Measures reported by VmgCtxXcXAWemTest

One of the common reasons for poor user logon experience in a virtual desktop environment is the delay in profile loading and group policy application. Using Citrix Workspace Environment Management (WEM), this delay can be greatly minimized!

Citrix WEM uses intelligent resource management and Profile Management technologies to provide the best logon experience to users in XenDesktop deployments.

The WEM Administration Console is where policies are defined and managed, resources are created and assigned, and users are authorized. The settings so defined are communicated to a WEM Broker, which stores the same in a SQL server backend. WEM Agents are deployed on VDAs or physical Windows devices. These agents communicate with the WEM Broker and enforce the settings you configured. An Active Directory server is used to push the settings to users.

Typically, the WEM agents offload the critical logon processing steps - eg., group policy application, logon script execution, drive/printer mapping, etc. - and perform them after the logon, thus significantly improving logon speed.

This is why, where WEM is employed, user logons will be quick and hassle-free. However, if WEM clients - i.e., the WEM agents - experience delays or errors in logon processing, it can cause serious performance issues post logon. In other words, user profile loading, logon script execution, drive mapping etc., can become very slow. Because of such issues, a user will be unable to access the application/desktop profile, even after logging in quickly.

Therefore, to assure users of a high quality experience with the virtual desktops at all times, administrators of WEM-enabled environments should continuously monitor the WEM processing times on the clients. This is exactly where the VmgCtxXcXAWemTest test helps!

For each user of a desktop OS machine (provisioned on a virtual server) that hosts a WEM agent, this test reports on the overall WEM processing duration, the time taken by the WEM agent to perform initial processing (this includes tasks such as detecting and reading initial configuration, reading SQL configuration, etc.), and the time taken by the WEM agent to perform main processing (this includes processing of main instructions - eg., mapping network/virtual drives, processing environmental variables, application launching etc.). In the process, administrators are proactively alerted to a delay in WEM processing. The root-cause of the delay is also accurately pinpointed - is it because WEM agent took too long to perform initial processing? or was too much time spent on processing the main instructions? if initial processing was delayed, then was the delay due to a bottleneck when the WEM agent was reading the initial configuration? or was it due to a delay when reading other settings such as SQL configuration, environmental settings, kiosk settings, etc.? if main processing was delayed, then was the delay because the WEM agent was slow detecting the OS/agent log settings? or was it owing to a delay in processing the critical instructions such as network drive mapping, virtual drive mapping, external task processing, application launching, etc? Errors in processing that could be slowing down WEM start-up are also highlighted, so that administrators can easily rectify them. This way, the VmgCtxXcXAWemTest test promptly captures and reports performance bottlenecks on WEM clients that can impact overall user experience with virtual server, thus prompting administrators to rapidly initiate remedial measures.

Outputs of the test : One set of results for each user who is currently logged into the desktop OS machines hosting a WEM agent.

The measures made by this test are as follows: