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

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.

The stars from this solution are its NetScaler and profile manager.

This was a breakthrough for us; we reduced our user base from 2000 client machines with Windows OS and all applications installed on all computers and so on, to 40 application servers and 2000 thin clients that don’t need any management. If one has a problem, it’s replaced.

Many of the improvements that we have identified for this version already appear in the newer version. For this version, we thought they could improve management access to the applications, organization in the console, and revise server management – these are in newer versions.

The solution has been in production for three years.

The solution has been in production for three years with no major problems; zero down time from the solution.

No scalability issues at all; in the beginning, we had only 20 application servers and 900 users. At this time, we have double the application servers and more than double the number of users. The process was straightforward.

The level of support is very good. We have support from a company that is Citrix certified and if we need some core development, such as in the client for end users, Citrix had been wonderful.

I did not previously use a different solution. This was the solution that we chose for the business need that we had at the time. And from the search conducted at the time, this was the best solution for us.

The solution was straightforward; it’s like, if all of the network requirements have been done, it takes 4-6 hours to have the infrastructure working in a production environment.

Thera are two types of licensing, per user or per device. This is a point that needs a lot of attention. It varies from case to case. In the infrastructure that I administrate, the (concurrent) per-user license was the best choice.

At the time, we did not evaluate other options. This was the best solution available for us.

Citrix have online sites that help designing, planning and implementing the solution; use them.

It’s a strong solution for application virtualization. Works on a Windows server base, so compatibility with applications is easier.

The most valuable feature of this product for me is that it provides secure access anywhere from any device.

This product has improved my organization by provide access to the Intranet application and website over the internet over SSL from any device.

This product should include a feature like like App Volume, which their competitor already has.

Also, the Hypervisor needs to be improved.

I have been working with this product for the last four years. I have done many projects on Citrix XenDesktop.

I did not have any deployment issues. For a PoC, it is an easy one-day setup.

Technical support in India is awesome and are equipped with the required technical solutions.

Initial setup was straightforward. It's a single-server setup in a simple environment and can be scalable at any point of time.

ROI is always a challenge for VDI if the number of users is less than 200. It all depends upon the organisational requirement.

In comparison to Citrix XenDesktop, VMware Horizon is a very good product. However, some features such as Sharefile and Netscaler complete the Citrix story.

Go for this product without any thinking. If you are looking for security and a single point of management, then go with this product.

The user experience is comparable to XenApp (our past presentation server), with the same look and feel as a normal full desktop in the head office.

It still uses ICA protocol, which means we did not have to increase the WAN bandwidth to deliver same user experience across all the sites. We did not have to increase telco cost to provide same user experience from sites outside of the head office.

In the past, when we were using the presentation server from Citrix, login time was taking up to eight minutes. XenDesktop reduced login time to less than two minutes. Managers who move around can take their work at any point in time to a new location without having to login from scratch. That increased productivity.

Our organisation has not been successful in delivering a multi-media experience via VDIs. This is one of the areas we are hoping to improve by upgrading to version 7.8.

I have been using this solution for more than four years.

Stability issues due to storage performance caused initial grief. Now it is working. We are using dedicated VDIs for users. We have half of the 1200 VDIs running from one DC and the rest from a secondary DC.

Scalability is good, but it required a lot of learning while our organisation were going through it.

Citrix support was good. They can always do better.

Since we already were using Citrix presentation server, our migration met the same look and feel requirement for the business. Citrix XenDesktop is the leading product for VDIs.

Initial backend infrastructure was easy for our organisation for VMWare and storage, because we were already running VMWare for server virtualisation. Now it is just too many. We are running 1200 VDIs.

It was a hybrid implementation. Design was done by vendor and implementation was done jointly.

Our model for ROI was not financial. It was user experience and opportunity productivity loss savings. If we are to do this work again, I would recommend using DataCore Software Defined Storage using commodity hardware to run a VDI host farm to reduce storage and DR cost.

Get the full business requirement and test the end-to-end performance and the capacity for DR before going full-fledged. Also, understand the licensing cost. Having dedicated VDIs for our organisation saved us lots of headache:

The most valuable feature of this product to me is its ability to provide a secure desktop to remote users.

The product has allowed the organisation to provide VDs for external users to access internal resources and manage them.

The product deployment is role-based and I would like to see the roles reduced.

I have used this solution for 18 months.

We had some issue with SCVMM, which is used to manage the Citrix infrastructure. We also faced an issue with the VDs being unregistered due to different reasons.

Citrix support is very good. You open a case online and then give them a call. An engineer works with you until the issue is resolved. I quite like it.

This is our first VD deployment.

Initial setup was straightforward, but we did face some issues. As it is role-based setup, one needs to follows it properly, and do the sizing right to get it working.

The product was implemented by a solution provider along with the server hardware as part of the project.

We implemented the product to check the feasibility and acceptability of VD in our organisation.

The product licensing is competitively priced.

You can manage all devices and users in your company. You can respond rapidly to user requests. If you use the thin client, you can save energy.

You can simulate disaster scenarios for our virtual world and you can increase your virtual security.

You can create Linux virtual desktops with XenDesktop, but only Red Hat and SUSE versions. I would like to be able to create Linux virtual desktops for VMs running Ubuntu, Kali and other Linux versions. Citrix should add this features to the next version.

I would like applications to open faster. Citrix can increase applications' startup time.

I have been using XenDesktop for nine years.

I had a stability issue with Citrix XenServer. If you experience a problem with XenServer, you must know Linux commands, unlike with VMWare ESX. You can solve any problem with the GUI on VMWare ESX. With Citrix, it must be developed.

Citrix has a very easy setup GUI in versions 7.x.

Implementation varies from company to company. If you have more than 10,000 users in your company, I prefer to perform implementation in-house.

Regarding Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop licenses:

• Example 1 - You have 100 users in your company. If all workers use Citrix products during work time, you can select the Citrix user/device license. (For any company.)
• Example 2 - If your company uses a shift system (60 workers in the morning, 40 workers at night), you can use a Citrix concurrent license. (For example, any university.)

This Citrix product is flexible, easy to manage and faster than similar products such as VMWare Horizon.

The initial installation plan should be well-done. It must be well-constructed and it must be very well-optimized. Anyone can install this product, but not everyone can manage this product.

My rating refers to version 7.x of the product. I rate earlier versions lower.

The following are the product's most valuable features to me:

• Quick provisioning: It is easy to make changes and see them reflected throughout the organization.
• Document control: Enabling users to copy a company document to their hard drive or flash memory really protects our IP.

It has accelerated the process in which a new employee is given the necessary tools. We have contacted people in different countries that no longer have to wait for the central team to grant access to their PC in our environment. Assigning them a VDI user allows them to start right away.

In general, I'm really pleased with Citrix. What sometimes is an issue is when an application is not compatible with the server's OS, but that is out of Citrix´s hands.

I have used this solution for one year.

I have not encountered any issues with scalability. It actually is a strong point in its favor.

I rate technical support 10/10. They are really interested in understanding your architecture and providing solutions.

Citrix Mexico helped us understand some issues, but mostly it was developed in-house.

The ROI in our case is really difficult to quantify. I focus on the non-measurable advantages: IP protection, access from any device, and storage of data in high-availability data centers, no data loss.

Unlike MS, many vendors haven’t considered VDI licensing, so this might represent an opportunity to save on licensing costs, because you're actually installing it on only one device (the application server).

Redundancy is a must. After that, ensuring that all your users will access it through a high-speed internet connection will be a key success factor.