topic Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues in ArcGIS Enterprise Questions

ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

SarahBurnham — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:07:31 GMT

Hi

We are currently looking to deploy ArcGIS on Citrix across our Authority. Does anybody have any experience of running ArcGIS on Citrix as opposed to Desktop clients? We are especially interested in known issues/ performance and optimum settings for improving speed, which initial testing has shown to be very slow. We will be running on a minimum version of 9.3, but possibly 10.

Any help or advise would be much appreciated!

Thanks

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

AaronHixson — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 13:40:51 GMT

We are in the process of doing the same thing with ArcGIS 10. We are putting it on a Citrix6 Farm on Server 2008 R2 servers.

To solve the printing issue, we have created a print server that is in the data center that is local to our Citrix farms. This allows the print jobs to off load the terminal servers quickly. When then have the print servers print directly to the local/network printers inthe various offices directly across the WAN. In our testing phase this is what yielded us the best results for printing.

Still, I was hoping there would be others with a Citrix 6 and ArcMap 10 environment that I could do more reading on so I can know how to optimize my Citrix installation to get the best performance for my environment.

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

jduval — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:08:46 GMT

We have moved to XenApp 6.0 in June 2010 and currently using 9.3 SP1. We want to move to ArcGIS 10.0 but am waiting to hear from ESRI if it has been tested/supported in this kind of Citrix Environment (OS is Windows Server 2008 SR2 64-bit). We currently only have 11 GIS users which are the only users on this server. Performance-wise, it's good for mapping and general analysis. I find it slow on editing and the help menu has issues (can't access from programs).

I found out today that because the license server is on Citrix, our local desktops/laptops won't be able to borrow (in ArcGIS 10) any licenses because it cannot directly connect to the license server. (The Citrix farm is in another city) This is a big drawback for us as we have users that go out in the field where there is no cellphone/internet coverage.

I'm interested in the comments in this thread...

Julie

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

Anonymous User — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 20:20:49 GMT

I found out today that because the license server is on Citrix, our local desktops/laptops won't be able to borrow (in ArcGIS 10) any licenses because it cannot directly connect to the license server. (The Citrix farm is in another city) This is a big drawback for us as we have users that go out in the field where there is no cellphone/internet coverage.

I am not able to personally test this without access to a Citrix environment, but I double checked with a couple of sources that say you should be able to borrow a license from the license manager that is running in the Citrix environment as long as the client can connect to it. Maybe you could provide more details (error messages, connectivity issues, etc.)

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

GregoryPonto1 — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 02:15:32 GMT

Julie - Don't give up hope:

1. Take a look at the following KB Article in response to a bug we've found with ArcInfo license borrowing:
http://resources.arcgis.com/content/kbase?fa=articleShow&d=38021

2. If you are trying to borrow over latent connections you may also want to look at:
http://resources.arcgis.com/content/kbase?fa=articleShow&d=35659

We do support ArcGIS Desktop 10 and License Manager 10 in Citrix environments. For that matter, the Citrix display rendered on your local system is not actually running on your local system but is in fact running on the Citrix server itself. Therefore the only connection to be concerned about is that between the Citrix server and the server running ArcGIS License Manager. If you can consume you should also be able to borrow, which makes me feel you are actually running into the borrow bug addressed the the first URL above.

Let us know what happens.

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

jduval — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:07:27 GMT

Hi, we haven't installed ArcGIS10 on the Citrix Environment yet, so I have not actually tested whether the borrowing would work or not. The IT managing our Citrix servers wanted me to investigate whether the license borrowing would work. ESRI Support said that my local desktop must be able to connect to the license manager.

My local desktop cannot connect to the Citrix server that is acting as the license manager. I connect to the Citrix servers via an internet portal.

What happens when I borrow a license? Does it create a license file? If my Citrix desktop borrowed the license, would I be able to copy it to my local desktop and use it?

I'm hoping to implement ArcGIS10 within the next week - I will keep you posted.

Julie

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

jduval — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 15:02:26 GMT

We are in the process of doing the same thing with ArcGIS 10. We are putting it on a Citrix6 Farm on Server 2008 R2 servers.

To solve the printing issue, we have created a print server that is in the data center that is local to our Citrix farms. This allows the print jobs to off load the terminal servers quickly. When then have the print servers print directly to the local/network printers inthe various offices directly across the WAN. In our testing phase this is what yielded us the best results for printing.

Still, I was hoping there would be others with a Citrix 6 and ArcMap 10 environment that I could do more reading on so I can know how to optimize my Citrix installation to get the best performance for my environment.

Hi ahixson, we are now running ArcGIS10 on XenApp6 running on Win Server 2008 R2 Std. ArcMap is very slow in performance - it sometimes takes up to 10 minutes just to add a data layer. Have you experienced abnormally slow performance? I have contacted ESRI support and it looks to be a Ctirix issue. I'm hoping ESRI will pursue this since I keep getting told that ESRI support ArcGIS 10 on Citrix.

Julie

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

KarenGrassi — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 22:45:55 GMT

I am not able to personally test this without access to a Citrix environment, but I double checked with a couple of sources that say you should be able to borrow a license from the license manager that is running in the Citrix environment as long as the client can connect to it. Maybe you could provide more details (error messages, connectivity issues, etc.)

If you can you may want to host the desktop license manager on a server that is not associated with your CITRIX farm but accessible to it. That is the solution that we at Miami-Dade County utilize and it works great.

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

GregoryPonto1 — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 05:24:52 GMT

Julie -

Is the poor performance on client side systems only? For example, if you can find a way to remote into the Citrix box (Win2k8) using RDP, do you find the performance remains slow? Also, running Task Manager on the Citrix box, how many ArcMap.exe's do you see running? ArcMap is a pretty hefty product it is quite easy to overwhelm a Citrix server with only a few clients.

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

jduval — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:05:03 GMT

Julie -

Is the poor performance on client side systems only? For example, if you can find a way to remote into the Citrix box (Win2k8) using RDP, do you find the performance remains slow? Also, running Task Manager on the Citrix box, how many ArcMap.exe's do you see running? ArcMap is a pretty hefty product it is quite easy to overwhelm a Citrix server with only a few clients.

ESRI Support asked to me to test that as well. When a user used RDP to remote in, the peformance was 'normal'.

When I run Task Manager, I only see my own apps running. We only have 10 users (clients) on a 16 CPU and 12GB Ram server (new since June 2010). The CPU usage rarely goes beyond 10%, memory usage is usually around 5GB. Performance was also extremely slow when only 1 user (administrator) was logged on. I don't think we are overwhelming our Citrix server...

Thanks for your feedback! Any other suggestions to try?

Julie

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

BruceAnger — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 00:16:43 GMT

We have had ArcFm running in a Citrix environment for 4 years and ever since IT put it on we have been begging them to take it off the citrix environment, it is frequently slow where it takes 10 mins to save or to do an edit, it won't change printers you need to convert map to a PDF first. And if you want a real exercise in futility try creating an A0 sized map and then adding or editing anything on the map.

By the way we recently were checking server loads on our system and while we found the server with SDE on it rarely used more then 50% of its processor, the citrix server seemed to be the one doing the calculations and was the server maxing out at 100% for minutes on end.

If you can avoid it, don't use citrix.

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

MarkSalter — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 08:12:38 GMT

We are finding ArcMap 9.3 through XenApp 5 OK in some respects, but very difficult in others. In particular at the moment we are stuck trying to get hyperlinks to image files working as they always respond with "Unable to open '<path>\<file>'. Please make sure the path is correct and the document exists". Works OK with text files, and when run locally on the server with an admin a/c, but not from clients. Must be some sort of file association / launching another program from within a program issue.

Mark Salter
National Museum of Wales

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

ScottBarker — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 18:55:24 GMT

Mark,

We are having the exact same issue where we get the "unable to open...", but is we are admin or logged into the desktop the image (tif) opens successfully.

Did you ever find what caused this problem?

Thanks,

Scott Barker
Alabama Gas

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

JosephWallis — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 11:39:11 GMT

Does anyone know how to change the default.gdb location for users accessing ArcGIS Desktop 10 in Citrix? I don't want the server filling up with these default GDBs. Also, I'd like to know how to redirect this local cache folder to the user's home drive and not a folder on the citrix server. Any thoughts?

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

GregoryPonto — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 21:54:54 GMT

Does anyone know how to change the default.gdb location for users accessing ArcGIS Desktop 10 in Citrix? I don't want the server filling up with these default GDBs. Also, I'd like to know how to redirect this local cache folder to the user's home drive and not a folder on the citrix server. Any thoughts?

You can probably get what you are looking for by enabling "Special Folder Redirection," a Citrix concept will push the GDBs created for each profile back to the client (http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/index.jsp?topic=/web-interface-hardwick/wi-enable-special-folder-redirection-gransden.html). BUT....be advised that enabling "Special Folder Redirection" within Citrix results in a considerable performance loss from the client side as data that normally would be locally available to the Citrix server now has to traverse the LAN/WAN link between client and server. (Among a host of other complications).

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

JeffDeWeese — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 22:30:35 GMT

Hi

We are currently looking to deploy ArcGIS on Citrix across our Authority. Does anybody have any experience of running ArcGIS on Citrix as opposed to Desktop clients? We are especially interested in known issues/ performance and optimum settings for improving speed, which initial testing has shown to be very slow. We will be running on a minimum version of 9.3, but possibly 10.

Any help or advise would be much appreciated!

Thanks

Hello. Esri has many, many, customer running ArcGIS Desktop on Citrix XenApp. We have a presentation we did at the last User Conference which addresses many of your questions. Please write me a jdeweese@esri.com and I can provide you with more details. Thanks.

Jeff DeWeese
Esri - Enterprise Systems Architect

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

GregoryPonto — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 19:38:29 GMT

We've recently seen a successful Citrix XenApp based ArcGIS Desktop 10.x deployment consumed on Macintosh. Some challenges to be expected, but I wanted to post the Citrix prescibed solution if it helps anyone in that area:

Citrix/XenApp + ArcGIS Desktop 10 + Macintosh Client: Configure the application not to run in "seamless" mode and lock the application to a given resolution (800x600) for example.

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

GregoryPonto — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 21:28:44 GMT

Though I earlier in this thread stated that we have experienced little to no problems in using the Citrix Deployment method for ArcGIS, there have been a few little pesky items. One of which follows:

When I thry to author and serve out a map (either through ArcServer or Publisher) using ArcGIS through the Citrix connection, the data links break and the end user (web or ArcReader) sees only the data holder in the TOC along with the broken link symbol.

Same map is then opened in ArcGIS on a local install, the data sources reset to exactly what they were before(but resetting is required), then the maps as served out (via ArcServer or Publisher) contain active links and all is well.

After researching this a bit, I did discover that when looking at the data sources for the .MXD file in ArcCatalog, the connection file found on the \Application Data\ESRI\ArcCatalog\[connection].sde path was set to where the IT folks are preserving the profile information that Citrix uses when a user is logging in. (see attached).

The data source file is shown on another computer - in this case:\\rcg-file1\appdata$\jearmstrong\Application Data\ESRI\ArcCatalog\SdeConnect@richmond_vector.sde - this is where the user profiles are being stored

Normally this connection would be "Database Connections\SdeConnect@richmond_vector.sde" which seems to resolve to C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\ESRI\ArcCatalog\Admin@richmond_vector.sde.

Is there a way to set this data connection path to allow data in a map service authored through the Citrix deployment of ArcGIS to be viewable by the end users? I realize there is a manual workaround, but that kind of defeats the purpose of running the GIS through Citrix. I hope somebody can shed some light on this issue.

thanks

James Armstrong
Richmond County, North Carolina
GIS

James -

Disable "Special Folder Redirection" (http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/index.jsp?topic=/web-interface-hardwick/wi-enable-special-folder-redirection-gransden.html)

We just resolved this exact issue with another client with this solution.

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

JosephWallis — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 11:31:33 GMT

You can probably get what you are looking for by enabling "Special Folder Redirection," a Citrix concept will push the GDBs created for each profile back to the client (http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/index.jsp?topic=/web-interface-hardwick/wi-enable-special-folder-redirection-gransden.html). BUT....be advised that enabling "Special Folder Redirection" within Citrix results in a considerable performance loss from the client side as data that normally would be locally available to the Citrix server now has to traverse the LAN/WAN link between client and server. (Among a host of other complications).

instead of pushing them back to the client, I would like to push them to the user's "home" drive which is on the local network with the Citrix server. Does this special folder redirection accomplish that? I'd also like to redirect the cache folder to their home drive as well.

Re: ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

GregoryPonto — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 15:27:16 GMT

instead of pushing them back to the client, I would like to push them to the user's "home" drive which is on the local network with the Citrix server. Does this special folder redirection accomplish that? I'd also like to redirect the cache folder to their home drive as well.

Inteller- As this is more of a core Citrix question than an Esri question, I'll admit I am at a position of disadvantage and will certainly welcome a Citrix expert's take on this. That said, the functionality that you are looking for, in my experience, is the default behavior (Special Folder Redirection disabled.) We use local (not roaming) profiles, and as each user runs ArcMap via Citrix, the user home, user profile, etc, all are created locally on the Citrix server. I'd equate this to a Terminal Services/RDP session. You are on your own workstation, but all the processing, file referneces, home directories, etc, all exist and are utilized on the server (Citrix does tend to blur this line a bit though).

That said, I'll make a note to check on the behavior though and get back to you as soon as I can.