Citrix SD-WAN WANOP

Configure Virtual Apps acceleration

Virtual Apps acceleration applies to both the ICA and CGP protocols within Virtual Apps. The Citrix SD-WAN WANOP appliances, Virtual Apps servers, and Virtual Apps clients provide cooperative acceleration of Virtual Apps connections, providing substantial speedup compared to Virtual Apps alone. This cooperation requires up-to-date versions of all three components.

Virtual Apps compression dynamically switches between memory based compression for interactive channels (such as mouse, keyboard, and screen data) and disk based compression for bulk tasks (such as file transfers and print jobs). Compression ratios increase as compression history fills, increasing the amount of data that can be matched against new data. Virtual Apps compression provides several times as much data reduction as does unassisted Virtual Apps, often exceeding 50:1 on repetitive bulk transfers such as printing or saving successive versions of the same document.

Virtual Apps compression achieves high link utilization without congestion, by preventing users from interfering with each other.

To enable Virtual Apps acceleration

  1. Check the ICA service class policy. On the Configuration: Service Classes page, the ICA service class should show disk in the Acceleration column and ICA Priorities in the Traffic Shaping column. If not, edit the service class definition.

  2. Update Virtual Apps 4.x servers and clients. (Not necessary on Virtual Apps 5.0 or later). Use Presentation Server 4.5 with Hotfix Rollup Pack PSE450W2K3R03 (Beta) or later. This release includes the following server and client software, both of which must be installed for Virtual Apps compression:

    1. Server package PSE450R03W2K3WS.msp or later.

    2. Client version 11.0.0.5357 or later.

  3. Update Virtual Desktops servers and clients to release 4.0 or later.

  4. Verify Virtual Apps server registry settings. (Not necessary on Virtual Apps 5.0 or later.) On the Virtual Apps servers, verify the following settings and correct or create them as necessary:

    pre codeblock HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Citrix\WanScaler\EnableForSecureIca = 1 HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Citrix\WanScaler\EnableWanScalerOptimization = 1 HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Citrix\WanScaler\UchBehavior = 2 <!--NeedCopy-->

    These are all DWORD values.

  5. Open and use Virtual Apps connections, between updated Virtual Apps clients and servers, that pass through the updated Citrix SD-WAN WANOP. By default, these sessions use CGP. For ICA, on the client, under Citrix Program Neighborhood, clear the Custom ICA Connections check box. Then, right-click a connection icon, navigate to Properties > Options, and click Enable Session Reliability check box. Multi-Stream ICA and AutoQoS requires Session Reliability to be enabled.

  6. Verify acceleration.

    After you start Virtual Apps sessions over the accelerated link, accelerated ICA connections should appear on the appliance’s Monitoring: Connections page. A compression ratio of greater than 1:1 indicates that compression is taking place.

Configure Virtual Apps acceleration