April 22 2010 Thursday
Real world Citrix with Lotus Notes Standard
Hopefully everyone using Citrix to host thin clients has reviewed the following IBM white papers:
IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 on Citrix XenApp 4.5: A scalability analysis
and
IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus iNotes 8.5.1 on Citrix XenApp 4.5/5.0: A scalability analysis
This is a lab analysis. Your real world scalability could be will be different. If you are upgrading to Standard or a replacing (or starting a new) Citrix farm, be sure to test with the desktop your users will be using. In the real world we see MS Office 2003 and 2007 skewing these numbers somewhat lower.
Additionally, "virtual drives" are not supported by IBM for the storage of home profiles and how it is related to Notes. See technote 1086985 for further details. It amazes me how many Citrix partners (and Lotus partners) don't know this. Yes it can be done, but there are far better options now that SANs have percolated deep into data centers. Most Citrix administrators have it configured this way, and if you do, expect to scale your number of concurrent users way back. If you must use file shares and are seeing degraded performance, Microsoft have published a truck load of SMB tuning articles which may help.
For direct SAN storage of local profiles (i.e, not mapped), see you Citrix provider. There are a few companies providing tooling for this now and they will have a preference.
If you are running 2003 32 bit servers with a 4GB RAM limit and are running Standard and any other applications, expect to lower the number of concurrent users on those servers. 64bit Windows server is far superior given the 1TB upper bound of Windows 2003 Enterprise x64 (see this MS post for other OSes).
As I have said a lot lately, test. Test before you roll out an entire farm. You need to know the physical limits of your proposed servers.
IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 on Citrix XenApp 4.5: A scalability analysis
and
IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus iNotes 8.5.1 on Citrix XenApp 4.5/5.0: A scalability analysis
This is a lab analysis. Your real world scalability could be will be different. If you are upgrading to Standard or a replacing (or starting a new) Citrix farm, be sure to test with the desktop your users will be using. In the real world we see MS Office 2003 and 2007 skewing these numbers somewhat lower.
Additionally, "virtual drives" are not supported by IBM for the storage of home profiles and how it is related to Notes. See technote 1086985 for further details. It amazes me how many Citrix partners (and Lotus partners) don't know this. Yes it can be done, but there are far better options now that SANs have percolated deep into data centers. Most Citrix administrators have it configured this way, and if you do, expect to scale your number of concurrent users way back. If you must use file shares and are seeing degraded performance, Microsoft have published a truck load of SMB tuning articles which may help.
For direct SAN storage of local profiles (i.e, not mapped), see you Citrix provider. There are a few companies providing tooling for this now and they will have a preference.
If you are running 2003 32 bit servers with a 4GB RAM limit and are running Standard and any other applications, expect to lower the number of concurrent users on those servers. 64bit Windows server is far superior given the 1TB upper bound of Windows 2003 Enterprise x64 (see this MS post for other OSes).
As I have said a lot lately, test. Test before you roll out an entire farm. You need to know the physical limits of your proposed servers.
