HDX: The story behind a roadmap - Citrix Certification

Did you ever wonder how roadmaps are defined at Citrix? Why feature ‘A’ makes it and feature ‘B’ doesn’t? We Product Managers have guidelines on how to operate – do we want to innovate with new features or optimize an existing one? Is there an immediate business opportunity attached to a Request for Enhancement, or are we penetrating a green field market? In this blog, I want to share with you a story of how one of the most important features HDX has ever seen came to life.

The Past:

Before I joined Citrix, I worked in the satellite telecommunications industry. I had the pleasure of traveling the world, visiting remote United Nations branch offices where Satlinks were the only means of communication. Satellite connections are generally limited in bandwidth, as this resource is finite on the “bird” up in the geostationary orbit. This is due to the maximum available power of the high-power amplifier (HPA) and antenna size. As a result, bandwidth is an expensive commodity.

But if there is one distinctive characteristic of this industry, it is latency. The laws of physics (and equipment performance) generally produce a round-trip time of 600-1,200 msec. TCP throughput behaves very differently under these conditions. The degradation effect of latency (and packet loss) on TCP can be especially challenging for an interactive protocol such as ICA.

I experienced that first hand back in 2012. I was working on a Citrix XenApp 6.5 project over a satellite. We used Citrix Consulting Services to tweak the XenApp 6.5 farm for the best WAN performance. (Curiously, the Citrix consultant on site, Roberto Moreno, is now my colleague in HDX Product Management and sits in front of me on the seventh floor of our building.)

The interesting part was that back in those days, we opened a ticket with Tech Support — a ticket that I can still find in Salesforce — titled “Low ICA Bandwidth Consumption.” I knew that I was not able to squeeze all the kilobits per second that I should have been able to with HDX/ICA. Countless hours of looking at Wireshark traces validated this.

We finally ended up tweaking a few reg keys and values in Citrix Receiver that resolved the issue. But this process was more of an art than a science, and it required manual intervention.

The Present:

In 2014, I accepted an offer to work at Citrix as a sales engineer for the CSP team. Shortly thereafter, I switched to the HDX Product Management team to work on domains such as Multimedia, Devices-Peripherals and the ICA stack (known internationally as Hostcore).

As soon as we got Enlightened Data Transport (EDT) on by default in XenApp and XenDesktop 7.16, I knew this was the best opportunity to restore my good karma and work with our architects and engineering team on improving ICA bandwidth utilization.

So off we went, kick-starting a project that now is bearing fruit in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7 1811.  We rewrote some of the core components of ICA, fine tuning buffers, window sizes, IOCTLs, and drivers.

(Note that a 2x throughput improvement is already present in the Citrix Workspace app 1808 for Windows, so by simply upgrading to that CWA version you are enjoying benefits without requiring a VDA upgrade.)

Now we are providing every virtual channel with a transport stack that can dynamically adjust its throughput to the available bandwidth of the network — without impacting interactivity.

The results of this have exceeded my expectations.

In CVAD 1811 you can enjoy HDX like never before. Trust me, your users will come to you saying, “I don’t know what you did, but the experience is twice as good!” The real number is 5x: We are going to be five times more efficient than XenApp and XenDesktop 7.15 over WAN links.

This means more throughput, more frames per second, more interactivity, and higher resolutions.

We call this feature HDX Adaptive Throughput, and it is part of our new A3 approach for HDX: Adaptive Display, Adaptive Transport, and Adaptive Throughput.

My colleague Miguel Contreras is now the Product Manager (PM) for ICA, EDT, and Adaptive Throughput, and he brings years of savvy Citrix Consulting field experience to the HDX team. Make sure you read his blog on HDX!

Mark Howell is now the PM for Devices, and he has been transforming our Client Drive Mapping virtual channel to make it even more efficient!

Roberto Moreno is the PM for Graphics, and he has driven a series of remarkable visual improvements to our stack. You can find them here and here.

The Future:

The story doesn’t end here, though, because the HDX Engineering and PM team have more bandwidth than ever (pun intended), and we have more tricks up our sleeves. You may recall from this blog post by Georgy (our architect) something about Enlightened Virtual Channels.

We are cross-pollinating Thinwire, Framehawk, and EDT. Next generation HDX is coming at full force and will, once again, set the industry standard for user experience and delivery of virtual apps and desktops.

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Get insights into user profiles with Citrix Director - Citrix Certification

With an objective to provide deeper insights into ever-critical user logon duration, Director 1808 had drilldowns of two of the most important logon phases — Interactive Session and Group Policy Processing (GPO). These drilldowns provided granular level details related to Interactive Session and GPO processing, which assisted in finding out the precise point of trouble.

In addition to these two phases, profile load is one of the most critical phases for logon duration. Profile load is the time it takes to load a user’s profile, which includes registry hive (NTUser.dat) and the user files.

Starting with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7 1811 and the latest Virtual Apps and Desktops service, Citrix Director displays detailed insights related to user profiles.

When hovering over the Profile Load bar in the Logon Duration chart on the User Details page, a tool-tip displays the summary of the user profile. When you click on the Detailed Drilldown button on the tool-tip, you get further insights about the user profiles.

Let’s have a look at what information is available and how it can assist in troubleshooting high profile load-related issues.

This feature is available in the Logon Duration chart on the User details and Endpoint details page. When you hover over the Profile Load bar, a tool-tip with the following information is displayed.

This tool-tip provides profile statistics such as the total number of files in the user profile, overall profile size, and number of large files. The number of large files is based on the default threshold of 50 MB. When you click the Detailed Drilldown button, you get a drilldown into each of the folders in profile root.

Here, the size and number of files in each individual folders in the profile root are displayed. These statistics include the nested folders in the calculation. The files inside the root profile are included in the Files in Root Folder entry. These details can be used to gain insights into the user profile and fix high-profile load issues. For example:

• An administrator can use the Send Message feature on the User Details page to notify users about abnormal file count and size and advise them to clean up the profile by removing unwanted files.
• The Reset Profile panel in the Personalization panel can be used in the case of humongous profiles.
• The Number of Large Files metric can be used to recommend users to reduce large files in their user profile.

These insights can be used to determine if the organization should use features such as profile streaming and folder redirection

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Vector Rockets into New Frontiers with Citrix

The commercial space industry is hot, and if Vector has its way, it is going to get even hotter. With the help of Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS), Vector is pioneering a next-generation platform to provide affordable access to the Final Frontier and an efficient, intelligent way for entrepreneurs to collaborate and bring their innovations to life.

“We want to give a blank canvas to the artists of the mind who will develop new use cases that create value in society,” says Jim Cantrell, CEO, Vector.

Building on its relationship since 2017 to develop the next generation of satellites, Vector is now extending its use of Citrix technology to include remote launch capabilities.

Combining dedicated, low-cost launches with software-defined satellites, Vector aims to increase the speed of going into orbit. “We want to make it possible for users who don’t have a lot of time to launch when they want so that we can realize the 21st century that we were all promised,” says John Garvey, President, Launch Services, Vector.

The company also wants to make work simpler and more efficient. “Our ultimate vision is one of space app developers being able to develop satellite applications on their desktop computer and upload them to an already orbiting satellite constellation yielding nearly instant data and revenue,” Cantrell said.

Enter Citrix. “Citrix technologies allow Vector to manage launches anywhere in the world from their California-based mission control faster, better and cheaper,” says Steve Wilson, Vice President, Product for Cloud and IoT, Citrix. “An even more unique use of Citrix, by Vector is that our solutions are the foundation of the compute cloud Vector is building that will enable the next-generation of the space-based economy by enabling entrepreneurs to put their applications into orbit and build new businesses.”

Using Citrix virtualization technologies, Vector is creating a virtualized satellite environment that will host customer applications running in space. And with Citrix® Workspace™ and Citrix networking solutions, it has built an intelligent and secure digital workspace through which mission control can collaborate with remote teams wherever they happen to be to launch, monitor and control rockets.

“Satellites right now are about as smart as your dishwasher,” Cantrell says. “With Citrix, we’re adding a smart layer where entrepreneurs don’t actually have to build satellites and our teams can collaborate from wherever they are to drive optimal results.”

Like Vector, more than 400,000 companies around the world are using Citrix solutions to transform the way work gets done.

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