Citrix

The Need

Many companies have deployed Citrix, whether it be as part of a wholesale “thin client” infrastructure, to host some specific business applications, or a remote access or disaster recovery strategy. But Citrix is a complex set of technologies, and while it can deliver very real business benefits it can also be prone to problems - particularly if the Citrix implementation has not been correctly designed and configured.

Citrix skills are not easy or quick to acquire, which is one of the reasons that companies often find it difficult to resolve Citrix implementation issues themselves. What they really need is expert, focused help so that they can get the most from the investment that they have made.

Citrix health check service

At Plan-Net, we have evolved our market leading infrastructure health check service to deliver a health check that is specifically focused around Citrix technologies. Citrix is a powerful but complex beast and there are many potential ways for the system to go wrong, perform poorly or be vulnerable to security issues.

Plan-Net’s Citrix health check service delivers real business value in a number of key areas:

  • Independent and expert review of your entire Citrix infrastructure
  • Evaluation not only against recognised best practice for the configuration in place, but also reviewing the overall suitability of the configuration for your business
  • Specific focus on existing Citrix and Terminal Services problems that are currently impacting the business in order to provide quick resolution
  • Coverage of operational procedures as well as technical configuration to ensure that one side isn’t letting the other down
  • Clear and detailed report with gradings against recognised best practice for more than 40 separate elements
  • Detailed description in business language of our findings from the health check activities, and recommendations for addressing the issues found
  • Opportunity to discuss the findings face to face in order to truly understand the report’s messages

What’s Covered?

Plan-Net's Citrix health check service delves deep into your Citrix implementation to review:

  • Network infrastructure that supports Citrix including available bandwidth and key services such as DNS
  • Farm / zone architecture design, particularly with respect to configuration of high availability of business critical applications and fault tolerance mechanisms
  • Hosted application usage patterns and load management configuration for high availability
  • Server performance tuning and configuration
  • Citrix and O/S patches and hotfixes, particularly those which address known Citrix and Terminal Services issues
  • Security configuration with server and session security
  • Licensing architecture review
  • Printing mechanisms, including drivers, replication etc.
  • Client access methods and current means of deployment
  • Systems management and alerting tools, disciplines, and processes

What Else Should I Know?

Like our other health check products, our Citrix focused health check is designed to deliver value quickly, with a typical assignment taking no more than one week to complete end-to-end. It is also conducted on a low, fixed cost basis - our customers have told us that the value they received from a Plan-Net health check has typically paid for the cost of the health check within 3 months.

Where we make recommendations to fix problems, we focus on solutions that are right for your business and budget - rather than some unrealistic solution that only a few would consider or could afford.

Presentation Manager provides real technical solutions to some of the today’s most critical systems access problems. If you depend upon Citrix for your business, but it isn’t performing as well as you would like, then a Plan-Net Citrix focused health check might well be the boost that your Citrix infrastructure has been looking for.

To find out more about our Citrix services click here