Citrix XenApp to Horizon

[Fabio Storni]

Hi everyone, I'm about to tackle my first migration project from Citrix XenApp to Horizon.

These days I have to proceed with the assessment phase. Are there any tips or specific documentation to read that you recommend?

Thanks!

[Rob Beekmans]

Hi Fabio,

The question on my mind is what version of XenApp are you migrating the customer from? pre-FMA or FMA?

Then the question would be, what was the reason they moved to Horizon? new use cases, specific features they want to see in the new environment? or is it just a replacement because of e.g. license costs.

Also important to know (for me answering) are you migrating platforms? to cloud, to on-premises?

If nothing changes in use cases/persona's there is not a lot to assess. The workloads would be the same, the images would be the same (more or less, remove Citrix VDA and install Horizon Agent) and design a Horizon environment. sizing and such depend on number of concurrent users, DR/HA, locations and such.. most fun question to ask a customer "how long can you be down?" "How many users need access all the time, or in a DR scenario?"

But if nothing changes and you do a rip and replace.. it is agent for agent and broker for broker...and you are up to a technical install.

[Sean Massey-1]

To build on what @Rob Beekmans said, you'll want to look at how they're deploying their desktops or RDSH servers.  Are they using MCS or PVS?  If they're using PVS, that might require an image rebuild since PVS is built for network boots.  I'm not sure how common PVS is these days, but it might still be around in large scale deployments.

What other ecosystem tools are they using?  Are they using the full Citrix stack for things like profile management and app layering?  3rd-party tools like FSLogix or Liquidware? Or is it a simple environment without any extra components?

What are their plans for Netscaler?  Are they planning to keep it for load balancing other workloads, so you can use it with your UAGs and other Horizon components?  Or do you need to find a new load balancer solution to support this environment?

And finally, I would recommend doing an actual performance assessment and use case validation.  Make sure that you have good performance baselines in the existing Citrix environment so you can compare it to a post-deployment/migration Horizon environment, and you can use these numbers to validate that you have the right hardware or virtual machine sizing. 

[Rob Beekmans]

I'm so glad Sean has given the more extensive answer.. Yes to all that.

[Fabio Storni]

Thank @Sean Massey and @Rob Beekmans for the support! In the next week, I have an assessment call with the customer. Now I Have only a few information: 

- Citrix XenApp 7.x

- RDS servers Windows Server 2016 

- Max 1000 concurrent users (This max is for the Windows RDS license)

We need to replace the actual RDS servers. 

 

Edited May 31 by Fabio