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jcrowland
Contributor
Contributor

Console mouse session interfering with guest Citrix sessions

We're running a number of Citrix Presentation 4.5 servers on Microsoft Windows 2003 R2 fully patched guests on ESX 3.5.0 (64607) hosts and recently encountered two problems:

  1. Today, we RDP'ed into our VirtualCenter server and hit the console for a guest server, after logging in as a local administrator, about 12 users complained that their mouse was moving. We verified that this was the case and that it correlated to the console session. We disconnected the administrator, closed the session, reconnected from another source, and reproduce the problem again. We've never experienced anything like this on any of our 3.0 or 3.5 ESX servers.

  2. Last week, we consoled into a server, again via RDP, logged in, logged out, and then copy and pasted text into something on my local PC. The text surprised me as it was something from a user logged into the server, probably from her buffer, it was a confidential excerpt from a contract. This was on a separate Citrix 4.5 server guest running on a different 3.5 ESX host.

I hunted around the KB and couldn't find recent references to issues like this. We have the VMware tools installed on the guests, updated as of a few months ago. Any ideas?

Thanks!

--John C. Rowland

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28 Replies
tsc09
Contributor
Contributor

Has anyone found a solution to this yet? We are experiencing the problem on all our servers.

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jcrowland
Contributor
Contributor

We can still reproduce this problem on Citrix and RDP for 2003/2008 32/64-bit Window servers. We never received a satisfactory reponse on the opened issue for this beyond a recommendation to upgrade after building another ESX server and reproducing it with support and sending images.

If anyone else has had some luck, let me know.

Live with it? Smiley Sad

--John

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tsc09
Contributor
Contributor

Hi John

Thanks for the repsonse. Fingers crossed someone else will have found the solution...

Will

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msemon1
Expert
Expert

One of the issues we faced was the problem with VMware Tools on Citrix boxes. Installing shared folders with VMware Tools does not work with Folder redirection. We found that the /console or admin switch did not work for use with RDP. The VM Console appears to be the console session. Let me know if you find anything further on this issue.

Mike

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teledataconsult
Contributor
Contributor

I'd like to confirm this issue STILL exists.

I have a vSphere 4 Update 1 (with post Update 1 patches)

Server 2003 x86 running citrix XenApp 5 with the latest hotfix rollups and the latest VMware Tools.

moving the mouse around in the vSphere client console makes the mouse jump around in Citrix ICA user sessions...

I'm pretty sure we have shared folders disabled in the VMware Tools.

I have not opened an incident with VMware yet. Wondering if anyone has any new updates on this issue...

Thanks!

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Justins
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

This issue does indeed still exist, vSphere 4 update 1 with latest patches on ESX for citrical, security and even general showing no missing's we encountered this issue. Citrix 4.5 on Win2k3 R2 with latest patches in the VMs. We installed VMware Tools but did not install the shared folders component, that was disabled explicitly during the install.

A VI admin logs into a Citrix VM console and all users on that server logged into a published desktop will get their mouse to flicker and move unexpectedly in correlation to the VI admin mouse movements.

For now I had my customer just use a process of not logging into a citrix VM console until all users are removed from it Citrix wise akin to 'maintenance mode'. But of course, this leads much to be desired as a final 'solution'. In for seeing if any resolution is found for this problem.

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w_moore
Contributor
Contributor

Oh my. We just came across this and thought it was weird. The fact that it was happening to you guys 5-6 years ago is spectacular!

We are running a 5.1 farm and came across it while working with a new 2012R2 RDS and replicated it with a 2012R2 XenDesktop server. My first thought was that it was probably because we are 5.1 and VMTools isn't yet compatible with R2 but clearly that isn't the case.

Did any of you guys track down the cause or come up with a solution?

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ctzmjs
Contributor
Contributor

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RonaldJanssen
Contributor
Contributor

Issue is still very much alive, using Vsphere 6.7

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