Citrix Health Check

About the customer

Our client is a multinational financial services company, one of the largest financial institutions in the world. They are currently using Citrix for their virtual app and desktop solution. Their business heavily depends on the seamless functioning of this Citrix environment to ensure continuous, high-quality user experiences, particularly with remote work. They have seen significant growth, and their Citrix infrastructure plays a key role in supporting their scalability, disaster recovery, and regulatory compliance needs.

The Challenge

The client was concerned that their Citrix environment, which had been functioning reliably for several years, might not continue to meet their evolving performance, security, and scalability needs. Specific challenges included:

Performance bottlenecks: The client had noticed some degradation in user experience as more employees utilised the system.

Security vulnerabilities: The client wanted to ensure their Citrix infrastructure was secure and met all regulatory security requirements.

Scalability concerns: As the business was growing, the client wanted confidence that the Citrix environment could handle an increase in users over the next 3-5 years.

Disaster recovery capabilities: They needed to assess whether their current configuration would provide reliable business continuity in the event of infrastructure failures or security incidents.

Our Approach

We utilised our comprehensive Citrix Environment Assessment methodology to analyse and optimise the client’s environment. The approach included three distinct stages:

Environment Assessment and Analysis: 

In this stage, Coffee Cup Solutions conducted a deep dive into the client's current Citrix environment. This assessment was broken into five key areas:

User experience: Identified performance issues and resource utilisation inefficiencies.

Hardware: Evaluated the configuration of the virtual machines and physical infrastructure.

Management practices: Assessed how the environment was being monitored and managed.

Virtual machines (VMs): Checked for any over-subscription of resources that could lead to performance issues.

Security: Ensured the environment was secure and followed best practices.

Monitoring and Management Assessment: 

The second stage involved reviewing the monitoring and management processes. Coffee Cup Solutions examined the systems in place for proactive monitoring of performance, availability, and security. They also reviewed backup, restore, and disaster recovery procedures to ensure the environment could withstand potential disruptions.

Executive Summary and Health Check Documentation: 

The final stage of the project involved presenting the client with an executive summary that outlined critical areas for improvement. Each identified issue was assigned a severity level (Critical, High, Medium, or Low), enabling the client to prioritise action. Specific recommendations included:

Critical Security Issue: Changing the default username for a user cluster to an Active Directory service account to prevent security breaches.

High Reliability Issues: Upgrading Citrix StoreFront, Virtual Delivery Agents (VDA), and deploying a secondary NetScaler appliance to ensure high availability (HA) and reduce downtime.

Medium Reliability Issues: Adopting the Base Image Script Framework (BIS-F) for virtual disk resealing and configuring affinity rules to ensure infrastructure servers were distributed across separate hosts for increased reliability.

This comprehensive assessment gave the client a clear roadmap for enhancing their Citrix environment, ensuring it remained performant, secure, and scalable as their business continued to grow.