How many people use TM1 with Citrix?

[rossi]

Wondering how many people use TM1 with Citrix out there in TM1World and have experienced slow performance?
Paolo

[Alan Kirk]

Wondering how many people use TM1 with Citrix out there in TM1World and have experienced slow performance?

We use it, but haven't really had any speed issues with it. It might be an idea to provide further specifics about your setup.

[Steve Vincent]

same here, users complain it takes a little while to log in to citrix and it opens too many excel sessions (about 5 windows) but once in its fine.

[David Usherwood]

Most of our corporate clients use Citrix with TM1 in one form or another. (One recent, rather brave one has gone Vista/O2007, and runs their 8.x version of TM1 in Citrix). I would expect it to be much better than standard client server/TCPIP over Wans, and probably better than TM1Web - though there is some controversy about that. But I do know clients where it isn't good - but when you investigate you find out that the Citrix environment itself is old/underpowered/overloaded. Make sure that it isn't first.

[paulsimon]

I recently worked at a client using Citrix and the performance was very good - no different to being directly on the box. I think it all depends on the processor and memory on the Citrix box and the network.

Regards


Paul Simon

[CiskoWalt]

Hi,

We have been using TM1 version 8.4.3 wth Citrix for many years.

The Good

Better Performance over the WAN

There is a lot of network traffic with TM1. Some Excel Workbooks have as many as 300,000 DBRW formula. With the Local install of the TM1 client, when the user presses F9, all 300,000 formula travel accross the network from the user's PC to the TM1 server; the TM1 server, in turn, returns 300,000 data points to the users' PC. With Citrix, only the F9 key-stroke travels accross the network from the users PC to the Citrix server. The F9 key-stroke is executed on the Citrix server; the TM1 server returns the 300,000 data points to the Citrix server and the Citrix server returns a compressed television-like image of the activity on the Citrix server to the user's PC.

Since our Citrix servers (will have 2 load-balanced Citris servers) and our TM1 server both reside in the same data center, this back-and-forth traffic (DBRW from the Citrix Server and data from the TM1 server) does not travel far.

Access from Any PC with internet connectivity.

We have a Citix Portal which enables the users to access TM1 from any PC that has internet connectivity. May user can now Access TM1 from home.


The Bad.

Users prefer to Work with a Local install of TM1.

The users' Citrix session times out when there is no activity after 30 minutes.

Some of the Excel Workbooks are large (30 MB) and it can take a while (two minutes) to open these Workbooks when they are stored on a file server that is located in a different location than the Citrix Server. In Citrix we map the users to a file server that resides in the same data center as the Citrix server, but they don't always use it.


The Ugly.

When the user launches TM1 in a Citrix Session 6 instances of minimized shorcuts to Excel appear on the users' local task bar. This can be confusing when the user is working with more than one Excel Workbook.

Our short cut looks like the following:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\EXCEL.EXE" "C:\Program Files\Applix\bin\tm1p.xla" "C:\Program Files\IncSight30\Engine.xla"

Why?
The 6 shortcuts seem to be realted to the install of Service Pack 4 for MetaFrame XP 1.0 for Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 and the Hotfix Rollup Pack XE104W2K3R02 - For Citrix MetaFrame XP 1.0 for Windows Server 2003

A proposed solution I found in a Citrix forum (http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=79635 ) is this:

Excel Add-ins are showing on the client Taskbar

you need to apply Hotfix XE104R02W2K001
it will solve excel add-in problem

[yyi]

my citrix view is that users complain about the speed believing they're logging into tm1 when it's actually taking 10 minutes running the citrix login script. other times, they get a dud machine on the farm that's even slower. when they're lucky to get a good machine on the rotation and the keystroke/mouse clicks kicks in, sometimes it's even better than the local client.

as for opening xls files, if the citrix administrator can spare a share folder on their server, it doesn't have to drag the local file over the wan then re-display again on the citrix connection

[Steve Vincent]

I'll add one to the Ugly list;
Difficult to print files from the citrix session, especially if the printer is directly linked to the clients PC.

But overall its benefits far outweigh its failings

[andre lie]

Hi all, can shou share your practical experience in terms of bandwith?

If I have 100 users of TM1 that connect concurrently to TM1 server. What is the suggested bandwith on the server site and on the client (remote sirte) for implementation using Citrix?

How many citrix servers should be ideally used (i heard 1 citrix server can only handle up to 25 users)

Rgds
Andre

[Carlos]

Hi

In reply to ...

"The Ugly.

When the user launches TM1 in a Citrix Session 6 instances of minimized shorcuts to Excel appear on the users' local task bar. This can be confusing when the user is working with more than one Excel Workbook."


I found by setting the option 'Windows in Taskbar' to unchecked in 'Tools' , 'Options' does the job.

Cheers
C

[RLReyes]

We've been using TM1 with Citrix since we implemented TM1 about 3 yrs ago. We have had no major issues with speed. When we did encounter slowness ie response time from TM1, it was due to other application using the citrix box resources. We have installed TM1 client on 4 citrix boxes.

Regards