Re: Options to set up MS Teams Desktop Client for Citrix Users I have little experience of this but I know Microsoft and Citrix are kinda friends now:) Here's a blog with a little information about Citrix and teams. You can disable Microsoft Teams from Task Manager and it will not start up automatically: Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc key to open Task Manager. Go to Startup tab. Click on Microsoft Teams, and click on Disable. Method 2: Change settings You can the settings in Microsoft Teams and see if that helps: Launch Microsoft Teams. Re: Options to set up MS Teams Desktop Client for Citrix Users I have little experience of this but I know Microsoft and Citrix are kinda friends now:) Here's a blog with a little information about Citrix and teams. The Windows and Mac Citrix Workspace clients support Team optimization at the time of writing this article with Linux on the way. Installing Teams on a VDI environment When installing Teams on a VDI environment, it must be installed a certain way.

Modern times require modern solutions such as Microsoft Teams. What to do however when your Microsoft Teams user experience is not up to par due to extensive consumption in your organization?
This blogpost will guide you through optimizing Teams on Citrix and your local machines.

Please keep in mind that below text is all based on the full Teams client, meaning this does not apply to the web version.

From a Citrix/Microsoft environment perspective; there are two primary ways to optimize your Microsoft Teams traffic.

  1. Use Quality of Service (QoS) tagging for the ‘Teams’ packages that are transmitted over your network.
  2. Use HDX Redirection (optimization) for Microsoft Teams on Citrix to offload CPU consumption.

Quality of Service

Quality of Service works best if this is deployed through your whole organization. If you prioritize a Microsoft Teams package that is less important than ‘Business Application X’ you might experience unsatisfying behavior in your network priority. You can say something is important, but you would need to know how important it is in consideration to other things. Otherwise it would always be your top priority, at least for IT devices that is how it works.

Quality of Service needs to be supported (and honored) by your network devices and additional configuration might be required on these devices.

Let’s say that you already have QoS setup in your network environment. Then the default Microsoft recommendation would be to setup QoS tagging with the following ranges for Microsoft Teams:

This can be easily done with a GPO. Optionally you can configure the source/destination addresses.

Microsoft Teams optimization on Citrix

Microsoft Teams redirection is an efficient method for saving VDI/SBC resources. This however only works for the desktop based (a.k.a. fat-client) Microsoft Teams 1.2.00.31357 in combination with the Citrix Workspace client on the local user desktop. (minimum version 1907).

On the Worker

Microsoft Teams would need to be installed after the VDA Agent has been installed. If you already installed Microsoft Teams and did it in the wrong order, you can always reinstall Microsoft Teams. Depending on your setup (persistent vs non-persistent) you need to set up the installation differently.
As an example you’ll find the commands below. To be safe refer to the latest vendor documentation.

In short there are two available installation commands:

Per-User installation (default)

This won’t work properly on non-persistent setups. Also, the application will auto-update. This is better for dedicated persistent VM’s.

Per-Machine installation

This will work properly on Non-Persistent setups. Also the client won’t auto-update with this parameter (saves you the user tickets about update prompts).

Checking the configuration

After being installed, the Microsoft Teams client needs to load in VDI mode, this is done via a policy that is set automatically by default.

No need to configure it unless you manually disabled it in the past.
You can confirm if the policy is enabled by checking if the following key is set to ‘1’.
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareCitrixHDXMediaStreamMSTeamsRedirSupport

On Microsoft Teams you can check if everything is working correctly by clicking on About > Version, and the Citrix HDX Optimized legend displays:

Editing the gpo

Now it is time to update the GPO you created earlier and add the QoS tagging for the Teams redirection client.

You need to add the MicrosoftTeamsCitrix entries. Depending on your current running version, the service might be named differently.

Teams

Currently we have:

  • Teams.exe (local fat client)
  • HDXTeams.exe (offload service before 2009.6)
  • HdxRtcEngine.exe (offload service from 2009.6 and onward)

When all is said and done

Microsoft Teams should now offload Media traffic to your local machine’s HDXTeams.exe or HdxRtcEngine.exe service. saving a lot of those precious SBC/VDI resources and automatically redirects the local host peripherals (microphone, camera etc.) as a bonus.

Install Microsoft Teams On Citrix Server

Sources

  • https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/multimedia/opt-ms-teams.html
  • https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/qos-in-teams

Mbb network & wireless cards driver download for windows. Teams is actually a really good enterprise messaging and collaboration tool and as its in many O365 subscriptions etc then it’s a no-brainer to use it.

Install Microsoft Teams On Citrix App

However teams also has an unpleasant after taste for SBC/VDI admins (its not the only app that does mind you) in the way that it is installed. By default, running the installer for Microsoft Teams doesn’t actually install the application but it extracts a package and a json file into the c:program files directory. When a user then logs into a their VDI instance the package is extracted and installed directly into the users profile (around 500mb natively).

For physical devices this doesn’t cause too much of a hassle but for VDI implementations this causes a massive headache. If you consider a typical non-persistent VDI environment which includes some kind of profile solution, Citrix UPM, VMware’s persona manager etc etc you get some highly undesirable effects.

You either have to persist the default locations for theinstallation files within your profile management solution adding at least 500mb’sto each profile (no thank) or users have to accept that on each logon to a nonpersistentfresh desktop the Teams installer will execute providing a non ideal userexperience while the CPU is busy performing the installation actions and whateverelse it has to worry about during a logon.

A great solution to this is FSLogix and Office365 or profile containers to containerise the installer reducing the user impact by persisting the data natively within an OS as far as Windows is concerned. This is one of the reasons why Microsoft purchased FSLogix then provided effectively free licences for anyone who purchases RDS,VDA, E3 and above O365 among others. This obviously covers pretty much about everybody. however the problem will still be the same that while Teams is containerised within FSLogix that is still 500mb x No. of users of storage space that could be put to better use.

Despite the great FSLogix option there’s no denying that Teamsis a badly written application for any kind of non-perisitent solution andeveryone has been commenting on the situation for some time. It appears thatMicrosoft are now starting to do something about it.

Microsoft have released a version of Teams that is a machine based install which does not install the application into a profile location but with in the correct C:program files location with the caveat that it available for VDI instances only. Sorry SBC people you’ll have to have wait a bit longer I think.

Microsoft Teams Through Citrix

Microsoft have recently released this articlewhich includes download links to the x64 and x86 versions of teams and aspecific command line to run in order to install Teams as a VDI friendlyproduct. I wanted to have a look at this executable and see how it installed.

The command line you need to install teams is:

msiexec /i Teams_Windows_x64.MSI /l*v Teams.log ALLUSER=1

The critical difference here which either installs teams inthe standard in profile mode or VDI mode is the ALLUSER=1. DO NOT get ALLUSERconfused with ALLUSERS=1 its not a typo!

In order to find out a bit more about the teams installer Ibroke open process monitor and ran the command line without having preinstalledany typical VDI agent packages into a windows 10 instance. Sure enough theinstaller errors out with an error stating “cannot install for all users when aVDI environment is not detected”.

Looking into the process monitor logs it appears that theteams installer looks for specific VDI agent based registry locations to determinewhether it will install or not.

The installer looks specifically looks for the followingregistry keys

HKLMSOFTWARECitrixPortICA

HKLMSOFTWAREVMware, IncVMware VDMAgent

These reg keys are obviously associated with the two big VDIvendors however if you are using another vendor again you may be out of luckfor now. If a VDI agent is not installed then the installer looks for thesekeys only and then fails the install however if the VDA is installed it alsolooks for quite a few other keys so at the moment its not a case of creating asingle key to fool the installer.

However once you have a standard VDI agent installed you will then be able to run the installer command and you will see that rather than putting only the package and json file within the program files location it will now install full application into program files with the only exception to the rule being that the Squirell install log file is placed within the user profile and also a folder is created for Teams addin’s within the C:Users%username%appdatalocalMicrosoftTeamsMeetingAddin.

The change to MSI package are certainly welcome and a good initial step in providing a machine based install for Microsoft Teams which hopefully will also migrate across to the other apps that are guilty of the same behaviour(cough OneDrive). I personally would like it be a choice for the customer whether they want to go to the standard version of teams ensuring that they stay up to date with the latest versions automatically across their estate or take a steadier approach by using the machine based install versions
without the VDI technology search behaviour which would require more administrative effort for IT teams but a further degree of control that most companies find comforting.

A couple of things worth noting is that like its non machine based install counterpart Teams is not yet optimised for VDI voice and video capabilities, such as the HDX realtime pack so Microsoft recommend disabling the calling feature within teams. Download huawei network & wireless cards driver.

The machine based installed is also not automatically updated so IT teams will need to manage the update procedure as they would for any other application.

Author: Dale Scriven





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