This is a guest post by Rory Monaghan, Product Marketing Manager, at ControlUp.
Citrix Remote PC Access turned out to be key for many organizations in their attempts to quickly move their workforce home with minimal disruption. VPNs used at scale were untested for most before the pandemic, and when many attempted to put all employees on one, they discovered capacity issues with frequent connection drops and poor user experience.
Virtual desktops can scale more seamlessly if the hardware in the datacenter and licenses allow, but many struggled to move all required apps to the desktops to keep everyone as productive as they would be in the office. Some power users who usually work on a workstation with 16GB+ of memory, could also grow frustrated if expected to work on a less powerful virtual desktop. Unfortunately, catering for all users on virtual desktops and giving them optimal resources was also a challenge as storage, memory and other components became hard to source due to manufacturing and shipping delays caused by disruptions in supply chains.
Remote PC Access enables employees to keep using the desktop they grew familiar with when in the office while they work remotely. This can also provide the benefit of consistency for hybrid workers as they can use the same machine in the office and when working from home. A major benefit is that the IT team does not have to work miracles to try and get hundreds of apps to work in new virtual desktops or try to scale to a number of desktops past the optimal number that the hardware in the data center will allow.
Citrix also focused some efforts to make Remote PC Access even better and more accessible throughout 2020 by making it available without the need for a full on-premises Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops site by leveraging Citrix Cloud and changing the licensing of the product.
With HDX, the end user experience can be just as good as you can expect when in the office and without the same performance constraints typical to many VPN setups. But one challenging aspect for Remote PC Access is the management and support of these desktops and the digital employee experience. That’s where ControlUp can help.
Remote PC Access Support
As silly at it may seem, one of the biggest challenges with Remote PC Access is simply that the PCs may be inadvertently powered off in the office, meaning your employee can no longer get to the desktop when remote. Unlike when in the office, it’s not as simple as just pressing the power button.
For this, you can enable Wake-On-LAN in the BIOS of the PCs in your office. When someone reports their device is not accessible, you can try to connect to it in ControlUp. If it appears it is powered down, you can launch the ControlUp Console from the same subnet as the PC and simply right click on the machine and send the magic packet from the built-in Power Management features. ControlUp’s Branch Mapping feature can be useful for tracking the location of the remote PCs so support knows where to send the magic packet from.
The option can be made available to your help desk to ensure they can be empowered to assist these users as they call in for help.
More common is when a person calls into the help desk to say they can’t access the remote PC and you find the machine is actually powered on and can be connected to in ControlUp. However, the Registration State is showing Unregistered. You can usually quickly resolve this with a restart of the Citrix Desktop Service on the remote PC. You can use the awesome Controllers feature within the Real-Time DX Console to navigate to the PC’s services and restart it that way or simply right click and run the Restart Citrix Desktop Service Script Based Action. You can even create a new Trigger to automatically restart the service on an unregistered remote PC to take a more proactive approach.
One other challenge customers run into with Citrix Remote PC Access is that someone will stop using a PC or possibly a field tech will swap out a PC and not unassign and remove the PC from your Citrix Remote PC Delivery Group and Machine Catalog. Identifying unused machines is made a lot easier with ControlUp Solve and Insights.
For those using Remote PC Access with Citrix Cloud, you can leverage the awesome Citrix Cloud data displayed in ControlUp Solve to ensure the good health of your Citrix Cloud Connectors. This could be particularly useful in identifying an access issue that is not caused by the device in the office itself.
If you deploy ControlUp Remote DX to your remote user’s home machines, you can correlate their network data with data from their remote PCs in the office, plus the Citrix Cloud health data, to definitively figure out the source of any potential performance degradation.
You can, of course focus purely on your remote PC devices to get great data specific to these machines but you can also create a custom dashboard within Solve to display even more great data on your remote PCs too. If you have been loving life with Citrix Remote PC Access but could use some help to provide the best support and management possible, check out what ControlUp can do for you.
Learn more about Citrix-compatible solutions from ControlUp.
