Citrix and Notes 8.5.1 - research-notes
I have heard from a couple of customers that they are planning to implement Notes 8.5.1 (great) in the Basic edition (oh no!).
The reason why the customers are planning to go for the Basic edition is performance. The customers have done some research, and they believe that they need to invest heavily in more Citrix servers if they are to support running the Standard edition of the Notes client.
We want all users to be running the full-featured Standard edition of the client of course. This has led me to do a quick research on what the story is about performance and Notes 8.x.
This is what I have found.
First a collection of good resources on the subject
And what does my research show?
There was a major improvement in performance
on Citrix when Notes 8.0.2 was released. This code change is also included
in the 8.5.x Notes code-branch.
There is no major performance change
between 8.0.2 and 8.5.
RAM in he Citrix server is what limits
the number of clients you can run on a server on a server running 32-bit.
You can extend a 32-bit citrix server
to 8 GB ram and host a lot more clients. Almost double of what you can
host on 4 GB of ram.
And here is something that I find important:
I get the impression that configuring
Notes 8.x on citrix is not for amateurs. It's not like putting the OpenOffice
installer on the desktop, doubleclicking it and just clicking Next, Next,
Next.
If I was in charge of a Citrix environment
and had plans to tweak the Notes client installation on there (upgrading,
re-installing or just tuning) I would make absolutely sure that the consultant
I hired to do the tweaking had a good track record for just that kind of
work.
I would not settle for someone who had
experience with with Citrix but no experience with Notes on Citrix.
I get the feeling that getting the right
person to to the job could move the number of concurrently running clients
to perhaps double the number of what your average Citrix consultant would
manage to make it run.
What I would like to see was a table
comparing Citrix performance across Notes versions. Say Notes 7, 8 and
8.5. I haven't found anything like that.
