XenApp 7.1\7.5 Disconnected Sessions not Logging Off

There are a lot of timeouts in any XenApp environment – active session timeout, idle timeout, disconnected session timeout…the list goes on. Recently, I ran into an environment that was having a problem with disconnected sessions staying on the server – it was a newly deployed XenApp 7.5 site with infrastructure and VDAs on 2012R2. There were some issues with applications pegging resources when users connected to disconnected sessions – turns out the disconnected sessions were several hours old.

Here’s the first important part to realize: XenApp 7.x does NOT use Citrix policy to define session timeouts – those policy items only apply to the Desktop OS VDA.

And no doubt this is confusing – when you read this CTX article where previously timeouts were controlled by RDS policy and the ICA listener…in XA6.x they are controlled by Citrix policy….and now we are back to the RDS policy.