Citrix Servers

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See Also Citrix Contract

Citrix Servers

Citrix was the third part of the overhaul of WNA IT capabilities. (The others are the Network and IFS Upgrades). The recommendation was to replace and upgrade WNA Citrix's capabilities and improve the performance of IFS and other applications. Although not directly part of the IFS Upgrade, the project significantly enhanced the performance of IFS at the Lancaster, City of Industry, Chattanoofa, Corporate and Montreal and help WNA connect newly acquired companies on to our network. The Citrix solution was able to be implemented immediately and work with WNA current IFS environment as well as the IFS App7 version.

Background

When users connect the ERP system to IFS they connect to an Application Server at their site and in turn the Application server connects to the IFS Database server at the Data Center. The Application Servers host the ERP program. When a user clicks on an IFS icon on their PC it opens up and displays the applications screens on their PC but the data they enter on those screens is being transmitted back and forward to the Data Center. Once the IFS application is loaded from the Application Server there is very little further data transmission between the PC and the Application but there is a significant data transmission between the Application server at the site and the database at the Data Center. The speed of the network between the PC and the Application Server is 100Mbps but the speed between the Application Server and the Data Center is 1.5Mbps. (66X smaller) In effect, we barely use the 100Mbps capacity and instead push all the data transactions down an over utilized 1.5Mbps pipe. For the users this means that when they enter a Customer Order, Purchase Order or print a Crystal report the response of the application looks very slow. In fact the application is calculating the requirements very quickly it’s the request and the response to all the transactions queue up on the 1.5Mbps connection that is slow.


Solution

The solution was to load a Citrix client on a user’s PC. This opens up a virtual Application Server on the Citrix server at the Data Center. When the user enters transactions, the transmission of those transactions takes place between the Citrix server and the database server. This happens on the 100Mbps Ethernet connection. Consequently, the performance of the IFS system to the user is significantly enhanced (about 66X faster). At WNA it is recommended that users at the sites who print large crystal reports in IFS and use IFS extensively or are using screens where rapid entry is essential should connect to IFS through Citrix. Other users who do not use Citrix will also see an improvement because less data traffic will be being transmitted through the conventional T1 network. This is a typical and recommended method by which all distributed Client Server ERP installations including IFS would normally be implemented.


Other benefits to Citrix

There are other immediate benefits accrued by adopting this approach

  • Remote users such as the Sales force cannot connect to IFS through an Application server when they are not at a WNA site. Using a Citrix client to access IFS to look up orders or create new Inter-stock Pricing Programs and Deduction Programs will make this possible
  • Users who move between sites and do not connect to IFS from the same Application server need Citrix to connect
  • The Citrix server can be used to host other applications such as Sage FAS.
  • IFS Support, third party vendors, consultants and our financial auditors will be able to login to the WNA network and we will be able to customize access to programs and areas that we will them to see and control their access to our network. This avoids the cost of 3rd Party VPN’s or other data communication costs resulting from support

Longer term benefits

  • We can add additional applications on the Citrix server and make them available to anyone at WNA
  • We can immediate add new sites and companies to our network by loading a Citrix client
  • A user can log into their own personalized Citrix environment on any PC and see the applications screens and access data that they normally see
  • Citrix can used to share and back up data quickly
  • Because all the applications and processing of data takes place on the Citrix server it means that for some users low end PC’s can be purchased with smaller disks, memory and processing speed at a much lower cost. Existing PC’s can be utilized for more years than they do today
  • With no applications or few applications on the PC’s themselves, maintenance and troubleshooting will be reduced
  • We will be able to control much more closely what applications users download and use.
  • Citrix could be utilized to host ADP programs. This will make them far more secure than they are today. Currently far too many users at the sites have access to personal HR records.
  • We would not have to maintain and keep current the 5 IFS application servers at the sites with bug fixes, updates and customizations

Citrix at WNA

Prior to the Citrix upgrade WNA had a small Citrix environment. The Citrix edition had not been updated for 4 years because of the limitations imposed upon us by the server and the operating system. The Citrix server was used to host IFS for remote users and was used for instance to connect Polar to the WNAGLOBAL network before the hardware and infrastructure was built at the site. Previously, we had done the same for the API implementation of IFS. The server is also used to host the FAS Fixed Assets program. In fact this is the original reason why the Citrix server was installed. Consequently we had far outgrown the original purpose for which it was purchased and were continually struggling with data corruptions, server crashes and reboots on a daily or more frequent occurrence.

Implementation Path

The implementation of a fully operational Citrix environment that works seamlessly and effectively with the rest of the network required the skills and experience of outside service providers. The implementation plan envisaged a hardware purchase as well as implementation services. In order to provide a robust configuration that includes all the services that is scalable in the future, the plan calls two Citrix servers that can share the operational load as well fail-over to the other in the result of a server issue. The third server in the cluster is a web-server that allows connectivity to the servers via the WNAGLOBAL network or the internet. An operational Citrix cluster (or Citrix Farm) took two weeks to install using outside consultancy resources. The recommendation included a relatively low number of Citrix Licenses at this point (35 Licenses at $335/license). This achieved WNA's short term requirements.

Recent Developments

In 2008 Citrix renamed Presentation Server to XenApp. A comparison of features can be found [1]

References

Timeline: 2007 Citrix Portal http://mycitrix.com

  1. ↑ [1] here
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