Using Citrix to Expand

Into New International

Markets
Sean Whetstone
Head of I.T. Services
Reed Managed Services Plc
Email: sean.whetstone@reed.co.uk
 Who are Reed?
 Founded in 1960 by Alec Reed CBE and privately owned by the Reed family.

 Over £600 million group turnover. Largest independent UK recruitment

company.

 Seven businesses in the Reed family group; Reed Employment, Reed

Personnel Services, Reed Managed Services,Reed Learning, Reed in
Partnership, Reed Executive and Reed Health Care.

 Over 3500 IT knowledge based users across 300 locations in UK & Ireland.

 reed.co.uk is the UK’s largest job website with 355,888 jobs online,
10 million jobs viewed each month,1 million job applications per month, over
two and a half million registered users and 1.4 million unique visitors per
month.

 Reed Managed Services delivers Managed IT services across the Reed

family group as a monthly fee per desktop. Business requirement to reduce
IT service managed desktop fee by 20% in 2006/2007.

 Carbon Neutral Company with strategy to reduce carbon footprint of I.T systems.
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 Strategy and
Infrastructure Rollout in
2006 Update
 In 2006 we rolled out a new infrastructure to deliver competitive
advantage, and reduce costs and reduce carbon footprint.
 The new Citrix infrastructure consisted of 64 bit Citrix
Presentation Server 4 using HP AMD Dual Processer/Dual Core
blades with x64 Opetron processors.
 Each server supports a maximum of 105 users without causing
significant impact to users. However, we are loading each blade
server around 85 users per blade in live environment to allow
room for growth and resilence of server farm. Currently 30
servers support our con-current user population of 2,550.
 Another 20 blade servers will be added during 2007 to give
100%
fail over capability in the events one of our two data centres
fails.
 We deployed 18 Virtual Windows 2003 Servers using VMWare
3.0
on four HP 64bit AMD BL25P Blades to run our Citrix
Infrastructure
such as data collectors, web interfaces, citrix secure
gateways,SQL databases, domain controllers and print servers.
Capacity to add other virtual servers without further hardware
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investment. On average we run 25 servers per VMWARE server.
 The Kit List

 31 x BL25P HP AMD Blades Dual Core Dual 2.2Ghz 16Gb

 4250 x Wyse V30 WinTerms CE.NET

 65 x Wyse V90 WinTerms Embedded XP

 Netapp 3050 Clustered NAS Filers

 31 x Microsoft Windows 2003 Server x64

 18 x Microsoft Windows 2003

 4 x VMware Server ESX 3.0

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 The Savings
 Significant reduction in the capital purchase, hardware
maintenance,
support, management and monitoring of servers from an
original
estimated 130 x 32 bit Citrix blade 32bit servers, to just 30
based on HP AMD 64bit BL25P blade servers.

 Significant reduction in the powering and cooling of 95 less

servers in
our data centres eliminating the need for additional planned
upgrades of air conditioning, power distrubution, Un-
interupted Power Supply and generator backup in data
centres plus reduction of
over 2,500 tonnes of CO2 emissions per annum through
reduction of 450 servers and 4,000 PC’s all of which were
powered 24x7.

 Reduction in cost of purchasing 95 less copies of server 5

based software such as Microsoft Windows 2003 Server.
 International Expansion
New year – New Challenge
 In early 2007 the business decided to expand into new
international markets.

The Business required:

 Low start up and ongoing I.T. costs.

 Quick deployment.

 Simple support model.

 International wide database.

 Solution should be Secure, Reliable and Flexible by

design.
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 Our Proposed Solution
 Deliver all applications via Citrix PS from two UK data
centres over Public and Private networks.
 Important to choose the right local network provider in
each country.
 Communication partner should, where possible, be tier One
with low latency and good peering agreements with the UK.
 Three factor security using Security One Time Passwords
fobs such as Secure Computing Safe word for Citrix fobs.
 All international markets use the same applications as the
UK with currency and language support but supported from
the UK.
 Supported from the UK using on-call engineers and
extended hours.
 Technical courier swap out for local Terminals or PC’s. 7
 Choosing the right
Communication Partner
 Do Internet research to select tier one Internet Service providers.

 Check peering arrangements with International and UK communication

providers.

 Use Visual trace and trace route to map number of hops and countries on
route to the UK.

 Check minimum/maximum/average latency and packet loss metrics.

 There is no substitute to try it for real.

 All you need is an air plane ticket and a secure fob.

 Take advantage of Quality of Service (QoS) and Class of Service (CoS)

where available.

 Private leased lines can sometimes be cost effective with International

carriers.
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 Visual Trace
Visual Trace
To Sydney
Australia from
London UK Example

Routes from
London UK through
Tier 1 ISP Above.net to
Washington. USA

Peers with Primustel in

Washington USA

Delivered to Imprimus.net.au
In Sydney, New South Wales
In Australia

It took 19 network hops to

Reach destination.

Latency only 75ms to Primustel

In Washington USA but 300ms
by the time it reaches Sydney
New South Wales, Australia.

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 Malta
Melita Cable
3.805 Mb/s Download
248.5 Kb/s Upload
Average Latency 70ms
Min 66ms Max 170ms
Secure Computing
Citrix
One time password
fobs
PC’s using Universal
Printer driver Ta'xbiex, Malta
 6 users start up
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 Qatar
QTEL
2.048 Mb/s Download
250 Kb/s Upload
Average Latency
224ms
Min 224ms Max 400ms
Secure Computing
Citrix
One time password
fobs
PC’s using Universal Doha, Qatar
Printer driver
3 users growing to 30
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 Australia
Verizon/MCI
2.048 Mb/s Download
2.048 Mb/s Upload
Private Network to UK
Average Latency 200ms
Min 150ms
Max 300ms
Wyse V30 Win Terms
Currently at Regus Office
Latency Average 299ms
Min 299ms Max 383ms
4 users growing to 32
Sydney, Australia

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 Poland

2.048 Mb/s Download

250 Kb/s Upload
Cisco VPN to UK
Average Latency 47ms
Min 45ms
Max 79ms
Wyse V30 Win Terms
5 users growing to 40

Warsaw, Poland

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 Madeira
Cabo TV
2.048 Mb/s Download
250 Kb/s Upload
Cisco VPN to UK
Average Latency 61ms
Min 60ms
Max 150ms
PC’s using Citrix ICA
13 users growing to 20

Funchal, Madeira

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 Bulgaria
The Bulgarian
Telecommunications
Company (BTC)
2.048 Mb/s Download
250 Kb/s Upload
Public Broadband
Average Latency
104ms
Min 124ms
Max 101ms
PC’s with Secure Fobs Sofia, Bulgaria
4 Users
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 But What about Latency?

It can’t be that simple!

International links suffer from
latency

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 Citrix S.L.R.
 When all else fails there is speed screen latency reduction
(SLR).
 If latency is above 200ms SLR can and does help.
 Provides local text echo allowing characters to appear on
the ICA client device screen the instant the user pushes the
key on their keyboard rather than wait for the server to
acknowledge over a latent link.
 Mouse click feedback works by adding an hour glass once
the mouse button is pressed locally rather than wait for a
server acknowledgement.
 SLR does its best to guess position, font type, size of font
and colour of font. The more standard the application and
font the better it works! It is not perfect but can help in
certain circumstances.
 SLR needs to be enabled on both the server and client side.
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 Citrix Tuning
on latent links
 Reduce screen resolution and colour depth as low as
business will accept to reduce bandwidth.

 Enable Citrix compression and caching.

 ICA Session reliability can be switched on.

 ICA keep alives can be configured to set how quickly a

Citrix server will classify a lost session.

 Turn off unneeded virtual channels to save bandwidth.

 Follow recommendations in Citrix support article

CTX101602 for
Optimizing Citrix over wireless wide area networks.

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX101602
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 Other Improvements
on latent links
 GlobalMaxTCPWindowSize and TCPWindowSize (REG-DWORD) can
be modified in the Windows registry to increase the number of
bytes a user can send without receiving an acknowledgement.

 Use of Quality of Service such as Cisco’s NBAR for ICA on Cisco

routers or Cisco’s “Weighted Fair Queuing” allows fairer treatment
of smaller packets such as ICA.

 Find the optimal Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) for your link
and change the MTU on your client to match.

 Wan Acceleration/Compression devices and Packet/Traffic shaping

devices such as Packeteer and Peribit can also help.

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 Tools to use on
Latent links
 Free Tools
 DPC Latency Checker
http://www.thesycon.de/eng/latency_check.shtml
 Dummynet Network Simulation http://www.dummynet.com/
 Ethereal Packet Analyser http://www.ethereal.com/
 SG TCP Optimizer http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php
 Traceroute & ping (included with MS operating systems)
 Citrix Session Monitoring and Control Console (SMCC) Free from
Citrix
 Commercial Tools / Free Trials
 Visual Route http://www.visualroute.com/ Network Diagnostics

 Observer Suite 12 http://www.networkinstruments.com/ Network20

Analyser
 Summary
 Existing 64bit Citrix Infrastructure enabled quick
deployment and low start up costs into new
International markets.
 It is important to choose the right communications
partner.
 Latency and very low packet loss is key.
 Citrix SLR can help.
 Optimize Citrix to work on latent links.
 Network improvements such as NBAR, MTU, Wan
acceleration and traffic shapers can also help.
 Try it for real – all you need is a plane ticket and a
fob!

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 Q&A

Thank You for listening!

Any Questions?
Email:Sean.whetstone@reed.co.uk
http://www.reed.co.uk

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