Real Life Citrix Experience from a Citrix Service Provider
October 06, 2015
Real Life Citrix Experience from a Citrix Service Provider
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Software Version
7.6
Modules Used
- Storefront
- Studio
- Director
- Profile Management
Overall Satisfaction with XenDesktop
We are a Citrix service provider and with Citrix, we deliver a hosted virtual desktop to our clients. Citrix XenDesktop allows us and our clients to seamlessly work from any location, with any device. We have several Citrix farms (sites), and utilize most, if not all, of the Citrix features.
- Delivery of a virtual desktop across a high latency/high packet loss connection: When Citrix introduced Framehawk, we were excited to get it into production. The feature seems to work pretty well, but even the base implementation, when correctly configured, works well across the WAN.
- Access Interface: When users access the Web front-end or Receiver interface, it is a visually pleasing experience and invites users to connect to "Work".
- Scalability: Citrix allows us to scale our deployments in a quick and easy way with Machine Creation Services (MCS), or Provisioning Services (PVS). We have many small clients with dedicated images and with MCS we can give them the benefit of a fresh "Golden Image" without the added cost of additional servers.
- File accessibility: Currently, Citrix offers the ability to transfer files to and from their virtual desktop via client mapped drives. This works ok, but can be clunky and a little slow at times. ShareFile is a good segueway, but can be a little cumbersome to set up in a Hosted-Shared environment.
- Offline access: With XenClient, users can run offline instances of virtual machines and still get the benefit of the virtual machine managed from the datacenter. The process isn't very seamless and could be more integrated into XenDesktop. If a XenDesktop virtual desktop could be delivered to a users local machine and then cached, that would be a great solution.
- This has helped us scale in a fast and secure manner. When our clients acquire new business, we can easily spin up new machines and add to their capacity quickly.
- With Citrix, we allow all of our clients to work from anywhere which is a huge selling point. They are able to work from the office and then pick right back up from where they left off when they get home (or to the beach).
- Citrix has provided us with some great out of the box management tools such as Director, Studio, and HDX insight center for monitoring and customer service.
The main reason that we went with Citrix is because of the performance over the WAN. It is far superior to VMware's offering.