies.

Many times I found myself trying to figure out how to do/fix things that for simple they seem to be, it's difficult to find specific information about them. Other issues aren't that easy and you have to struggle and review the whole picture several times till you get somewhere. I think some of those findings and ideas can be useful and in some cases time saving for others.

That's all for my first post, let's see how it goes.

Cristian