Accelerate Citrix Machine Catalog Updates with XenServer optimizations

I was talking with a Citrix admin from a large bank recently and they had this exact problem.

As a Citrix Admin, keeping your Citrix images updated is a key part of your job.

This is where you align technical and business requirements – making sure the business users have everything they need to be productive.

You likely have a monthly image update process where you update your Citrix Machine Catalogs with the latest security patches, newly installed applications, and any user experience tweaks.

The most effective way to deploy these updates to hundreds or thousands of Citrix desktops is by leveraging Citrix Provisioning technologies such as PVS or MCS. This is the Citrix magic that makes Citrix the leading EUC vendor in the enterprise space.

However, if you are using an unoptimized hypervisor for Citrix with PVS, it can put heavy load on your network, and with MCS it can put heavy load on your storage. This results in more time when booting or rebooting a large number of Citrix desktops.

If you are not using XenServer, updating your Citrix Machine catalogs can take a long time to complete, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of VDAs.

When I was in IT, I was part of the team that managed the image update process for thousands of Citrix desktops. Mistakes happen, and sometimes – “oops I pushed out the wrong image!” Or the reg key that was working in the QA environment isn’t taking the same effect in production – and now the machine catalog needs to be updated again.

Since this process usually occurs over the weekend or after hours, now you are spending time away from your family, playing a round of golf, or whatever you enjoy doing in your spare time! Additionally, if you need to update a Machine Catalog during the workday, this can lead to significant loss of employee productivity.

I was talking with a Citrix admin from a large bank recently and he had this exact problem. They updated their machine catalogs on Sunday, and on Monday while this Citrix admin was at a doctor’s appointment, he received a call that there was an issue in the image. This was impacting the employees’ productivity and the Citrix admin had to roll back the machine catalog update from the previous day. The Citrix admin said the machine catalog update took the entire work day and he saw that his storage system was overloaded – because he wasn’t using XenServer and didn’t have the MCS optimizations to reduce the load on storage.

As the most optimized hypervisor for Citrix, XenServer can solve these problems by accelerating Citrix Machine Catalog updates with our image caching technologies – such as PVS Accelerator and Intellicache.

This is how XenServer helps increase user productivity, reduce employee downtime, and save on administration time & headaches.

Check out these blog posts that give a deeper dive into how these Citrix optimization technologies work:

Here are YouTube videos showing these technologies in action: