Question about Citrix for network admins

[shmokes]

How cost effective is Citrix?  My guess is that it isn't nearly as cost effective as Citrix would have you believe, but that's just a gut instinct.  My law school uses it for all the on-campus computers and I've learned to ---smurfing--- loath it.  Everything is SOOOOOOOO slow.  

My impression is that the great thing about Citrix is that updates are easy to roll out.  You just update a single profile and voila, every single computer on your network is updated -- OS, applications, user settings -- everything.  But it can't be that easy in operation.  Our computers haven't been updated once since I started school almost three years ago.  I take that back, the hardware has been updated, but not the software.  The computers are all running Windows XP with Internet Explorer 7 and MS Office 2003.  No firefox.  Bunches of web pages can't be run because of problems running scripts, which I assume means there's an old version of Java.  It's so effing frustrating.

But if Citrix made updates easy, I can't imagine it would take this long to update our computers.  The University already has a campus-wide subscription to Windows operating systems and MS Office 2007.  I can even download this software for free for use on my personal computers (both the OS and the productivity software).  And when thinking us being stuck on Office 2003 remember that writing is half of what lawyers do -- really complex writing.  We have a serious need for referencing tools, symbols, styles, etc.

Long story short, how much money can they possibly be saving by using Citrix over, say, Windows Server if they already have XP/Vista/7 licenses for every workstation?

[ChadTower]

Licensing.  It's not about speed.  It's about rolling out and unrolling apps to mass users with ease.  It's also about not having to site license expensive but small applications if you have a lot of people.  I don't have 100% insight into how the contracts differ but we use it where I work for that reason.  There are quite a few small apps where each install costs a good amount of money - but making it available on a Citrix server costs substantially less in licensing for whatever reason.

Citrix is an emulator for the most part.  That's why it gets used with small apps and not heavy stuff like MS Office.  If you notice it draws your apps with java libraries rather than the standard windows dlls - they look slightly different, the colors are a little off normal, etc. 

Sounds like the implementation there just sorta sucks.  I agree it does slow stuff down vs a local install but it's really not that bad.  We have people accessing the same Citrix servers from both here and India and are not seeing an unreasonable performance difference between the two sites.

[vorghagen]

Citrix is getting less and less relevant. We use it at my work mostly for the ease of only needing thin clients at every desk instead of a full workstation. Makes it easier to have a standard operating environment that any employee from any office can log in at any desk and have access to the same files and same desktop. Used to be that Citrix was a lot more admin friendly when it came to setting up printers, using dual screens, controlling user rights etc but now Microsoft has caught up with it's recent upgrades to RDP and terminal services, especially in Windows Server 2008.
Once our Citirx licence expires we won't be renewing it. Many tens of thousands of dollars we could better spend elsewhere.

[shmokes]

Licensing.  It's not about speed.  It's about rolling out and unrolling apps to mass users with ease.  It's also about not having to site license expensive but small applications if you have a lot of people. 

That's what's so weird.  We have site licenses for everything already.  Operating system, Office.  That's it.  The computers aren't running anything else.  And I just can't imagine there can be much manpower saved.  It's just the workstations in the library and the computers for all the faculty and staff.  Can't be more than a couple hundred machines at the absolute most, all located in a very small geographic area.  You can walk from any computer on the network to any other in less than five minutes.  And Citrix is SUCH a pita.  For example:

- Effing slow
- Can't hear sounds, even with headphones plugged in
- Effing slow
- Right-click doesn't work!!!
- USB devices (flash drives, ipods, etc.) won't mount while logged in.  They have to be plugged in before logging in for the server to see and map them, so if you're working and need files on or off a flash drive you have to plug it in, log out of your workstation and log back in.
- Effing slow

It all adds up to a really obnoxious experience.  When you're in explorer you have to use the edit menu to copy/paste.  For that matter you can't open an explorer window by right-clicking--you have to go through the menu and open My Computer.  The lack of right-click wouldn't be so bad except that it's impossible to get used to cos I have it on every other computer I work on.  So I right-click on something and no menu pops up, so I right-click again, then I curse and go through the menus.  Perhaps some or all of these things could be corrected by someone who knew how to use Citrix better than our admin guys, but . . . ugh.  So since they don't, in fact, ever update our systems (Win XP, IE 7, Office 2003) in spite of the fact that it wouldn't cost them a dime as far as application licenses.  They'd need Windows Server 2008, but I suspect they already have that too (the rest of the university uses a typical Active Directory network, it's just the law school section of campus using Citrix). 
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[painterinfo]

I would say you are put on citrix because you are on a slow link and need access to the main network.

Think of citrix as remote controlling the server in the main campus. All that is transmitted over the network is the screen of the server console to you, and your keypresses and mouse movements back to the server.

Sound can be turned off to save bandwidth (and has in your case because of your slow link)

Right click would have been disabled because you are using a shared environment and it is percieved that a right click will enable you to access some area that will be able to damage the environment.

USB devices don't work in citrix though the network admin can configure a drive letter within the citrix environment to reflect a local drive but if you decide to copy a large file to the server then the link is flatlined and citrix becomes even slower.

Imagine you are on a slow link shared by many people, to open an email which has a 10mb attachment that might take several mins to open but if you are on citrix it will take only seconds, granted there is an annoying lag but that is the pay off and that lag is present on all computer operations.

The only other thing that might make the citrix environment slow is if there are two many users on one server.

Citrix on a fast link and a decent load balanced server farm is an acceptable experience speed wise. You can turn on sound and maybe even video

[shmokes]

It's hard to say.  It would be incredibly strange to be on a slow link because on one side of the law campus is the School of Music's library, which has very fast non-Citrix access to the university network, and on the other side of the law campus is the Technology building where the IT guys for the entire campus (and the servers) reside.  Additionally the law campus is blanketed with Wi-Fi which is very fast.  But wireless access points don't exactly have the greatest range.  They are presumably plugged into the wired network on my campus and should therefore suffer from the same slow link.  I dislike bringing a computer to school, though, so I'm stuck using the Citrix computers in the library.

For what it's worth, the computers can stream web video just fine.  It's not exactly streaming HD video over the network, but it is streaming and it works fine.  The slowness comes in the form of the browser completely locking up about 20% of the time you tell it to do something new, i.e., click a link, hit play on a video, hit the back button.  It will just go completely unresponsive for like 5-10 seconds . . . completely locked up including the X button for closing the browser.

Otherwise, speed is a mixed back.  Clicking the start button often produces instantaneous results, and often the menu is preceded by 2 or 3 seconds of lag.

[painterinfo]

Strange, hard if not impossible to diagnose it further without being on site. I have seen slow issues where the cache is too big, I clear it and set it to something smaller and get an immediate speed increase. Your intermittent speed is starting to sound like a server issue especially since streaming video works through citrix

[Silas (son of Silas)]

I used to work with Citrix daily, qualified CCA and CCEA, worked as a Citrix Solutions architect for HP for a number of years so have a reasonable amount of experience with it and now work for another company and am forced to use it when I work from home, and hate it.

It's very rare that anyone ever gets it quite right when designing a new Citrix solution. The problem is, usually Citrix solutions aren't designed, the are just installed and if they work but perform poorly, there is a reluctance to try and improve it.

Is Citrix worth the cost? Maybe,  for most of the customers I have designed for, yes absolutely. If the solution is a pile of cow dung then, no its not worth it, regardless of how much you manage to drive down the TCO of your deployed applications and desktop solutions.

If it's done right, with a 'scale out not up' approach to farm design, then users need never see a difference between a locally running application and one running over ICA, sadly tho' examples are few and far between.

[ChadTower]

...all of which, of course, applies to any enterprise platform.   

[Silas (son of Silas)]

...all of which, of course, applies to any enterprise platform.   

True words