Several years ago, and inspired by an article written by George Spiers to reduce login times, where “the second logon is quicker”, together with some code from Maurice Daly, I created a methodology and scripts that is designed to Autologon a non-persistent Session Host (both VDI and RDS), and then log it off again before another script will Start the Citrix Desktop Service (BrokerAgent).
It has been working flawlessly for years. However, I was never 100% happy with it because the process was using a domain (service) account for the Autologon process. The main challenge here was trying to change the password on a regular basis to stay compliant when managing multiple images. You cannot realistically do it without an outage. And in a 24×7 environment, it becomes difficult and onerous. I also felt that using a domain account can be “heavy” during a boot storm as you need to ensure you are excluding this account from profile management and policies where possible. Sometimes that is easier said than done. There is a level of risk here, as someone can easily make a change that will cause issues. The ability to roll the password and stay compliant was my biggest concern and where I got stuck for quite some time.
