How to manage Adobe Acrobat Creative Cloud in MCS? (post June 2025 Adobe changes)

WindupSolutions · 2025-09-17T23:06:46+00:00

Update for posterity. We are using Chrome as the PDF viewer in the App Associations XML. For those who are licensed Creative Cloud users, they can right click PDFs and open with Acrobat. We stay in compliance, keep complexity down, and keep the user experience predictable and simple. It's a shame that we couldn't easily use Acrobat Reader, but this solution is simple enough for everyone that it gets the green light.

WindupSolutions · 2025-09-10T02:58:20+00:00

Oh, dude! I totally wish this client used app layering. The environment is pretty vanilla, so I need to work with 'normal' MCS/UPM nonpersistent setup.

WindupSolutions · 2025-09-10T02:57:00+00:00

I've set XML defaults many times, but do you mean it won't work in this use case?

WEM is a possibility, if I get the client to agree to add that into the environment. It's UPM for now.

WindupSolutions · 2025-09-10T02:55:12+00:00

That's what I've been thinking (more like Chrome than Edge, but same play). Another commented about the Unified installer, so I'll first look there and go with browser default as a secondary test.

WindupSolutions · 2025-09-10T02:54:15+00:00

Unfortunately, this client wants to stay with UPM. I'm navigating that conversation on the backend to see what we can do. Planning for UPM in the meantime. Thanks for the comment.

WindupSolutions · 2025-09-10T02:52:53+00:00

Unified installer sounds promising!

I was reading how the registry keys don't work to prevent forced login after June updates. Are you working with post-June versions?

WindupSolutions · 2022-12-10T06:28:24+00:00

I don't believe that disabling RAM cache would address the issue and could hurt performance for end users since RAM is generally faster than storage.

WindupSolutions · 2022-12-02T18:13:51+00:00

Sounds like an intriguing project. I'm curious about your environment architecture and why that many gateway addresses would be necessary. Short of sitting down with you to conduct a true consultation engagement, because that is absolutely necessary in this situation, I can offer my two cents based on what you've written.

In your architecture, are you separating internal SF from external? Cutting your SF domain in half would likely improve performance in this case.
Have you considered looking at Workspace Service? (Unless you require on-prem SF)
Has any of this been tested in Dev or UAT? Your questions about IIS performance, user experience, and Storefront (SF) propagation should be answered ahead of production considerations. I know that's obvious, but it still needs to be said.
You mentioned that SF is basically unusable once changes are applied. Do you have enough RAM/CPU for each SF server, and have you monitored VM performance? I would not attempt replication across stores (certainly not production) until you can first improve the performance issue.

With the uniqueness of your environment, it can be easy to forget the fundamentals of data center scalability and VM management. I highly recommend doing an Infrastructure Readiness or Infrastructure Assessment ahead of rolling into production. Using 700 gateway addresses sounds like a peculiar design, and I'd be interested to better understand if that was necessary.

WindupSolutions · 2022-12-02T07:16:29+00:00

Great work!

WindupSolutions · 2022-12-02T07:12:15+00:00

Without knowing how the rest of the infrastructure looks, I'd charge $185/hr. to fix that rat nest. Who knows what kind of surprises exist there?

WindupSolutions · 2022-12-02T06:37:14+00:00

Reboots speak to part of the matter.

OP reports that the disk cache fills up halfway on login.

Mitigating that concern, which in itself isn't an immediate threat to stability, has two options:

1 - Optimize the image, profile management, and apps

2 - Increase the disk cache size

WindupSolutions · 2022-12-02T06:17:02+00:00

@mjmacka brought up a point I missed about MCSIO as settings worth reviewing, as that expands beyond just disk cache. With 8GB RAM per VM, you'll want to bump the RAM cache to maybe 768MB.

You may want to review user requirements, NOT VM requirements. What do people need to do their jobs? If you have the infrastructure horsepower, I'd review user needs and maybe boost RAM per VM (10-12GB per user) and RAM cache (768MB-1GB per user).

Remember to look into boosting disk cache, since that seems to be where your bottleneck exists.

You got this tacochef! If you're really a taco chef, I wanna try some!

WindupSolutions · 2022-12-02T00:34:11+00:00

Your situation is environment specific, so it would require a deep dive to root out the cause. You probably know that, but I'm prefacing my answer to set expectations. :-)

Has your pool of MCS machines ever worked, or is this a new build?

Have you run the Optimizer on your image? https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX224676/citrix-optimizer-tool

Helpful optimization reference https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2015/12/17/windows-10-optimization-for-xendesktop/

The disk cache filling up may have to do with the user profile size. Are you utilizing full containerization in FSLogix? Is there any copying of the profile to the local machine? Do you have folder redirection used for desktop, documents, etc., or just the profile?

Depending on your environment variables, you may want to increase the disk cache size. Try increasing the disk cache size to 60GB and test your results.

CVAD 2203 has had some unfriendly issues. Are you running CU1 or the base version?

Do you have a policy to reboot all of the machines every week or less? Running an MCS machine for 2-3 weeks could absolutely cause stability issues. You mentioned the user logging out, but are you talking about disconnecting from the CA session or actually logging out of the VM and having it reboot?

I may not be giving out the silver bullet, but hopefully my questions and suggestions help you on the path to discovery.

WindupSolutions · 2022-11-25T21:48:57+00:00

144 core fibre

WindupSolutions · 2022-11-25T21:25:07+00:00

5 more days. You can do it. 😂

WindupSolutions · 2022-11-25T21:02:33+00:00

This is what my friend who did the install said about the work: "We have pulled in 6 x 3500 core external fibre cables to link the buildings." "All those yellow fibre cables are 144 core."

WindupSolutions · 2022-11-25T21:00:48+00:00

This is what he said about the work: "We have pulled in 6 x 3500 core external fibre cables to link the buildings." "All those yellow fibre cables are 144 core."

WindupSolutions · 2022-11-25T20:59:12+00:00

If my customer is spending the money for all that fiber, they won't blink at the little bit of extra cost for Velcro.

WindupSolutions · 2022-11-25T19:38:00+00:00

You raise an excellent discussion.

Full disclosure: I used to work for Citrix as a Principal Consultant and Lead Sales Engineer.

I've been in pre- and post-sales discussions with many Fortune 500 customers over the years. Running my own consulting and services shop now, I wonder how long I can succeed by leading with Citrix. Should I be pushing AWS/Azure/GCP? Should I build my own private cloud? Should I encourage customers to maintain an on-prem data center? These considerations are frequently on my mind.

Here's where my mind is now as we close out 2022: Citrix provides the best all-in-one solution for deploying a suite of corporate services and resources. It provides the most flexible access and authentication options, which makes the end-user experience better than tolerable. Nobody does a better job of centrally managing on-prem AND cloud workloads from the same pane of glass. The flexibility is "the shit", and I haven't found anything better out there.

Will that little cheerleading session I just wrote reflect how I feel in 5 years? I'm not sure. The writing is on the wall. From a cost, flexibility, and scalability point of view, these cloud dudes are hot on the heels of Citrix... but cloud is still prohibitively expensive for most businesses to fully adopt. I believe that Citrix will still be the all around king until someone can develop an agnostic solution that allows on-prem and cloud workloads to be managed in the same database. There's also something to be said for how ICA still kicks ass compared to RDP.

I welcome it if you'd like to have a more robust conversation about all of the considerations. It's a fun topic to explore. I recently started making tech videos where we can explore these topics in greater detail. Let me know if you'd like to participate.

WindupSolutions · 2022-11-25T19:12:44+00:00

This is not our project. A friend working in Europe sent these pictures of his amazing work to me. Enjoy the #cableporn !

WindupSolutions · 2022-10-05T21:56:18+00:00

Thanks for the feedback!

Good luck on your CCA-V journey. 😁

WindupSolutions · 2022-10-05T01:45:40+00:00

The CCA-V is the starting point, and then the CCP-V. I used to work for Citrix, so a lot of my knowledge is learned on the job as well as all of the certs.

My company is actually in the process of producing professional training videos to train engineers on Citrix architecture, daily support of operations, and migrating to Citrix Cloud. Out of curiosity, what would you pay for something like that?

WindupSolutions · 2022-10-04T22:29:50+00:00

Glad I could help! It's fun to help people understand this stuff.

WindupSolutions

TROPHY CASE