SYN404: Best practices for migrating to the latest version of XenApp

© 2014 Citrix. Confidential.1


• This slide should only be used with partners or existing long term customers NOT new customers.

• Use this slide to tell the story that many organizations today have separate teams managing app delivery (XenApp admins) and desktop delivery (XenDesktop admins).

• Start with painting the picture that the XA admins “grew‐up” managing app deliver, from Metaframe to Presentation Server and now XenApp… initially for those productivity apps that everyone uses or maybe with problematic apps. Separately, and more recently, they have a separate team managing XenDesktop – they may be the admins previously doing desktop management.

• Naturally, as more customers expand desktops virt to improve desktop management/meet other business initiatives like BYO ‐ via XenDesktop, … they quickly realize the importance of applications and the need for apps to be an integral part of their desktop strategy. And as a result, more CIOs and Directors of IT are saying & making plans for the desktop and apps infrastructure and teams to come under one team/group and they envision today’s silo’ed roles and responsibilities of the two teams will quickly merge over time.

2


• Explain that, today, XenApp admins manage their XA farm and XD admins manages desktop virt in their XD farm.

‐ On the left, a traditional (albeit simplified) XenApp Deployment – it uses the IMA (Independent Management Architecture) to deliver applications to end users

‐ On the right, you can see a typical desktop infrastructure, this is capable of delivering desktops to end users using the new FMA architecture (Flexcast Management Architecture)

• The delivery infrastructure is, of course, hidden from the end user today by the web interface and in more recent versions of XD & XA storefront which is becoming the preferred means of access.

These two architectures are very different; each with their own needs, requirements and management… and as organizations merge their XA and XD teams together under one infrastructure/one team….<next slide>

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• This slide shows the separation of management/controller and the lightweight delivery agent, compared with the traditional IMA model.















• Founded in 1925 as Rolscreen Company• Rolscreen® was first product• Started making windows in 1937

• Headquartered in Pella, Iowa since 1926• Pella brand honors the City • Population 10,000• Home to Central College

• Company renamed Pella Corporation in 1992• Aligns better with our brand



• By leverageing partnerships we’re able to get access to technical teams and resources and in turn we speak on their behalf

• By staying current we’re able to take advantage of new features and supportability. Continue to be attractive to our partners.

• Location in Pella, Iowa…growing and challenging employees helps to recruit and retain top talent.

• We like to stay cutting edge but we do so in a very controlled manner as to not adversely impact the business.



• Move to smaller facilities

• Remote data centers, most of our server/data center expertise is in Pella. How do we get the servers moved back to Pella?

• Each branch operated independently for a long time. Standardization to reduce support costs. Enable cross‐site support

• With each site operating independently, users were saving files to various locations…some not backed up consistently

• Growing number of Finance, HR, Customer Service Reps supporting multiple branches became a networking nightmare. Used DFSR but with mixed results

• We wanted to arm our sales reps and service technicians with flexibility by giving them options with devices


• We chose Citrix because it matched up best for us following our recent conversion of virtual environment from VMWare to Hyper‐V

• We chose XenApp because it was gave us better user density than XenDesktop and provided everything we needed

• Some additional details about our XenApp Environment. We’re using HP Lefthand for SAN storage and a NetApp NAS for user profiles and folder redirection.

• In the Fall of 2012 we engaged Choice Solutions based out of Kansas City to help us build out our XenApp 6.5 environment. At the time we knew very little very little about Citrix. There’s a lot involved with setting up Citrix with profiles, folder redirection, GPOs, storage, etc. Having Choice onsite was invaluable to us in getting our environment up and running in a timely fashion.

• One issue we ran into right away was that we discovered that some of our applications (particularly Outlook add‐ins) didn’t work in a terminal server/XenApp environment so we decided to move forward with a Hybrid environment where users could access their apps both from Citrix and from their local PC


• In January of last year our first Sales Branch went live with XenApp

• We quickly discovered that redirecting all available folders on the local PC like we did on the XenAppservers didn’t work as well for users in Los Angeles as it did for us in Pella where we were 30 feet from our NAS. We quickly mitigated the folder redirection issues by slimming down to redirecting just the documents and favorites folders. We chose to skip the desktop folder because it’s become a place where people store a lot of personal stuff

• After we mitigated the folder redirection issues we found we were still fighting some performance problems. The biggest difference maker for us was changing the write cache settings in Provisioning Servers from Write to Disk to Write to RAM. You can see our disk I/O throughput before and after the changes.


• We have over 10 images to maintain….1 for each branch. Considered App‐V but want to maintain ability to phase in changes. Capturing and publishing images in 6.5 consumed a lot of time

• We’re a thin team without much time to learn Citrix. When we ran into issues it cost us time trying to determine which console contained the feature we were looking for

• We also felt pain when we brought a new branch on site. Each branch has around 30‐40 applications to publish. With 6.5 we had to enter all the information for each app manually. Could take an hour or two.

• Lastly and most importantly the Finger Pointing. Citrix talks about this all the time but it doesn’t really sink in until you experience it. Whenever we ran into issues with Citrix performance the blame always started with us. Sometimes it was a network issue, sometimes a disk issue, sometimes it was Hyper‐V, sometimes it was the app. We suddenly found that we were not only desktop admins but server admins, network admins and application owners. At one time Nick alone had close to 50 open helpdesk tickets assigned to him. 1‐10 is average.



• This slide talks about why we decided to pursue XenDesktop 7. What drove us to pursue the upgrade.

• Nick was at Synergy last year during the XenDesktop 7 release. HDX Insight Center and Director really motivated us as a means to get rid of some of the finger pointing and to get out of troubleshooting issues when they weren’t necessarily Citrix issues.

• Consolidation of Consoles ‐ Being a Citrix Admin is just a small part of our role so we were looking to reduce the complexity of our environment

• We were hearing that Web Interface was going away so we thought upgrading to XenDesktop 7 would allow us to upgrade to Storefront

• We knew we’d want to upgrade eventually and thought it’d be easier to do it before the environment grew and upgrading would become more complicated


• We used the XenDesktop 7 project as a means to upgrade our backend Hyper‐V environment from 2008 to 2012

• We continued with HP Lefthand for backend SAN storage

• We have 2 NetApp FAS 3220s in two separate data centers to provide NAS storage for our Citrix UPM Profiles and Folder Redirection data

• We continued to leverage Citrix Provisioning Services in the new environment


• We brought Choice Solutions back last fall and they helped us build out our XenDesktop 7 environment

• We were just getting ready to start rolling into production when Citrix announced 7.1. Since we hadn’t put any users on 7 yet, we upgraded everything to 7.1. It was a pretty easy upgrade, didn’t need assistance from Choice Solutions

• Started Production in January rolling out the upgrade to one branch at a time. With each rollout there was substantial end user training to familiarize them with the new Receiver client and getting them used to launching apps inside the Receiver vs the Start Menu

• As a backup we left the 6.5 environment running alongside 7.1 as a failsafe and as a reference to flush out issues when users would say, “It worked in the old environment”

• During the 5 week span we upgraded 7 branches and over 350 users. Feb 24th we removed the 6.5 environment.

• During that span we also added 2 additional branches, 1 independently owned…required us to re‐architect a separate Citrix environment for them.


• Our upgrade to 7.1 wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. We ran into a few problems along the way

• Our first major issue was implementing the HDX Insight Center. The version of Netscaler that we were on had a bug that caused our load balancing vips to break when we enabled AppFlow. This issue has since been resolved more recent Netscaler versions. Lesson learned: check for known issues with your Netscaler version before trying to implement HDX Insight Center. We’ve since upgraded our Netscaler but haven’t had another maintenance window to re‐try the install.

• Application launch times – we were aware that moving to version 7, that we’d lose Application Pre‐Launch but what we encountered was that apps were taking over 1 minute to launch in some cases. However, we were able to leverage data in Director to find that it was caused by a group policy for Internet Explorer that was written with an old ADM template. After re‐writing the policy with a newer template, login times now are between 20‐30 seconds. Lesson Learned: look to Director first to track down logon performance issues.

• We saw performance take a step back with one of our critical in house developed applications. We discovered a Citrix Policy in Citrix Studio called Legacy Graphics Mode that’s disabled by default. Turning it on greatly improved performance for that application without any adverse side effects in other apps.

• Upgrading the Citrix Receiver from Enterprise Receiver 3.3 to version 4.1 was painful for us. 3.3 failed to uninstall cleanly in most cases. We mitigated this by writing a task sequence in SCCM that ran the uninstall, the Citrix Receiver Cleanup Tool, rebooted, ran 4.1 install and then rebooted again.

• The final challenge we faced was end user training. Our users had grown accustomed to accessing applications from the Windows Start Menu. We got them used to accessing the apps from within the Citrix Receiver by conducting a 30 minute webinar with each branch prior to its migration.


• While we had our challenges with the implementation, we also had a few pleasant surprises

• Capturing images in 7.1 is much easier. You no longer have to run the Citrix Wizard to remove the server from the farm before capturing the image. Only have to run the Target Device Optimization Wizard. When you have 10+ images to maintain, this is a big deal

• XenDesktop 7 also introduced a new write cache option called Write to RAM failover to Disk. Having the option to failover to disk allowed us to right‐size the write cache resulting in a memory savings of 120GB which should allow us to increase scalability without any further hardware purchases.

• Another pleasant surprise came when we began to add applications in our new environment. We found that XenDesktop 7.1 scans the image for installed applications and from there you can import applications. We still have to specify how the application is displayed to the end users and to which users the app gets published to but we no longer have to type the path to the executable or command line arguments which saves us time in creating applications

• The last piece is reliability. Mid February until now has been the most stable our Citrix environment has been since its inception


• All of our Branches are now on Citrix 7.1. We migrated the last branch this past weekend

• We now have over 600 people using 7.1 and our 6.5 environment has been retired

• Since our failed attempt to install HDX Insight Center, we haven’t had a maintenance window to try again. We’re planning to attempt again when we get back

• We’re currently weighing plans to upgrade to 7.5. We’re hoping to get some insight on 7.5 while we’re here this week to see if we’ll move forward with it or hold off.


• You can’t put a price on the stability we’ve achieved with XenDesktop 7. We’ve found the new environment is much easier to manage and maintain. We have peace of mind knowing that we’re more up to date with our environment and we no longer have to worry about the eventual retirement of Web Interface.












SYN404: Best practices for migrating to the latest version of XenApp

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