I have a XenApp 6.5 farm of around 30 servers running on Server 2008 delivering a published desktop.
A fair percentage of our help desk calls are around hung sessions. It's not an excessive amount for life with Citrix I don't think. I recently discovered that a lot of these calls were not actually XenApp session issues but crashed applications, the kind everyone is used to with MS Office and the like, that you would normally just end the task for.
We currently deny access to task manager with a GPO. I think this was done for fear of users logging each other off or killing processes of others. Having tested this myself that doesn't appear to be the case, can't view other processes or log off users. You can create new tasks, but other security settings should prevent any issues arising for us from that.
I've seen a few 3rd party task managers which are made for Citrix, I did try Task Nanny briefly. It seemed useless to me as obviously it's not integrated with the OS and couldn't be launched when it was actually needed. Why do they exist? Filling a gap which no longer exists?
My question really is do you give your Citrix users access to task manager? If you don't, why not?
Thanks.
Best Answer
In our 6.5 farm we give our users Task Manager - for the exact reason of killing hung processes. It doesn't really make our Helpdesk kill hung process type calls any less though as some users don't even know it exits or they simply don't know what process they need to kill.
We generally manage processes/sessions with the AppCentre admin console.
The only thing we restrict via gp is, as you mention ability to log other users off/send messages etc. They only have visibility of what other users are logged onto the same server (via the users tab) but that's about it.
I don't think we'd disable it as it's handy when shadowing a user to check the cpu etc. we disable the usual stuff: run cmd.exe c:\ (of the citrix server) etc etc