We’ve seen an issue recently: Users login to netscaler gateway url and click on the application. It shows the steps like connection in progress, loading profile, negotiating capabilities, processing group policies etc, and immediately disappears.
Troubleshooting:
In Citrix director, under trends, logon performance. Check the logon performance time for the users who had this issue. In the delivery group option, you can select the delivery group that the faulty application is part of, and look for the login time for the users.
Let’s look at steps on configuring a Citrix high available site for applications. These are high level steps only. Not a step by step article.
Based on your user count and how critical is the application, create 4 DDCs. Two in North India Datacenter, and two in south India datacenter (or you can create 1 in each datacenter). Similarly, create storefront servers as well. All storefront servers should have all DDCs added under manage delivery controllers section.
Below are some of the documentation practices that I came across.
Create documentation as you design and implement something new in the environment. From Owen’s mycugc post, Check if you pass Bus Test. When you write a script add a help section explaining what it does. Similarly, when you implement a scheduled task, update the description with what it does. When you create service accounts, in the description, always explain why that account is created, where is its password saved (like keepass etc).
Issue:
When users try to open the application, they get a black rectangle screen instead of the whole application.
Cause:
The issue could be because of the monitor(s) that users attached to their laptop (or desktop). Ask users to remove all the external monitors and test launch the application on their laptop screen alone.
Solution:
All the monitors that users connect to their laptop, should have the same monitor scaling and it should be less than or equal to 150%.
A GSLB configuration consists of a group of GSLB entities on each appliance in the configuration. These entities include the following:
GSLB Sites GSLB Services or service groups GSLB Virtual Servers Load Balancing or Content Switching Virtual Servers ADNS Services DNS VIPs GSLB Sites A typical GSLB setup consists of data centers, each of which has various network appliances that may or may not be NetScaler appliances. The data centers are called GSLB sites.
By default client drives, usb drives, com ports, printers etc redirection from user’s devices to citrix applications is allowed. On Windows machines, printer redirection works. They can see their local printers in citrix application sessions. But in macbook it doesnt work by default. Follow below process to make it work in macbook.
Solution: Create a new Citrix policy with the below settings.
Printer Policy in Citrix Studio Next login to the VDA server and follow the article: https://support.
ICA Only: If you don’t have enough Citrix Gateway Universal licenses installed for all of your Gateway users, then we can use ICA Only option. This option disables SmartAccess and VPN features but does not require any additional licenses. Note: most Citrix ADC Editions come with built-in Gateway Universal Licenses.
If we dont need smartaccess, then we can use ica only option to provide apps and desktops to users.
ICA Proxy: Citrix Gateway has an ICA Proxy feature that authenticates the user, proxies HTTP traffic to StoreFront, and then proxies ICA traffic to VDAs.
NetScaler SmartControl:
SmartControl allows administrators to define granular policies to configure and enforce user environment attributes for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Citrix Gateway. SmartControl allows administrators to manage these policies from a single location, rather than at each instance of these server types.
SmartControl is implemented through ICA policies on Citrix Gateway. Each ICA policy is an expression and access profile combination that can be applied to users, groups, virtual servers, and globally.
Storefront Aggregation
A core functionality of StoreFront is the ability to aggregate and de-duplicate “common” application and desktop resources from multiple Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (CVAD) Sites. This functionality is commonly referred to as multi-site aggregation. Duplicate applications and desktops are identified based on matching Application Display Name and Application Category properties. This functionality has been available in the console as of version 3.5 and was previously a config file edit.
Connection multiplexing is a method of reusing connections to avoid the overhead on the server that comes with establishing new connections for each request. Connection multiplexing support in Citrix ADC ensures that server connections are efficiently reused, which results in dramatically reduced SSL/TLS load on back-end servers.
Q: What is the connection multiplexing feature of the NetScaler appliance? A: The connection multiplexing feature is the core of the NetScaler appliance functionality.
