7 Secrets to Becoming a Citrix Hero

© eG Innovations, Inc. | www.eginnovations.com
Lessons From The Field: What To Do & What Not To
7 Secrets to Becoming a CITRIX HERO

Know Your Speaker
Vinod Mohan
Sr. Product Marketing Manager
eG Innovations
Moderator
DJ Eshelman
Citrix Coach, CUGC Leader, and
Citrix Technology Advocate (CTA)
Srinivas Ramanathan
Founder and CEO
eG Innovations
Over 15 years of experience working with Citrix
technologies.
srinivas@eginnovations.com | www.eginnovations.com
• Specializing in Citrix since 2005
• Citrix Consulting Services
– 2011-2015 Resident Consultant
– 2016-Present Ad Hoc Consultant
• BOT-Consulting.com
• CTA / CUGC Leader
• Founder CTXPro.com and CitrixHero.com
• Author of “Become a Citrix Hero”
• Citrix Career and Technical Coach
CoachDJ@CTXPro.com | https://ctxpro.com | @TheCitrixCoach vinod.mohan@eginnovations.com | www.eginnovations.com

7 Secrets to Becoming a Citrix Hero
• Start With Why
• Methodology Matters
• Optimize Your Way Out of Default
• Respond to Your Users Before, During and After
• Being Proactive Saves You Pain, Time and Money
• Don’t Go in Blind: Get End-to-End Visibility
• IT Needs to Sell Management on Tools
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#1 Start With Why, Or Fail Before You Try
• Before making any non-
critical change, UNDERSTAND
the use case
• LISTEN to users
• ENGAGE with management
to understand business needs
DO THIS

#1 Start With Why, Or Fail Before You Try
• Do things because a website or
whitepaper told you it was best
• Assume users are idiots that don’t
know what they are talking about
• Avoid management because they’ll
assume you’re not qualified
DON’T DO THIS

#2 Methodology Matters: It’s Not Just About The Tech!
• Adopt a Services, ITIL-ish or DevOps-
ish Methodology as appropriate
• Get your team on-board
• Follow a well-thought out design
and watch for changes needed
proactively according to the process
• Develop, Test, Deploy...Repeat
DO THIS

#2 Methodology Matters: It’s Not Just About The Tech!
• Randomly do work that is in front of
you or that you feel like doing first
• Do it alone
• Leap before you look
– Deploy with no design
– Don’t monitor
– Rush through the process
• Test in production
DON’T DO THIS

Services Methodology
DJ’s RiskLESS
Methodology
Understand
Plan
Change
Maintain
Citrix Consulting
Methodology
Assess
Design
Deploy
Monitor

#3 Optimize Your Way Out of Default!
Default Settings are Costing Your Company $$
• Optimize the Operating System
– Use the Citrix Optimizer
– Keep in mind User needs
• Optimize NetScaler/Citrix ADC
– Defaults are used with the assumption
you will secure and optimize later
– Review quarterly
• Optimize your hardware/cloud
DO THIS

#3 Optimize Your Way Out of Default!
Default Settings are Costing Your Company $$
• Trust the ‘out of box’ experience
• Blindly follow whitepapers on ‘best
practices’
• Throw VMs into a hypervisor and
trust it’ll sort them out
DON’T DO THIS

Logon Time with Default Configuration
• Server 2012R2 7.15 CU3 VDAs
• Machine Creation Services
• User Profiles Management + WEM
• HyperV – workload spread between all 5 hosts
• 4 vCPU 16 GB RAM
• Apps and Desktops published
Average logon time: 90 seconds

Logon Time After Configuration Optimization
• Phase 1 (Late Nov)
– Applied Citrix Optimizer tunings
– Antivirus changes
• Scan on WRITE only
• Corrected Exceptions
• Eliminated Scheduled Scans of VDAs
• Phase 2 (Early Dec)
– Isolated ALL Server VDAs to 3 hosts
• 6 vCPU (12 core CPUs)
• 48 GB RAM
• Phase 3 (Late Dec)
– Tuned MCSIO Caching from 4 to 16 GB
– New Sealing procedures, cleaned,
defragmented and pre-scanned (yes, it
made a difference!)
Average logon time: 20 seconds Cost to implement: 6 to 8 hours

#4 Respond to Your Users Before, During and After
You Know What They Say If You Assume…
• Conduct design reviews with reps
from each user grouping
• Review trouble tickets and watch
for patterns
• Watch for workarounds and provide
a solution
• Monitor user activity proactively
DO THIS

• Assume you know what users need
• Ignore trouble ticket trends. You don’t
have the time...
• Users will always do what they want
anyway, so why bother?
• Director is good enough. But I forgot
how to get to it.
DON’T DO THIS
#4 Respond to Your Users Before, During and After
You Know What They Say If You Assume…

Step into the User’s World

#5 Being Proactive Saves You Pain and Time
And Your Company’s Money
• LEARN LEADING PRACTICES
• The goal should be to know about
problems before your users do
• Be alerted to what matters
• Quick resolution
(Hint: It’s very rarely Citrix!)
• Be able to trace problems & trends
DO THIS

• Assume it all works ‘out of the box’
• Helpdesk will let you know when
something is wrong
• Rely on service monitoring
• Stop what you’re doing and spend the
rest of the day searching for what caused
your SQL server to go down...
• Rely on your ‘experience’ to guide your
troubleshooting
#5 Being Proactive Saves You Pain and Time
And Your Company’s Money
DON’T DO THIS

The CTXPro.com Dirty Dozen
Common Consulting Findings & Leading Practice Misses
• User Environment Configuration
– Profile Management
– GPO / Logon Scripts
– User Devices and Workspace App
• Access Layer Security
• NetScaler Configuration
• Unused Citrix Features
• Resource Layer Not Optimized
• Operational Sprawl
• PVS and MCS Misconfiguration
– Server-Side RAM, Ports, CPU
– VDA RAM caching
• Data Security Holes
• Legacy Components
• Hardware/Hypervisor Not Optimized
• No Proactive Monitoring
• Lack of Training/Confidence
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#6 Don’t Go In Blind: Get End-to-End Visibility
• Monitoring needs to be end-to-end
– Endpoint simulation
– Citrix experience
– Backend and Applications
• Document your environment so
others can help you
• Learn about features of new
releases before deploying
DO THIS

• Just monitor Citrix and logon times
• Become used to being woken up at 2
am because you’re the only one who
knows the environment
• Just deploy updates and new releases.
There isn’t time to learn new things.
#6 Don’t Go In Blind: Get End-to-End Visibility
DON’T DO THIS

You Need Real Data to Get Real Results
Before – Citrix VDAs wrote the most disk (~8 MB/sec each)

You Need Real Data to Get Real Results
After – Citrix VDAs… 0 (Zero), File Servers ~2 MB/sec

#7 Sell Your Management on Tools, Not Toys
Waste Not or Get Not…
• Explain the BENEFIT of a tool, not what
it does
• Make sure management hears about
tools that will reduce effort hours – You
Don’t Scale
• Be prepared for budget reviews and to
be able to justify the tool
• Be prepared to expand the use of a tool
DO THIS

• Make demands or threats
• Hand your management someone
else’s presentation or a link to consider
• Results sell, not drama
• Get protective of YOUR TOOL (aka your
toy)
DON’T DO THIS
#7 Sell Your Management on Tools, Not Toys
Waste Not or Get Not…

Top 3 Citrix Mistakes, Fixes and Tips
How to Become a Citrix Hero
EVERY Citrix environment has
something wrong with it. Avoid the big
Citrix mistakes and be a Citrix Hero.
https://ctxpro.com/egspecial

How to Do Monitoring
The Right Way
Best Practices
from eG Innovations

#10YearChallenge ─ How Citrix Architecture has Evolved
• Physical servers
• Virtual apps & desktops with
separate deployments
• XenApp server central to
remote access
• Access from thin client devices
and desktops
• Virtual servers and/or cloud, hybrid infra
• Unified deployment architecture for
virtual apps and desktops
• Multitude of tiers: Citrix ADC, StoreFront,
PVS, WEM, Delivery Controller, etc.
• Heterogeneous devices (mobiles, tablets)
and platforms (Linux)

#10YearChallenge ─ Citrix Monitoring Has Changed Too
• CPU, memory, disk utilization
• Focus on XenApp metrics
• Simple to manage, few tiers
• Manual analysis and
interpretation of data
• Planning was simpler to do
• Focus on user experience
• Need to monitor all Citrix tiers in depth
• Single pane of glass to include supporting
infra (network, AD, virtual, cloud, etc.)
• Automated analytics, correlation and root
cause diagnosis is necessary
• Insights needed to right-size, optimize and
plan capacity for best ROI

Life as a Citrix Admin is NOT Easy
Pressure due to
technology
Pressure from
management
Pressure from
end users
• Functionality, capabilities,
complexity increasing
• Many tools: Citrix Director,
Analytics, ADM, Smart Tools;
no centralized visibility
• Dependencies on other tiers
• Challenge to prove it’s not a
Citrix issue
• User expectations are high
• Complaints need fast
resolution
• Do more with less
• Fewer staff
• More deadlines and SLAs

How eG Enterprise Can Help You Become a Citrix Hero
Single-pane-of-
glass visibility
Expert in a box
to aid you
Ensure a great
user experience
• Centralized monitoring of
Citrix and supporting infra
from one console
• No need to juggle between
multiple tools
• Track all aspects of user
experience
• Proactive alerts before users
are impacted
• Ability to distinguish client-side
issues
• Automated monitoring
• No need for experts
• Faster troubleshooting
• Increased efficiency

Synthetic and Real User
Experience
Citrix and Supporting
Infrastructure
End-to-End
Performance Correlation
Reports, Analytics, Machine
Learning
Monitor Every Layer, Every Tier
For End-to-End Visibility
Pinpoint Root Cause of
Problems for Troubleshooting
Right-size & Optimize for
Maximum Performance
Measure All Aspects of Citrix
User Experience
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How to Perfect Citrix Monitoring

Measure All Aspects of Citrix User Experience
 Emulates users
 Imposes the same workload again and
again
 Provides a measure of experience EVEN
when there is no real load
 Monitors real users
 Actual workloads
 Direct measure of what users are seeing
Synthetic Measurements
Real User Experience Measurements
User Experience
Measurement
 Simulate logon; launch
different applications
 Synthetic monitoring
from multiple locations
 Real user monitoring
from the client, network,
server
 Must use a combination
of both approaches
#1

Monitor Every Layer, Every Tier For End-to-End Visibility
• Logon time
• Profile load time
• Application launch time
• Screen refresh latency
• User network quality
• StoreFront response time
• EDT performance
User Experience
• Bandwidth speed
• Line speed
• Audio bandwidth
• Video bandwidth
• Printer bandwidth
• Drive bandwidth
• Framehawk fps
HDX Channels
• Active/idle time
• Top users by CPU, memory, IOPS,
GPU
• Top applications by CPU, memory,
IOPS, GPU
• URLs accesses by users
User & Application Activity
• Who logged in and when
• What applications did they access
• When disconnects happen
• Idle time in session
• Top users by session duration
Virtual Apps/Desktops Sessions
• Citrix ADC
• StoreFront
• Citrix Provisioning
• Citrix WEM
• Delivery Controller
• License Server
• Microsoft SQL Server
Citrix Tiers
• Virtualization platform
• Storage
• Network in data center
• Network to user terminals
• Infra services – AD, DNS
• Cloud
Supporting Infrastructure
#2

Universal Monitoring Technology
One Monitor for All of IT
#2

Pinpoint Root Cause of Problems for Accurate
Troubleshooting
StoreFront Delivery Controller
Citrix ADC
Citrix End Users
License
Server
Citrix Provisioning
Active DirectorySQL Server
Citrix Virtual Apps
Server
Hypervisor
Internet/
WAN
Storage
Client Side
Citrix Delivery
Infrastructure
Supporting
Infrastructure
Citrix End Users
Firewall
Corporate
Network
Client
Network
Corporate
Network
#3

Right-size & Optimize for Maximum Performance
Right-Sizing
Planning
Auditing
Optimization
• Analyze usage patterns
• Load-balance your IT
infrastructure
• Measure resource utilization
against availability
• Get the most out of your
infrastructure
• Predict when you will run out
of resources
• Forecast future requirements
• Make information available for
audits
• Get reports for regulatory
compliance
Out-of-the-Box Analytics & Historical Reports
#4

Right-Size Your Citrix Environment
Get insights for right sizing: Is the VM oversized?

Migration Analysis: Comparing Performance Before and After
Before
Migration
After
Migration
Migration from XenApp 6.5
to Citrix Virtual Apps 7

Capacity Planning
Memory bottleneck
preventing addition of
more desktops
Identify and resolve bottlenecks and excess capacity, and right-size your environment

Thank You!
Contact eG Innovations for more
information on Citrix monitoring:
www.eginnovations.com
info@eginnovations.com
Contact DJ Eshelman about:
CitrixCoach.com
BOT-Consulting.com
Citrix coaching:
Citrix consulting:

7 Secrets to Becoming a Citrix Hero

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