Delivery Groups: New Studio interface for creating machine restart schedules

In earlier releases, you used Studio to create a restart schedule for machines in a Delivery Group. To create multiple schedules, you used PowerShell cmdlets. Now, the updated Studio interface enables you to create and manage one or more restart schedules.

A schedule can affect either:

• All of the machines in the group.
• One or more (but not all) machines in the group. The machines are identified by a tag that you apply to the machine. This is called a tag restriction, because the tag restricts an action to only items (in this case, machines) that have the tag.

A schedule includes the day and time the restart begins, and the duration. The duration is either “start all affected machines at the same time” or an interval it should take to restart all affected machines.

You can enable or disable a schedule. Disabling a schedule can be helpful when testing, during special intervals, or when preparing schedules before you need them.

You cannot use schedules for automated power-on or shutdown from Studio, only to restart.

Citrix Scout: Always On Tracking traces on network shares

In earlier releases, Always On Tracking (AOT) traces that were saved to network shares were not included in collected diagnostics. Now, those traces are included.

Machine catalogs: New functional level

A new machine catalog functional level has been added. The default remains 7.9 (or newer). Keep that default, unless all of the VDAs in the catalog are version 1811 or later supported versions.

Machine Creation Services (MCS) provisioning to AWS dedicated hosts

This release adds support for Machine Creation Services (MCS) provisioning to AWS dedicated hosts. An administrator can create a catalog of machines with host tenancy defined through PowerShell.

Support for AWS IAM roles

Citrix Studio supports the ability to configure an AWS Hosting Connection to use IAM roles by specifying role_base_auth in place of Access Key and Secret Key. An IAM Role defining the policy and permissions required by Citrix should be attached to AWS hosted Delivery Controllers or Cloud Connectors instances.

Citrix Director: Logon Performance – Profile Drilldown

The Logon Duration panel in the User Details pages now includes information on the Profile load phase drill down of the logon process. Profile Drilldown provides useful information about user profiles for the current session that can help administrators troubleshoot high profile load issues. A tool tip with the following user profiles information is displayed:

• Number of files
• Profile size
• Number of large files

A detailed drill down provides information about the individual folders, their size, and the number of files. This feature is available on Delivery Controller version 7 1811 or later and VDAs 1811 or later.

Citrix Director: Microsoft RDS license health

Director now displays the Microsoft RDS (Remote Desktop Services) license status on the Machine Details panel in the Machine Details and the User Details page for Server OS machines. An appropriate message is displayed for the license status. You can hover over the info icon to see further details.

Citrix Director: Hypervisor alerts monitoring

Director now displays alerts to monitor hypervisor health. Alerts from Citrix Hypervisor and VMware vSphere are supported. Hypervisor alerts help monitor the following states/parameters:

• CPU usage
• Memory usage
• Network usage
• Hypervisor connection unavailable
• Disk usage (vSphere only)
• Host connection or power state (vSphere only)

Hypervisor alerts monitoring is available for Platinum licensed Sites. This feature requires Delivery Controller version 7 1811 or later. If you are using an older version of Director with the latest version of the Site, only the hypervisor alert count is displayed. To view the alerts, upgrade Director.

Citrix Director: Key RTOP Data display

Director now displays key RTOP (RealTime Optimization Pack) 2.6 data in the HDX panel of the User Details page. This helps monitor the following status of the RTOP pack for each user:

• Status (optimized, fallback)
• RTC version
• RTME version on user device
• Packet loss metrics

Citrix Director: Application Probing access through Citrix Gateway

You can now use Director’s Application probing feature to probe Citrix Virtual Apps from anywhere. You can use this flexibility to run the Citrix Application Probe Agent on end point machines that are hosted in a different network. You can access the Site you want to probe through the Citrix Gateway. To do this, while configuring the Citrix Application Probe Agent, type the Citrix Gateway URL in the StoreFront URL field. Citrix Gateway automatically routes the request to the corresponding Site StoreFront URL. This feature is available for Citrix Gateway version 12.1 or later, and Delivery Controller(s) 1811 or later.

Display graphics mode indicator

The Display graphics mode indicator policy has been updated to replace the display lossless indicator policy.

This setting configures the graphics mode indicator to run in the user session. It allows you to see details about the graphics mode in use, including graphics provider, encoder, hardware encoding, image quality, progressive display status, and lossless text.

By default, the Display graphics mode indicator policy is disabled. It replaces the Display lossless indicator policy of earlier releases, which was enabled by default.

DPI matching on Windows 10

DPI matching allows the Windows 10 desktop session to match the DPI of the endpoint when using Citrix Workspace app for Windows.

This setting is off by default. DPI matching is enabled whenever the DPI scaling setting is set to No. When using VM hosted apps, the DPI is set to 100% by default.

Client drive mapping performance improvements

Client drive mapping now supports the transfer of data from the host to the client as a stream. This enhancement ensures that the file transfer adapts to the changing network throughput conditions. It also uses any available extra bandwidth to scale up the data transfer rate. By default, this feature is enabled. These improvements require Citrix Workspace app for Windows 1811 or later.

To disable this feature, set the following registry key and then restart the server:

HDX adaptive throughput

HDX adaptive throughput intelligently fine-tunes the peak throughput of the ICA session by adjusting output buffers. The number of output buffers is initially set at a high value. This high value allows data to be transmitted to the client more quickly and efficiently, especially in high latency networks. Providing better interactivity, faster file transfers, smoother video playback, higher framerate and resolution results in an enhanced user experience.

Session interactivity is constantly measured to determine whether any data streams within the ICA session are adversely affecting interactivity. If that occurs, the throughput is decreased to reduce the impact of the large data stream on the session and allow interactivity to recover.

This feature is supported only on Citrix Workspace app 1811 for Windows or later.

HDX adaptive throughput changes the way that output buffers are set by moving this mechanism from the client to the VDA. Therefore, adjusting the number of output buffers on the client as described in Knowledge Base article CTX125027 has no effect.

Virtual display layout

This feature lets you define a virtual monitor layout that applies to the remote desktop and to virtually split a single client monitor into up to eight monitors on the remote desktop. You can configure the virtual monitors on the “Monitor Layout” tab in the desktop viewer. There, you can draw horizontal or vertical lines to separate the screen into virtual monitors; the screen is split according to specified percentages of the client monitor resolution.

You can set a DPI for the virtual monitors that will be used for DPI scaling or DPI matching. After applying a virtual monitor layout, resize or reconnect the session.

This configuration applies to all subsequent applicable connections from this client, only to full screen single monitor desktop sessions, and does not affect any published applications.