ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

[SarahBurnham]

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

[BruceAnger]

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.

[MarkSalter]

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

[ScottBarker]

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

[JosephWallis]

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?

[GregoryPonto]

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-...). 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).

[JeffDeWeese]

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

[GregoryPonto]

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.

[GregoryPonto]

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-...)

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

[JosephWallis]

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-...). 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.

[GregoryPonto]

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.