The cost of long user logon times to Citrix and VDI

Most of us at some point have experienced a long logon time when waiting to connect to a Windows Terminal Server or Citrix XenApp session.  And for most part, we just put up with it.  But on further inspection and if we scale this from just us, one user, to out across an enterprise, say, 10,000 users.. Then what is the cost there? 

10,000 users, all waiting 2 minutes to log on and start their shift work.. That’s 20,000 minutes per day!  Over 300 hours of lost productivity and paid for salary, everyday!!  At just 2 minutes per day, a typical user can expect to lose 30 hours worth of work over 3 years.

So what can be done about this?  First, let’s understand what causes the lengthy logon process…

One of the major causes of long logon times is unnecessarily large user profiles being loaded wholesale into the user session at logon. User profiles can grow to 100’s of megabytes in size, and if not managed correctly, can continue to grow further.  It is this large amount of information which causes the long wait as the system drags all your files, folders and personal settings across a network to load into your session.  But again, this is not just for you, it is also happening for everyone else logging onto the system too.  The solution therefore, reduce the amount of network traffic at logon, and reduce user logon times..

AppSense technology prevents the need for the whole profile to be loaded at logon, thus significantly speeding up user logon times. So what are the options?

AppSense Environment Manager streams in user settings on demand as they interact with their desktop session and applies user personalization to applications as they are launched. By selectively loading in settings required to set up and personalize the initial desktop, no application settings need be transferred across the network and into the user session as part of the logon procedure.

In most cases, this will reduce your logon time to just a few seconds.. As Conexus Credit Union found out..