Logon: VM Start


Diagnosing long logon times is quite a challenge.  Citrix Director breaks our logon time down into unique phase to help focus your attention on an aspect of the entire logon process instead of logon in its entirety. Looking at my 100+ second logon time, I noticed I have a 24 second virtual machine start time. … Continue reading Logon: VM Start

Logon: Brokering


I just experienced a 100+ second logon time for my Virtual Apps and Desktops session. Hopefully, you are not thinking “That’s pretty fast”. If I look at the detailed breakdown of my logon time, you can see it is a mess. Something is happening with my environment to cause things to spike. I want to… Continue reading Logon: Brokering

Achieving fast logon times


Wow! That’s fast.  That is the reaction users should have when they log onto their virtual desktop. I’ve heard many talk about how slow or fast their logons are, but many times we tend to exaggerate.  I’ve discussed this topic before in two recent blogs: Improving logon time with Workspace Environment Management How does Workspace… Continue reading Achieving fast logon times

Monitoring PVS Accelerator


I love data. I like seeing numbers and graphs. I like to see if something is having an impact. I like when new capabilities provides us with the means to monitor because this data gives me reassurance that the feature has an impact instead of me simply believing it does. Let’s look at XenServer 7.1… Continue reading Monitoring PVS Accelerator

How does Workspace Environment Management Improve Windows Logon Time


I’ve been able to experience the results of implementing Workspace Environment Management into a Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop environment.  I was easily able to obtain at least a 50% reduction in logon duration. I understand the why. I want to now understand the how. Let’s first examine the Windows logon process. When a user enters… Continue reading How does Workspace Environment Management Improve Windows Logon Time

Improving Logon Time with PVS Accelerator


The title is correct.  We can improve user logon time by implementing PVS accelerator in XenServer 7.1. This actually makes perfect sense. We already showed that PVS Accelerator drastically improves VM boot times because portions of the master vDisk image are cached locally.  Booting a VM equates to roughly 80% reads and 20% writes.  VMs… Continue reading Improving Logon Time with PVS Accelerator