Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service) Reviews

• Remote access
• BYOD
• High performance
• Feature-rich, full desktop experience

• It has enabled remote working from anyplace, anytime, and anywhere
• It has simplified, secured, and centralized the challenges of O/S deployment across the enterprise.

They could reduce the number of bugs and fixes required post release. This would ensure a smooth integration with any flavour of hypervisor or cloud provider.

I have been using the product for fifteen years.

Over the years Citrix has increased the pace in which new versions are released, and often the product has not gone through thorough enough testing so the consultants are left very challenged trying to resolve bugs, and obtaining post-release fixes from the Vendor (Citrix). It would be much better if Citrix could slow down the rapidness of their updates and give a bit more time and consideration to belt and bracing the solution prior to general public release.

For the most part, we did not encounter stability issues. However, owing to the complexities involved in working with multiple vendor platforms, and by the nature of the Microsoft O/S, there are sometimes gremlins and bugs which affect deployments for which hot fixes are often required.

These bugs can sometimes affect stability, but often only affect it when mixing multiple vendor solutions.

We did not encounter any scalability issues. By design, Citrix offer a very modular solution whereby you can bolt-on and build-up on features and functionality as required. Citrix tends to do future-proofing. It is still the market leader in Server Based Computing deployments.

Technical support was usually excellent. However, you sometimes have to push to ensure that you get to the top level of engineer to deal with the case. This is the case with most vendors.

We have worked with all competitors over the years. I think that the "Ferrari" Citrix is still your best choice

It depends on what business needs you are trying to achieve and which product features you need to enable.

Installation and setup have been improved over the years. However, to implement a truly robust, performance rich solution, you still need an SME to help design and implement the solution.

We have a teamed on seasoned Citrix Consultants, specialists in their chosen field covering off the complete Citrix Product Suite from XenMobile, to XenDesktop

We recently implemented a new on-demand private cloud solution for SAS Software to replace their aging PC/Ghost imaging within their classroom environments throughout the UK. The new XenDesktop solution is completely hands-free enabling the end user to provisioning the desired desktop image on-demand within a 3 minute end-to-end process. Previously, it use to take the SAS Support staff an entire weekend to rebuild a classroom ready for the SAS Software training course to commence on Monday. They realized their ROI within just one year.

Citrix is competitive when compared to other vendors. Often you get what you pay for. In this instance, if you want an enterprise-class and future-proofing solution, then Citrix is a good choice to make.

We have evaluated, and continue to evaluate all the main competitors since 2000.

We looked at VMWare View (now Horizon) and Microsoft RDS/VDI.

We are brand agnostic and we go with the best solution which fits the customers' needs and budgets.

As professional consultants, we will advise and present the pros and cons of each solution when explaining our recommendations.

• Talk to fellow experts who have worked extensively with the technology.
• Ask them to come over, showcase, and demo the solution so that you can cover all your business objectives and ensure the right vendor.
• We always recommend an onsite PoC for 5-10 consulting days to prove the technology and to thrash out what can and cannot be achieved.

• Protects web infrastructure
• Ensures business continuity and IT disaster recovery
• Consolidated multiple remote access solutions
• Lowers WAN costs

A cements customer uses the application for truck shipments from the United States by connecting to the infrastructure in Colombia, as the solution can only be found in that country.

We are already evaluating the latest version, 7.9, because Citrix continually updates everything.

For optimal and stable infrastructure products, the people who develop software in-house should provide IT architecture updates.

All implementations of Citrix have problems with stability; that is normal. This type of infrastructure should be integrated with the many software and hardware components that are currently implemented in the company.

Very good customer service.

Technical support is improving.

I have worked with VMWare as a hypervisor as the suite is very wide. However, Citrix is less expensive.

All Citrix configurations have a certain amount of complexity.

In-house application deployments are not always easy to integrate, because it is not always compatible with client-server environments.

For a project to be effective, you must coordinate with Citrix to divide the licenses into stages and not affect costs.

It is important to do a good sizing of users. In addition to Citrix' own online calculator for sizing users (https://www.citrix.com/products/xenapp-xendesktop/savings-calculator.html), I can help with dimensioning the server infrastructure for different virtualisation projects.

• ICA protocol: Beats latency and improves performance for slow connections
• Provisioning service (PVS): Makes deployment of VDI machines a simple breeze
• Profile manager: Profile manager makes it very easy to retain user settings. The whole suite of Citrix XenDesktop provides a complete set for managing the environment.

We have a lot of users in remote locations and some have slow, high-latency connections. So deploying XenDesktop as a VDI solution to connect to our data center overcame the challenges of having remote users and addressed the slow and high latency issues we used to experience prior to deploying Citrix.

I would like to see better documentation of best practices and communication of newly available tools or troubleshooting tools. If you ask several consultants, each will give you almost completely different designs, as the best practice recommendation by Citrix might be absent.

We did a lot of testing and slowly deployed our environment. Given we are also IT consultants and developers, we had a lot of the issues resolved before reaching production. One tip that is also important is training the end users and making sure they understand the setup.

Citrix Premium support is really top notch. They take ownership of the issues and are determined to address it, 9 out of 10 times it is addressed on the spot.

Citrix offers many different components to address all kinds of environments. Simple setup can be done; however, if it is a complex environment, rest assured Citrix will also address it. It all depends on the components used and how to best integrate them.

Implementation was completed by our in-house team.

Citrix is not a cheap solution as it addresses a lot of the challenges that no one else can. With Citrix, we do not have to upgrade our network infrastructure of remote offices, which is a lot of ongoing savings.

Buying the licenses all at once would give the best discounts. Also using a VAR may give best pricing. Shopping through different VARs is a must as you could see 50% of savings.

We evaluated several solutions including MS RemoteApp. Citrix offers better scalability and works much better in terms of WAN and slow connections due to the power of the ICA protocol.

Make sure you study the architecture before rushing to go to production. Also make sure to do a proof of concept and pilot deployment before investing. You can get trial licenses. Once you believe you have the whole solution is ready to go, consult a Citrix consultant to take a quick look before you execute, in the event you do not have all the expertise.

• Application virtualization
• Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI)
• Management and security using NetScalers

We are using this to allow our users to access applications over a secured, remote environment. It has helped to reduce the outages in our IT infrastructure, especially during server maintenance.

The solution needs some improvement to make it more flexible with an easier interface.

I have been working with this technology for over nine years.

Initially, we had some stability issues, such as slow logon for users and profile issues. All have been resolved and it is currently running smoothly.

We did not have hot-production outages in the environment. When we deployed the products, we set up rigid environment monitoring which has helped us to reduce scalability issues.

I never used a different solution as I started my career with XenApp. I later learned other Citrix products. So far, I am comfortable with them.

Initially, we built a pre-production environment to understand the challenges according to our requirements. We were able to overcome them.

I did not evaluate other options.

• During the implementation phase, understand the requirement and set up a sand box environment for testing and managing. 
• If all of the testing is successful, plan for production from scratch. Do not use your existing sandbox for production.

ICA and HDX are the most valuable features of this product to me. These protocols allow features that most other vendors either have not implemented yet or are too bandwidth-intensive to use in the enterprise with WAN users.

Our organization was a VMView shop. Due to issues with application responsiveness / perceived performance, our users had a very negative perception of the technology and were opting for physical PCs instead of VDI. During an extended pilot with these users leveraging Citrix XenDestop, we were able to improve the perceived performance / application response time, as well as use significantly less bandwidth. This was a huge cost savings for the firm.

The biggest area for improvement is in QA testing. The last few releases of either the VDA or updates to the broker either reduced functionality or re-introduced issues that were previously addressed.

I have been using this solution for five years.

The only issue that we had was early on in our implementation with a “Black Screen”. Although we were never able to determine the root cause with Citrix Tech support and escalated engineering, updating form 5.6 to 7.6 greatly reduced this issue / impact to our users.

I rate technical support 5/10.

The initial setup was straightforward. We were able to get three farms up and running within two hours. The migration from older to newer was relatively easy as well.

Implementation was done in house. My best advice if you are migrating from another product to XenDesktop would be to deploy new VDI’s and migrate the users. This allows you to validate the stack and avoid legacy configuration and applications that might have issues. If that is not an option, researching what the VDI’s have installed, and what other remoting technologies are in use, will prove valuable and avoid some of the pitfalls that we had.

ROI I believe is close to three years.

Citrix XenDesktop is a great solution for VDI or virtual desktop environments. Its most valuable features to me are:

• Pretty good management: You can manage a full environment for VDI, you have full control of what your users do, what they can or can't install and what resources your users can use.
• Great performance: Of course, it depends on hardware and the hypervisor (Citrix XenServer and VMWare vSphere are the best). It provides great performance with NVIDIA GPU cards.
• Great performance on low bandwidth links: Citrix was born when I still used a phone modem with 33.5 Kbps, so Citrix created the ICA protocol that provides great performance when you use low links.
• Easy install: With a little bit of understanding, for a standard configuration, if you have a little knowledge of Citrix XenDesktop, you can implement a solution in a few days.

Mobility! You can access your virtual desktop with all your applications everywhere; with a smartphone, laptop, thin client and so on.

I would like to see the following improvements:

• Better monitoring tools included in the enterprise editions: At the moment, if you want better monitoring, you need to buy a third license.
• Linux virtual desktop: We have been waiting more than five years for it!
• Compatibility with public clouds: Today, Citrix doesn't have the best position with public clouds. I work for IBM and we have SoftLayer public cloud, and we want to offer DaaS (Desktop as a Service) to the public. Citrix is a great opportunity for us, but Citrix has to “speak” SoftLayer API language. Secondly, Citrix should have a public cloud offering with a license that final users can afford and not just an annual license.

I have used this solution for at least nine years.

Citrix XenDesktop can be very stable and has great scalability if a certified Citrix architect designs it. Many problems that I've seen in the past with clients were related to bad design. Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp have great stability if you take the correct path.

Citrix is very good with this, if you pay your maintenance every year. :P

I previously used the VMWare solution. It works great but only when you use LAN (at least 1 Gbps if you have many users), but in a WAN environment, I really don't like the lags and delays with that solution.

If you have a little knowledge about Citrix and what a VDI environment means, initial setup is not complex. If you want to do a good job, you must be prepared to know:

• Microsoft Windows Server (2008 R2 or 2012 R2)
• Microsoft Windows Desktop (Windows 7, 8.1 or 10)
• Active Directory
• DNS!!!!!
• Security, local policies, etc.
• DHCP
• Firewalls (local and for internet)
• Citrix NetScaler Gateway
• And so on!

I have a lot of experience with third-party consultants and of course Citrix vendors. I have Citrix Architect Certification, so I have implemented my own solutions, but for big projects, it's much better to count on Citrix itself.

It's very difficult to evaluate this because if you have a low number of users, it's much better to buy new PC's or low-resource laptops than use VDI. For many environments, it's much better to use Citrix XenApp with published applications and use a shared desktop as opposed to using XenDesktop.

If you have at least 1,000 users or use GPU or high-resource-consuming applications, Citrix XenDesktop is the best solution, but you won't see ROI for at least three years.

Many of my clients are looking for a DaaS with IBM SoftLayer.

The most valuable feature to me as IT is that the disk is non-writable. This means that, during the course of computing, nothing permanently bad can happen to the computer. Viruses and malware can’t corrupt it. So instead of a rebuild of the machine, which used to happen at least twice a week, and take as much as 10 hours, it’s a simple reboot to fix.

The second most valuable feature is the ability to deliver a full-featured desktop to our users anytime, anywhere with an internet connection.

My organization is a 24x7 organization. About 2/3 of our users work a schedule that is 48 hours on, 96 hours off on rotating shifts and many of them live a minimum of 70 miles away. They frequently need to get into our computer system to adjust their work availability schedule for overtime and out-of-area deployments, as well as to keep in contact with other divisions that are on more-regular work schedules. We can now access our system in the field, which is valuable when interfacing with our constituency.

I would like to be able to document the VDIs better in XenServer and in the Delivery Controller, so that I could know which snapshot and image goes with which machine. I can do it now, but it takes some digging.

And I still think the training costs too much in relation to the cost of the software.

I have been using it since 2009.

In this newest version, I keep running out of allocated space on my storage server for the virtual desktop images. This is because I am used to the older Provisioning Server model where I had one image that streamed to many desktops. Now, I am using the Machine Creation Services model where each desktop has its own image. That’s okay, but the snapshots of previous images - so that versions can be rolled back - are giving me some problems to get used to. It’s not a terrible problem, it’s just me getting used to it and figuring out how to allow for it.

Customer service and technical support is great, but you do have to pay for it. Don’t skimp and don’t try to do without it; you’ll be sorry. There are great knowledge base articles and a lot of active users, but there is also a lot that happens that never hits the knowledge base. The risk you run by trying to figure it out for yourself is dissatisfied and tremendously frustrated users - and this is not an area where you want to encourage a howling mob.

My experience is no longer very valid as it was seven years ago and Citrix has made many changes and improvements. It was a nightmare. XenServer was, and is, pretty easy. XenDesktop was, and is, fairly complex. At that time, XenDesktop was poorly documented (as in, barely documented) and I ran into problems with everything, including lingering problems with the Nehalem processors in the hosts and problems in my storage server that caused the virtual desktops to arbitrarily hang for the first year or so. Every piece of the technology has matured, both hardware and software, since that time.

The XenServer piece was done by a VAR from the RFP process. The original plan was for them to also do the XenDesktop piece but, as I mention elsewhere, while they were familiar with Virtual Iron, they were not familiar with XenDesktop and did not wish to undertake it. They subcontracted it to another installer, who tried to set it up but didn’t get it done past the problems I mention elsewhere. Then another VAR took a shot at it, but also couldn’t fix it. I spent a lot of time studying, learning, and trying to fix the issues and found the hardware problems and fixed them. But it still didn’t work properly. I finally bit the golden bullet and paid the price for a Citrix gold partner who rebuilt the XenDesktop installation correctly and taught me at the same time. From then on, it worked beautifully and met our vision. But that first 1.5 years was a bear to wrestle.

We extended our hardware replacement lifecycle by not having to replace endpoints. We no longer use PCs, but use thin/zero clients with no moving parts. So instead of a PC refresh every three years, we went 5-6 years and used a less expensive machine. Instead of three servers for the hosts, we were able to use only two when we replaced them and didn’t do it until seven years. Our fuel costs are down because a “broken” machine is a reboot, not a rebuild. We use less electricity. We are able to provide 24x7 on-call support with only 1.5 IT personnel instead of only 40 hours to our 24x7 operation. All our employees, many of whom live in another city, can access our system anytime they need to sign up for overtime or change their schedule (this is a fire department) or interact with any division on a different work schedule than their own. And our overall IT costs (hardware, software, utilities, etc.) dropped 44 percent over what we were spending in 2008 and certainly over our trajectory.

The initial purchase for the first three years will be more expensive than what you have been spending. There will be a higher cost in time, in the learning curve, and in effort. You won’t start to see a savings until after that; the savings comes over time and will affect many areas.

This is a disruptive technology and it will disrupt your organization; you’ll have to learn to think differently both in a technological fashion and in a budgetary fashion. If you’re used to measuring your ROI in terms of years, you’ll need to take a longer view. If you measure it by line item, you’ll need to take a wider view.

Initially, we were going to use Virtual Iron as it looked to be the simplest and least expensive to implement for a small organization. Oracle bought the product in the middle of our implementation process and killed it. Our implementer had a business relationship with a Citrix sales engineer who was able to show us the XenServer/XenDesktop product. It looked very similar, so we went with that. XenServer was; XenDesktop, not so much.

Virtual desktops aren’t for every user and it takes some thought to apply them correctly. Heavy graphics programs will benefit from the use of GPUs in the host. Your best bet will be to use a Citrix partner VAR who knows what they’re doing to implement and train you; even though it costs more initially, it will prevent so much dissatisfaction, it will really be worth it. There are a number of little “gotchas”, optimizations, and tweaks they have already known about and Citrix has worked through and patched that will greatly impact the user acceptance and affect it will have on your organization.

Implementation will also take some user training and you’ll get some pushback. For example, people will need to be trained to use shortcuts on their desktops and to not put a lot of files and folders on them. Why? Because Microsoft Windows loads everything up on load and it will slow them down. It will make their user experience unsatisfactory while they WAIT FOREVER (more than 30 seconds to as much as minutes, depending on bandwidth and user perception) for their desktop to come up. They’ll get used to the new way of working and come to appreciate the new amenities, but you may have to keep reminding them of what they’ve gained when they complain of what they think they’ve lost. And they will lose some things; a virtual desktop is more locked down. The desktop is non-writable, which means that nothing writes to it. This is great for IT support, but not so great for some apps. Think about that in relation to software packages that you use as you’re planning. If you’ve got software that MUST write to the disk, you can do that, but you’ll have to allow for an additional writable disk to the desktop image for any user using that software.

The main features that I felt were valuable to our organization were:

• Ability to manage iOS and Android mobile devices.
• Application white/black listing.
• Comprehensive rule based policies with relative parity between platforms.

In this case it was an upgrade from XenMobile 8.6 so it was an upgrade to maintain support from the vendor. The main areas of improvement would be around reporting and integration with ShareFile and access to the Worx suite of mobile applications (WorxMail, WorxWeb, WorxNotes).

Even with professional services, deployment can be a challenge; especially when integrating with Exchange when rolling out WorxMail (as an alternative over the native mail clients to containerize and restrict access content). Support is also an area that we struggled with; inconsistent quality between support analysts.

I have used XenMobile for a little over 2 years.

We did encounter deployment issues. Integration with the NetScaler appliances and ShareFile were two of them but one of the biggest issues was around the wrapping of the Worx apps. As the Worx applications were updated, the wrapping tools would periodically also require updates but the releases were sometimes out of sync. Support also was limited with application wrapping. It would have been nice if Citrix Support would have dedicated more staff training for the Worx apps, the wrapping of them and how they are deployed.

XenMobile v9 was relatively stable once it was up and running. After Citrix professional services left the site, we spent another couple of months tweaking and testing before we were willing to migrate our devices to the new environment.

We did not encounter any scalability issues.

When you are dealing with the pre-sales teams and the professional services teams, they are really good. Our experience was that typically, if they didn’t know the answer to something, they had access to resources that could bring you closer to a resolution.

This is one area that concerned me with Citrix. I know that during our deployment, Citrix was making some changes internally and it’s possible that we just got caught in that change. But over the two years that I had access to Enterprise support, it was touch and go getting access to a quality engineer who knew how to actually resolve an issue rather than read it out of a prepared script. We always tried make our calls early in the day when we knew we would get access to support either in North America or UK/Germany/Ireland; otherwise it was always a game of phone tag when dealing with some of the other global call centres.

We did not use a previous solution. We upgraded from a previous version of XenMobile as we had a significant investment in the Citrix stack already.

Initial setup was complex. We had integration into ShareFile, AppController (for the Mobile Application Management -MAM), NetScalers and then we tried to deploy the mobile apps at the same time, so we could get away from ActiveSync. I felt that the complexity simply increased with the addition of integration points. Even our professional services team had difficulties at times as the products are complex on their own, much less when you are trying to get them to work together. I would recommend phasing the deployments, if your schedule permits. Start with getting XenMobile and the AppController up and running first, wrap and deploy the Worx apps and then worry about ShareFile later in the project. The secondary concern is for the end user, because it’s a lot of change to to cope with if there is a "Big Bang" approach.

We used Citrix’s professional services for the engagement. While they were very easy to deal with and tried to accommodate our design, I think they were still new to their roles.

Sit down and seriously review your mobility strategy. If you don’t have one, draft something before you get started. Consider where you feel your organization is going to be in the next 2 to 5 years. I would consider an mobile device management (MDM) solution to have a lifespan of about 3 years as they have to adapt to a series of vendors (Apple, Google, Samsung, etc.) that move a lot faster than they do.

Determine what features you are planning to roll out to your users over this timeframe (i.e. access to internal documentation [ShareFile], access to Internet sites [WorxWeb], etc.) as Citrix has a variety of options that can affect which licenses you will need and where you can save money. If you have an existing Citrix investment, look at the Enterprise licensing as you get quite a bit extra,(such as ShareFile for free).

We did not evaluate alternatives due to our existing Citrix investment, so we opted to stay with Citrix.

XenMobile is a good, stable product, but make sure you investigate what features you are looking to roll out and decide whether XenMobile isn’t overkill. Depending on what want to deploy, you may need to examine your resource requirements to not just deploy, but support as well. Training isn’t cheap for any Citrix course but XenMobile from an administration perspective, is pretty simple to learn.