HDX3D and RES Workspace Manager

Martin Lago from RES Software have posted this great article on howto get RES Workspace Manager to work with Citrix HDX 3D Pro Graphics.

The scenario

All the prerequisites for installation were perfectly met: Seperate DDC with Platinum licenses, Online plugin 12.0.33 (shipped with de HDX 3D Pro Installer) and de HDX 3d Pro server msi. The DDC runs on 2003 x64. The HDX 3D Host runs on a physical Windows XP SP3 X86 with VDA version 4.0.5010 (VDA 4 SP1) – Nvidia Quadro 6000 Graphics card. The Client is Windows XP SP3 with Citrix Online Plugin 12.0.33 and runs RES Workspace Manager with the Windows shell as default shell.

The actual problem

When a user session (with RES Workspace Manager) is started, the screen images do not look sharp. There is graphical “noise” at desktop icons and also the configured wallpaper image. When the same user session is started without RES WM, the images look perfectly sharp. With the HDX ConfigTool a slider (Quality Control tool) can be used to enhance the graphic performance. This works without RES WM, but it does not seem to have influence on the graphical performance (a value ’0′ of in the Quality Control tool looks the same as value ’100′).

Troubleshooting

To start such a challenge the first step is to forget all the cool technology for a moment and try to notice a difference in the user session between the RES WM managed and unmanaged session. Now this was actually the key to succes for this scenario.

In the RES WM unmanaged User session, there are two process responsible and present for the graphical performance: “ConfigTool.exe” and “PicaImpersonationClient.exe”.

In the RES WM managed User Session, the “PicaImpersonationClient.exe” process was absent. The “ConfigTool.exe” is started (systray icon visible), options can be configured, but they do not have effect at all, due to the fact the “PicaImpersonationClient.exe” is missing.

Resolution

Now that we found this, the solution was quite simple: add the ”PicaImpersonationClient.exe” as managed application in RES WM and set it to AutoLaunch and hidden. Works like a charm.

So lesson learned: both the “ConfigTool.exe” and “PicaImpersonationClient.exe” need to be started at session launch to ensure the correct working of this feature.
Important in such scenario’s is to skip all the existing technology for a moment and take a simple look at the User Session.

Resources

CTX124441 HDX 3D Pro Graphics User Guide – For XenDesktop 4 and Later
CTX123413 HDX 3D Professional Graphics Troubleshooting Guide

Source