JimMoyle.com

I was just with a client and needed a tool to launch a direct ICA connection to a server.  I knew such a Citrix tool existed, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember the name of it.  My Google skills also somewhat deserted me at the time and it was only later that I found the correct CTX article.

I was also under the impression that Nick Holmquist had stopped development on his xConnect tool which did a similar job.  Nick kindly pointed me to the correct Citrix Tool which is Citrix Quick Launch and told me that in fact he has not stopped developing his xConnect tool (think of it as mstsc for ICA).  You can find the beta download for his tool at tekhelix.

Edit: This post is relevant up to 11.2, Citrix changed everything with 11.2 Look for an update sometime in the future.

Generally the ICA client doesn’t get much attention, undeservedly so in my opinion.  So I decided to make this guide as a quick reference sheet for all you need to know about the Windows client for Citrix XenApp.

Most people install the client when they set up their first farm and forget about it, maybe upgrading with a major server refresh.  The people who leave old clients on their desktop estate are missing out on a whole lot of functionality.  So my first and most basic bit of advice is to upgrade your clients!

As the first bit of advice is to upgrade I’ll show you how to best do that below.  The rest of this post will only be relevant for clients from 10.2 onwards, if you have an earlier client, I’m sorry, but this post isn’t for you.

For a complete list of the features included in the latest client have a look at the Citrix Client Feature Matrix PDF.  Hopefully the new cool stuff (and the weird errors from supporting a mess of clients) has persuaded you to upgrade your desktop estate to the latest client which at the time of writing is the ‘XenApp Plugin for Hosted Apps’ 11.000.

A lot of administrators don’t even know which client versions they have out there, and unfortunately Citrix doesn’t help you very much in this regard, as it only shows the build numbers for connected clients and not the version numbers i.e. version 10.2 shows up as 02650.  In XenApp 5.0 and later, this client build number can be seen by selecting the user session in the Access Management Console and selecting the Client Build Number column.  So now you need to know what the build numbers mean.  The knowledge base article CTX112613 will give you this information.

Obviously once you have decided to upgrade your clients you need a way to distribute them.  To do this your standard software distribution method will be fine.  To create a silent installation download the latest client to your local drive and run the following command:

msiexec.exe /a XenAppHosted.msi

This will give you all the options you need to create a silent installation package tailored to your enterprise ready for distribution.

If you run into issues with upgrading clients and need a clean machine for install you can use the free tool from Gourami to remove all traces of the client from 2000/XP/Vista or Windows 7 machines.  If you aren’t comfortable with the tool you can use CTX325140.

So, now you have an estate of updated clients, but you need more granular control over the client behaviour.  You can get this by using a GPO, first you need to import the handy icaclient.adm administrative template. You can usually find it in “C:\Program Files\Citrix\ICA Client\Configuration”.  With this template you can control almost all aspects of the client behaviour, with the one weird exception being that you cannot manage the pnagent url.  The main topics in the template are:

• Network routing
• User Authentication
• Remoting Client Devices
• User Experience
• Client Engine

In most cases this should be enough to sort out most of your problems, if you have any niggling connectivity issues you should use the Troubleshooting ICA 32-bit and Web Client Connectivity CTX075552 article.

At the time of publishing there is a tech preview of flash remoting available on Citrix’s website, all I can say is it works superbly given the restrictions of the fact it is beta code.  Stick it in your test environment and have a go.  For more information on the future of protocols see my previous post: How games will show who is the remote protocol winner.

Finally, I have some tuning tips for your environment, I think most of these should probably be in the icaclient.adm file, but we’ll see if they make it into a future release.  If anybody has any more client side tips, please let me know in the comments and I’ll add them to the table.

Lastly, although this is not strictly a client side change, if you are accessing a XenApp Server on Windows 2008 with a client version less than 11.0 you will need to install KB949914 on the server to stop your clients crashing.