XenDesktopMaster

Using AppSense Environment Manager with Citrix Provisioning Services is a killer combination. In fact in combination with an application virtualization solution it’s a true layer cake.

Unfortunately the AppSense Environment Manager and Citrix Provisioning Services aren’t working to good with each other if you doesn’t keep the following step in mind.

• Every change you do inside the Environment Manager policy trigger “Computer Start up” needs to be baked into the vDisk itself.
• If you’re using PVS to stream VHDs to client systems, not XenApp servers or virtual desktops, every configuration change needs to be baked directly into the vDisk.

Why you have to do this? It’s easy:

If you’re using the AppSense Management Center to deploy and manage AppSense configurations normally every configuration change is almost immediately deployed to the agents. In a classic desktop or XenApp environment thats fine but not if you use Provisioning services and here is why:

If you make changes inside the Computer start up trigger there is no problem deploying the new configuration. But as soon as you restart your target devices, which is deployed as vDisk in standard mode, the new configuration is gone. When the system now reboots the AppSense Environment Manager runs the Comptuer start up triggers from the old configuration which is baked into the vDisk. After this is done the AppSense deployment system actual starts to update the configuration again but now it’s to late. The updated configuration is not used as the Computer start up trigger was already triggered. In a XenApp / XenDesktop environment that’s the only thing you have to be concerned about. Normally the Environment Manager  configuration is deployed before users can log on and so every change to the user section works, even if this configuration change isn’t baked into the vDisk.

For physical target devices, like client computers, that isn’t the case as the user is able to log on to the system much earlier as in a XenApp / XenDesktop environment. In this case the old baked in configuration is used for the user section of Environment Manager or, if the timing is very bad, the user gets absolutely no configuration as the Environment Manager configuration is updated exactly when the user logs on.

But if you keep both points mentioned above in mind you should be got to go.

By the way, maybe some at AppSense is reading this, it would be awesome if it would be possible to change the location where the AppSense configurations are saved. Then we could choose a persistent location for the configuration and wouldn’t need to update the vDisk in almost every case when an update to the Environment Manager configuration is done. Also it would be nice if AppSense configuration updates would be done before the Computer start up trigger gets processed and also before the user is able to log on.