Scalability benchmarking – XenDesktop 7.7 and Windows 7

When I worked at Citrix one of my now colleagues at NVIDIA (Jason Southern) came to us with a proposal and PoC (you can read the blogs about that experiment, here) for us to implement templates to assist users to configure and optimize HDX graphics for XenDesktop and XenApp (Template details – here). XenDesktop/XenApp 7.6 FP3 saw the release of these templates which allowed users to configure their graphics for the specific needs of their users (user experience vs. server scalability) and network conditions (WAN/limited bandwidth etc.).

HDX Graphics Policies, really are simpler than you think!

A wrote a blog a while ago (read it here) about how although the Citrix Studio Console interface shows every policy for every graphics mode, most modern graphics modes need very little configuration and are affected by a few policies only.

Comparing Apples to Pears! Benchmarking Thinwire Compatibility and Other HDX Graphics Modes

One of our really experienced experts has just done a blog on some evaluation he did on Citrix’s hot new graphics mode: http://trentent.blogspot.ca/2015/09/performance-differences-in-citrix-hdx.html. Now this guy knows what he is doing but I’m a little worried others might not fully understand what has been done or the implications for the results. Trent did some tests flipping the encoder via a registry key. We do not encourage users to play with registry keys, occasionally they can prove useful to tweak a system, but really if that is being done we should be exposing the control via properly documented policies.

Citrix XenDesktop / XenApp: Setting Graphics Policies – it’s simpler than it appears!

I get an awful lot of inquiries about the graphics mode policies available for HDX in Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp. The GUI shows a vast array of options and its clear from how haphazardly they seem to be set in support call logs that many users are confused as to what these do and actually fail to realise most of the settings pertain to a legacy graphics modes that they aren’t using.