The document discusses migration considerations and performance management strategies for transitioning to Citrix XenApp 6.5, emphasizing the importance of end-user experience and potential revenue loss due to application performance issues. Key migration factors include user profiles, environmental sizing, database upgrades, and strategies for application delivery, as well as the need for a parallel build for upgrades. It also highlights the significance of performance assurance tools to maintain optimal user satisfaction during the migration process.

1. Citrix XenApp 6.5
Performance
How To Ensure a Great End User
Experience Before, During and
After Your Upgrade
Presenters
Val King (WhiteHat Virtual Technologies)
Bala Vaidhinathan (eG Innovations)

2. Migration Considerations
Val King
CEO
WhiteHat Virtual Technologies
Val.King@Whitehatvirtual.com

3. Poll: What Are Your Biggest Performance
Management Challenges?
 User experience issues
 Lack of visibility across silos
 Complex and/or slow issue identification
 Proactive problem solving
 Chasing issues that originate in other IT domains

4. Top 10 Migration Considerations
1. The End User 7. Environmental Sizing;
Experience Capacity Planning
2. Physical  Virtual 8. Citrix Access Gateway
3. 32 Bit  64 Bit & App Goes NetScaler
Compatibility 9. Provisioning Server
4. Database Upgrades 10.Test Environment
5. App Delivery
6. User Profiles

5. What Impacts The End User Experience?
Active Directory
SQL/Oracle
SAN
Switch
Enterprise
Client Apps
Network Web Servers on XenApp on Hypervisor
ESX ZDC on
VMware ESX
Profile Server
License Server
vCenter

6. Why Care About The End User Experience?
 50% of businesses are losing revenue due to poorly
performing applications1
 Application performance issues can impact corporate
revenues by as much as 9%2
 Business performance starts to decline when mission-critical
applications reach the baseline of 5.1 seconds of response
time delay1
 32% of surveyed businesses experienced damage to their
brand reputation because of poor application performance1
(1) Aberdeen Group “Application Performance Management: Getting IT on the C-Level’s Agenda”
(2) Aberdeen Group “The Performance of Web Applications: Customers are Won or Lost in One Second”

7. What Does Citrix Presentation Server 4.5
And XenApp 5.0 End-of-Life Mean For You?
There is no real recommended inplace upgrade
from Presentation Server 4.5/XenApp 5.0 to
XenApp 6.5 or XenDesktop 5.6.
Plan on a parallel build of a new farm.

8. What About The XenApp Migration Center?
Settings Transferred Settings Not Transferred
Applications Zones
Application and server folders Printer management, such as driver
mappings and auto-replication
Load evaluators Configuration Logging settings
Policies Health Monitoring and Recovery
executables
Server configuration Server registry settings
Farm configuration Deprecated settings, such as Application
Isolation Environments
Administrator accounts
Health Monitoring and Recovery Tests
Worker Groups (XenApp 6.x only)
Load Balancing Policies (XenApp 6.x only)
Pre-launched applications (XenApp 6.5 only)

9. 2: Physical Servers To Virtual Servers
Primary Hypervisor
Vmware
Xen (Citrix & Oracle)
KVM (Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora)
Microsoft Hyper-V
Red Hat (RHEL, RHEV)
Other

10. Virtual Server Visibility Gap

11. 3: 32-bit To A 64-bit Server Platform
Citrix XenApp 6.5 and
XenDesktop 5.6 both
require a 64 bit server
platform…
Windows 2008 r2.

12. 3: App Compatibility With Windows 2008 r2
 Validate applications support of
Windows Server 2008 r2 and choice
of hypervisor
 Inventory legacy applications
– May require both a Presentation
Server 4.5 and
XenApp/XenDesktop
 Determine application usage before
migration
– Are your end users actually using
all of the applications?

13. 4: Data Store Database Upgrade
 Windows Server 2008 may require a
data store database upgrade…
 Databases supported for the XenApp
data store:
– Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express R2
– Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express SP3 ADD GRAPHIC
– Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
– Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP2
– Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP4
– Oracle 11g R2 32-bit Enterprise Edition

14. 5: Application Delivery Method Selection
Delivery methods available via Citrix
It is a “best practice” to
FlexCast for XenApp 6.5 and
do a complete XenDesktop 5.6:
assessment of your end
• Local VM
users and how they
• Streamed Virtual Hosted Desktops
work to determine the • Hosted VDI
optimal way to deliver • Hosted Shared
applications. • On-Demand Applications

15. 6: Managing User Profiles
 Migrate user profile data
 Consider Citrix Profile
Management, or a more all-
encompassing tool by third
party vendors.

16. 7: Environmental Sizing; Capacity Planning
 How many servers are you going to need?
 How many users will you get per VM?
 How many VM’s will you get per host server?

17. 8: Citrix Access Gateway Goes NetScaler
 Citrix Web Interface
server is going away
 Best practice:
Deploy Web Interface
Server with Citrix
StoreFront near term

18. 9: Plan For And Utilize Provisioning Server
Citrix has changed how the server image gets created, patched and
delivered to the XenApp servers (and potentially your edge devices if
you are planning on using XenDesktop VDI).

19. Step 10. Build A Test Environment
Create a standalone test environment, or sandbox, to test your 6.5
environment in parallel to your 4.5 environment.

20. Top 10 Migration Considerations
1. The End User 7. Environmental Sizing;
Experience Capacity Planning
2. Physical  Virtual 8. Citrix Access Gateway
3. 32 Bit  64 Bit & App Goes NetScaler
Compatibility 9. Provisioning Server
4. Database Upgrades 10.Test Environment
5. App Delivery
6. User Profiles

21. Upgrade Options
 Extended warranty
 Manage your own servers/upgrade
 Leverage managed services provider
 Hosted service provider

22. Proactive System Management
 Healthier systems Monitoring and management
tools are entering a new
 Greater IT efficiency generation where everything can
 Increased productivity be monitored with one system
and correlation can be used to
 Better IT coverage automatically identify, and many
times rectify, problems
automatically.

23. Poll: What Performance Management
Solutions Do You Currently Use?
 Citrix Resource Manager or Citrix EdgeSight
 VMware vCenter Ops
 Microsoft Perfmon, NS Lookup, PING, etc
 Other 3rd party tools
 None

24. Ensuring Peak Performance
Before, during and After Migration
Bala Vaidhinathan
CTO
eG Innovations
Bala@eginnovations.com

25. XenApp On Physical Servers = Complex
Active Directory SQL
Client Network Enterprise
Web Citrix Citrix
Apps
ZDC XenApp
User
License Server Profile Server
• Inter-application dependencies causes ripple effects
• Administrators don’t have control outside of XenApp
• Baselining

26. Virtualized XenApp = More Complex
Active Directory SQL
SAN
Switch
Client Web on Enterprise
Network VMware ESX XenApp on
ZDC on Apps
VMware ESX
VMware ESX
User
Profile Server
License Server
Oracle vCenter
• Virtualization adds additional infrastructure tiers, possible failure points!
• Most of the infrastructure is not visible anymore

27. Virtualized XenApp = More Complex
Slow Citrix Access Database Queries
Disk reads
Excessive disk reads by the Oracle Database slows down Citrix accesses
Citrix XenApp slowness can be caused by other VMs or the virtualization
platform itself.

28. A Familiar Scenario

29. Who Gets The Blame?

30. Fragmented Silo Tools Are the Problem
Desktop Apps Storage Network Compute
Cloud
Private, Hybrid,
Public
? ? ? ? ?
Virtual
VMware, Citrix,
Microsoft, IBM,
? ? ? ? ?
Red Hat, Solaris
Physical ? ? ? ? ?
X86, SPARC, PARIS
C, RS6000
Traditional tools don’t deliver actionable performance insight -
slow, fragmented, confusing.

31. The Result? Finger Pointing While User
Experience Suffers
“My
application is Looks
Not our fine Not mine
slow!” problem either
Talk to
the other
guys
LAN ERP Admin Application
End User Sys admin
Admin Admin
Everything Domain
Is OK admin
Firewall
All lights
admin Are green
VMs are lightly
The server
is working loaded
OK Database
Admin
Server admin
Virtualization We don’t
No other admin see anything
complaints wrong
XenApp
Admin

32. The Troubleshooting Conference Call

33. Where Time And Money Is Being Spent
© eG Innovations, Inc | www.eginnovations.com

34. Performance Assurance During Migration
How to avoid these pitfalls and
ensure optimal user experience
before, during and after your
XenApp Migration ?
© eG Innovations, Inc | www.eginnovations.com

35. eG Enterprise – How Does It help?
“My
application is
slow!”
Active Directory
SQL
SAN
Switch
Client Enterprise
Network Web on XenApp on
ZDC on Apps
XenServer VMware ESX
VMware ESX
Profile Server
License Server
Oracle vCenter
Complete visibility – every layer, every tier!

36. Performance Assurance With eG Enterprise
End User Service Infrastructure
Experience Performance Performance
Trading
Connection
Brokers Storage
Accounting
Online
Banking Network
Applications
Patient
records
... Virtualization
Profile Servers
User
Experience Total
eG Enterprise Right-Sizing
& Capacity
Management Automated Planning
Performance
Pre-emptive Diagnosis
Visibility Alerting

37. eG Enterprise – Live Demo

38. Unmatched Performance Visibility
Desktop Apps Storage Network Compute
Cloud
Private, Hybrid,
Public
Virtual
VMware, Citrix,
Microsoft, IBM,
!
Red Hat, Solaris
Physical
X86, SPARC, PARIS
C, RS6000
Complete, correlated visibility beyond basic health.
Actionable insight into service performance & dependencies.

39. Boost User Satisfaction And Productivity During
And After Migration
• Identify & prevent performance
issues faster BEFORE end users Reduce
30% performance
are affected and business is
incidents
impacted
• Diagnose & fix issues faster
with intelligent, automatic cross-
Reduce
silo correlation & diagnosis 35% downtime
delivering actionable insight on (MTTR)
root causes and bottlenecks

40. Reduce IT Support Cost And Complexity
During And After Migration
• Dramatically simplify
troubleshooting
in complex, virtualized Reduce
15%
support
environments
cost
• Reduce escalations to 2nd
and 3rd level support experts
• Free up expert resources to
focus on strategic IT initiatives

41. Reduce IT Infrastructure Cost Of Migration
• Get intelligent capacity &
performance analytics to identify Reduce
bottlenecks, better utilize HW and 20% hardware &
optimize your IT environment software
cost
• Get unprecedented performance
visibility of all IT domains impacting
user experience – from desktop to
application, virtualization
and infrastructure components
• Easily integrate into your complex
environment, retire legacy
monitoring tools

42. &

43. Become a
Citrix
Performance Performance
Hero
Hero
Visit
eG Innovations
Booth 417
Visit eG Innovations
Booth 417

44. Next Steps
More Details
www.whitehatvirtual.com
www.eginnovations.com
Contact Us
WhiteHat Virtual Technologies
+1.888.406.8719
webinar@whitehatvirtual.com
eG Innovations (US)
+1.732.794.1259
webinar@eginnovations.com