No company wants to waste money, especially these days with the challenge of a large remote workforce and IT budgets stretched to the limit. Making the most out of your technology resources is critical. For virtual app and desktop workloads, that means providing the best possible user experience while also conserving compute spend. This is true for traditional on-premises environments, but even more so in the public cloud where things like user density and vertical load balancing strategies are key.
If you’re a Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops customer, Citrix Workspace Environment Management (WEM) can save you money. Or, to put it another way, if you’re not using WEM, you’re likely wasting money on additional IT resources that aren’t needed while also hindering employee productivity. WEM intelligently optimizes resources for optimal performance with full administrative control over how the app and desktop sessions behave.
Recently, our WEM engineering team did some testing with various Azure VM instance types. The two main categories they looked at along with a summary of the test results are below.
Multi-Session Scalability and Reliability
When working with multi-session hosts, such as Windows Server and Windows 10 Enterprise Multi-session in Azure, the goals are maximum user density (for each given user persona such as task worker, knowledge worker or power user) and fair sharing of resources amongst sessions (e.g. tame the “noisy neighbors” running CPU-intensive apps that affect performance of other users). Citrix workloads are CPU-bound, so that’s where we focus most of our optimization efforts.
Configuration
These three simple configurations within WEM are a great place to start.
- Enable CPU spike protection and auto-prevent CPU spikes
- Add processes with known high CPU usage into the exclusion list
- Add key processes into the CPU priority list
Please note, these are basic configuration options for a starting point that you can fine tune later based on environment performance. We recommend using Citrix Analytics for Performance to objectively evaluate user performance levels and optimize accordingly.
Results
With these options set, session density can increase by more than 15 percent. That means either a 15+ percent savings on cloud compute spend or 15+ percent more users for the same amount of money. Your choice!
Under situations with high load (e.g. “noisy neighbor”) the savings can be even greater — an increase of 54+ percent was observed on more conservative instance types. And aside from the scalability savings, WEM also helps reduce help desk calls in these scenarios by providing a smoother experience for users.
Network latency was also tested because it has a direct impact on overall user experience. Here we see tangible benefits, as well.
Improving Logon Times
People are busy. No one wants to wait longer than they must for something to happen. The amount of time it takes for users to first launch a virtual app or desktop when they start their day is a key indicator of user experience. WEM can provide significant gains in this area (and for near-instant launch look at our session pre-launch and session lingering capabilities).
Configuration
This is the recommended starting place for optimizing user logon times.
- Enable WEM to launch the agent at logon
- Delegate session setup tasks, like printer creation and virtual drives, to WEM
- Migrate Windows logon scripts into WEM external tasks
- Migrate your GPOs to WEM’s GPO management (provides additional benefits like Citrix-specific filtering, too)
Results
Just by deploying WEM and having the WEM agent optimize your environment with the defaults, you can decrease your logon times by more than 60 percent!
On top of this, if you dedicate GPO tasks to WEM, you can realize an additional 50 percent (or more) reduction in logon times (please note, this will vary on the complexity of your GPOs). Here are some metrics from the Director console. See this video for more info on Director, and click the images below to view larger.
Get Started with WEM Today
Now that you’ve seen the significant savings that WEM can bring to a typical environment, it’s time to start using it for yourself. As our feature matrix for on-premises offerings shows, WEM is available in Advanced and Premium editions for a managed installation. The greatest value with exclusive features is available in the WEM cloud service, however, which is included for Virtual Apps and Desktops service customers in Citrix Cloud and also an option for on-premises customers too (let us manage the WEM infrastructure components for you). In fact, we have a comprehensive reference architecture on the Workspace Environment Management service on Citrix Tech Zone. There’s also great Tech Insight videos on WEM CPU Optimization and WEM Logon Optimization below. However you decide to implement WEM, you’ll be very pleased with the savings and improved user experience (and so will your management).
