SYN 314 Lessons Learned on the Way to

SYN 314 – Lessons Learned on the Way to 50, 000 Users May 14 th 3: 30 PM Room 224 A Paul Stansel Enterprise Infrastructure Architect Travelers Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Before We Get Started… Tweet about this session with hashtag #SYN 314 and #Citrix. Synergy Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Introduction In my previous role, I had the pleasure of building from the ground up a pretty massive environment. We spent 7 years going from 0 to almost 50, 000 users, a major achievement! And along the way we learned an awful lot about what to do, what not to do, and why sometimes you still have to do what you think you shouldn’t. That’s what I hope to leave you with today… lessons learned to make your transition from 0 to 50 k as smooth as possible. Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Who Am I? § 2015 Citrix Technology Professional (CTP) §Architect of multiple Fortune 100 Citrix environments § 18 years working with Citrix products §Author and editor §Owner of Citrix. Tips. com Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Your Takeaways Today How Day 1 impacts Day 763548 Common component sizing so you are poised for growth Automating your environment for maximum efficiency Planning a good monitoring foundation What’s the most important component you have (hint: it’s your users) Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

In the Beginning… Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

There was a user named Bob Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

But then one day… Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Lesson #1 – Know Your Users Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

You Need Data Know your users. Know their use cases. Know their work patterns. Know their apps, their data requirements, and where they sit. All of these factors play a role in the environment you want to build for them. Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Your User Experience Matters Most Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

But Paul that’s a ton of data! Take it one set of users at a time Use cataloging tools like SCCM, Lakeside’s Systrack, etc; to create your App to User Catalog Use App. DNA to help create delivery methodologies to know what your options are.

Lesson #2 – Build What They Need Not What You Want Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Your User Layers Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Connectivity Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Data Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Application Delivery Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Lesson #3 – Know the Limitations of Citrix Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Sizing Your Delivery Controllers http: //support. citrix. com/article/ctx 117477 HKLMSoftwareCitrixIMARUNTIMEUse. Regist ry. Setting DWORD registry entry to 1 HKLMSoftwareCitrixDesktop. ServerMax. Wo rkers Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

So What’s a Very Large Site? 20, 000 defined machines! Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Separate WI Into Pools http: //support. citrix. com/article/CTX 126625 Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

What About Store. Front App Pools? http: //support. citrix. com/article/CTX 138905 App Pools in Store. Front are a little trickier because of the way pools are tied to services. I recommend checking out CTX 138905 for more details on setting those up correctly. Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Updating the VDA on 20, 000 Persistent Guests is a Nightmare Lack of VDA Cleanup tool Failure of automated install means the user and/or machine is out of the water Troubleshooting why the upgrade failed is never easy The VDA itself was very difficult to extract from the other media (http: //blogs. citrix. com/2015/01/07/introducing-astand-alone-vda-for-xendesktop-and-xenapp-7 -6/) Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Lesson #4 – Mind the Gaps Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Monitoring With Citrix Tools Edgesite Director HDX Insight Power. Shell scripts Studio WMI Win. RM SNMP Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

rd 3 Party Monitoring Too many to list but recommended to try… 1) When they say end to end do they mean both with and without a gateway appliance (Netscaler, F 5, etc. )? 2) How much manual intervention do they take to set up and maintain? 3) Is the interface easy to use? 4) Can they do synthetic transactions against the infrastructure components to give you individualized health levels of each piece? 5) Can they proactively point you to a problem or reactively give you the data you need to fix it? Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Lesson #5 – Automate for Success Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Automation Tools Hopefully you saw SYN 512 earlier today! Power. Shell SCOrch Other Automation Tools…

Layering Technologies App. Volumes Unidesk Flex. App Others… Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Before you leave… Conference surveys are available online at www. citrixsynergy. com starting today, May 14 th. Provide your feedback to be entered to win one of many prizes! Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

Questions? Contact info: Paul@paulstansel. com http: //citrixtips. com @pstansel Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved

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References Some images courtesy of Free. Digital. Photos. net – Danilo Rizzuti adamr Copyright © 2015 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved