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jeeholeFlag for United States of America

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XenApp 6 Session Printer creation is SLOW

We just built a new XenApp 6 farm on Win 2008 R2 servers and are getting ready to migrate our users from an old Presentation 4.5 farm.

We have Citrix policies that deliver Session printers.  We have over 230 printers.  For some users, it is necessary to present all of these printers to their session.

On the 4.5 farm we can do this with no problem, the printers are all available within 3 minutes.

On XA6, it takes over 30 minutes until all of the printers have mapped.

We used Citrix Stress test tool for printers, and isolated some drivers that were causing some errors, such as interactive service detection errors, and removed the offending drivers.  We now have less than 10 different drivers in use, most of which are 2008R2 native.  They have also been replicated to all the Citrix servers using start-xaprinterdriverreplication from powershell.

We are using two new 2008R2 print servers for the new farm.

We are also using Citrix profile management 4.0 to do profile streaming.  One thing I have noticed, is that the HKCU\Printers\Connections key in the registry (which stores all of your network printer connections) does not get saved with the users streamed profile.  It gets rebuilt each time they log in by the Citrix Printer Policy.

One other thing of note - I noticed that if I manually install printers on one of the Citrix servers by browsing to the printserver and double clicking on the shared printer, it says "downloading driver" for each printer I install, even if the printer being installed uses a driver that has already been installed.  I compared this to our old 2003 environment, and connecting to a shared printer that uses a driver that is already installed is instantaneous.  

I set a policy via GPO to configure "point and print restrictions" to a bogus print server name (thereby disabling point and print completely), thinking this would help, but it made no difference.

Need to figure out a way to speed this up.  I know 230 printers is alot, but it worked very well in Presentation server 4.5....

Please help!

Thanks

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basraj
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Check if this helps:

http://www.citrix.com/site/SS/downloads/details.asp?downloadId=2305094&productId=186

Before that, please check your server is up to date with latest hotfixes. Also for Xenapp 6. There are many hotfixes released to improve the performance. Take a test server, patch it to the latest both windows and Citrix. Even check the optimization pack and see how it goes.
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Try disabling streaming profiles.  Streaming profiles is a great idea, but only a small portion is downloaded at session initiation in order to get the user session to start faster.  What your users require in terms of printer drivers may not be part of what is initially downloaded, so it could be that the system waits (and waits and waits) in order to get everything it needs and create those printers.
I've requested that this question be closed as follows:

Accepted answer: 250 points for joharder's comment http:/Q_27323441.html#36714133
Assisted answer: 250 points for basraj's comment http:/Q_27323441.html#36591404

for the following reason:

This question has been classified as abandoned and is closed as part of the Cleanup Program. See the recommendation for more details.
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ASKER

The recommended solutions did not help.  I will post a follow up with our solution.
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jeehole
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Needed total redesign, but ultimate solution of disabling Windows Firewall may have had an impact on original design too