Citrix Profile Management continues to simplify management effort and reduce your IT cost.
Citrix Profile Management focuses on helping our customer migrate to Windows 10 and Windows server 2016. We continue to deliver quality improvements in Citrix Profile Management 5.8, with the complete list available here. In addition to this, we also provide support for latest Windows 10 Update: Windows 10 Redstone 2.
IT cost saving is another important aspect for profile roaming solutions. In Citrix Profile Management 5.8, we provide several enhancements to save your storage cost. We provide an option to remove unused storage space automatically and also optimize active write back to reduce IOPS consumption. These optimizations become even more important when utilizing cloud storage. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through each of these optimizations.
Profile Prune
When folders or files were excluded from processing with Citrix Profile management, IT administrator may want to remove those folders and files to free up space in order to host more user data. In Citrix Profile Management 5.8, we added an option for administrator to configure Citrix Profile Management to either keep or delete those data automatically.
The configuration we introduce is “LogonExclusionCheck,” please read the product documentation here for detailed configuration and settings.
Got stale cookie? No worries, here’s to better processing for Internet Explorer 10 and 11.
A known problem with Internet Explorer 10 and 11 is that the browsers will generate a large number of stale cookies. This becomes critical on XenApp servers, where the cookie files may consume a large amount of disk space when multiple user logon simultaneously. In Citrix Profile Management 5.8, we enhanced stale cookie handling by improving the ability to remove stale cookie so that it can free up unused space on local and remote storage.
Reduce disk I/O for active write back
Active write back enables in session data sync back. This ensures minimum or no data loss when unexpected issues happen. However, this is done at the cost of increased disk I/O. When files are changed frequently, the increased disk I/O is even more critical.
One typical example is Internet Explorer cookie files which are updated frequently. With active write backs, they will generate a large disk I/O to storage server when multiple user logon simultaneously. We also recommend to configure folder mirroring for cookie files to ensure its integrity.
In Citrix Profile management 5.8, we consider in session write back unnecessary for mirroring folders since it creates no value to the users. This will mitigate I/O pressure on backend storage server.
Profile streaming exclusion
Profile Streaming is the technology we introduced improve user logon performance. Only absolutely necessary files and folders are downloaded during initial logon time. Other files are cached in the background without blocking user logon.
However, we realized that there are certain files or folders that need to be downloaded before they are accessed. In the current profile streaming mechanism, we observed that there is a chance when streaming is in progress while application access data. This might cause some application hang. This kind of problem highly depends on application design.
In Citrix Profile Management 5.8, we’re introducing streaming exclusion to ensure configured files and folders are downloaded during user logon, so applications can always use those data right away.
Please download XenApp & XenDesktop 7.14 to experience our new features here. As always, we appreciate your feedback – please post your comments below.
