The Citrix Workspace Environment Management (WEM) agent caching is a lightweight database downloaded during the agent’s initial registration to the service. It holds all configurations set by the admin and plays a key role when the connection to the backend service is lost. Through periodic synchronization, it ensures that any changes set by the admin are stored on the endpoint. The illustration below provides an overview:
Though the cache largely enhances Citrix WEM availability, it’s not always straightforward when using it with a non-persistent deployment. Many customers use scripts they’ve developed to keep their Citrix WEM agent caches always updated for non-persistent deployments. Why? With non-persistent environments, there’s place to save the cache changes onto the provisioned VMs. To provide a more fluid Citrix WEM experience, we have now built in the ability to ensure your WEM agent cache is always up to date.
How to Get the Feature
If you’ve already upgraded your Citrix WEM agents to a version later than our October release, the cache will always be up to date for you.
As we covered in our recent blog post on what’s new with Citrix Workspace Environment Management, we’ve worked to target issues like:
- The WEM agent did not refresh the Citrix Cloud Connector settings after start up;
- The cache was not synchronized when the agent cache file resided in the base image of a non-persistent environment.
Beginning with our October release, the agent refreshes the Cloud Connector settings after startup, just like it refreshes other settings. To ensure that the agent cache is up to date, the agent automatically recreates the cache in non-persistent environments.
Customers who used a script to keep their non-persistent cache up-to-date can now simplify their deployment and lose the script. For those who have very specific controls on their Citrix WEM agent cache, we added options for the AgentCacheUtility.exe so WEM admins can refresh host settings or reinitialize the agent cache as needed. Check out our agent cache utility options documentation for more details.
Improve the Efficiency of Your Citrix WEM Cache
Though the upgrade can help customers get rid of the scripts the used to keep their Citrix WEM agent cache up to date, we can go a step further to optimize the Citrix WEM deployment in your client for customers with non-persistent deployments of Citrix virtual desktops
You should remove the WEM cache from your golden image. This ensures that at every machine boot, WEM will automatically try to create a new, unique cache. A redirection of the WEM cache to the persistent disk will help; you can avoid downloading the WEM cache every time your non-persistent environment is restarted.
Here are some additional recommendations that will help:
- After making enhancements to the agents, remove any logon/startup scripts used for manual operation of the WEM agent. The use of logon/startup scripts to manually operate the WEM agent host service (stopping or starting WEM agent host service) is not a reliable way to ensure the correct behavior of your WEM agent. The WEM agent host service has dependencies on other services like Netlogon, and those operations could affect the environment’s behavior.
- Logon scripts to launch WEM UI/CMD agent manually will break the WEM agent startup workflow and aren’t recommended.
If you find you still need to use scripts after you upgrade, please contact me at cheng.zhang@citrix.com. I hope you enjoy this new Citrix WEM feature, and please share your questions and feedback in the comments below.
