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

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.