On March 25, I rounded up some of my smartest friends at Citrix (Dan Feller, Ryan McClure, Sarah Steinhoff and Scott Lane) and played host to a webinar that was exclusively a live Q&A on business continuity, without pre-planned content. Any question was fair game, be it technical or non-technical. We did the webinar twice so everyone around the world could join and ask questions, and we got some very interesting questions from the community!
In this post I’ll share some of the most popular questions we received, along with our answers. I’ve also included a few of the questions we missed in the morning session (we received nearly 30 and didn’t have time for everything). If you want to watch the replay, it’s available on-demand via our TIPs page and on YouTube.
Now, on to the questions!
You covered the business continuity planning services you’re offering today like consulting and education, but what is Citrix offering from a product or licensing perspective? Do you have any options for Cloud?
At a high-level we have three options — the Citrix Business Continuity Assurance Program, Citrix Managed Desktops, and Citrix Workspace Essentials. The Citrix Business Continuity Assurance Program has been the most popular, probably because it’s for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, but Citrix Managed Desktops, our turnkey DaaS solution, is gaining traction. And Citrix Workspace Essentials is a great option for small and medium businesses. Check out the post from Citrix CEO David Henshall for more details or reach out to your Citrix rep.
I’ve been hearing a ton about Remote PC Access. Does that work in the Cloud or on-prem only?
Remote PC Access has actually been around for eight years in the Citrix portfolio, and it works both on-prem and with Citrix Cloud. And it’s true — we have been doing a lot of Remote PC Access in the last few months as organizations have needed almost instantaneous work-from-home solutions. This solution really fits the bill because we can leverage existing assets (your physical PC or laptop!). If you’re looking for a quick overview of Remote PC Access, Dan Feller’s new Tech Insight video (just eight minutes) is a perfect way to get up-to-speed.
Any Remote PC Access gotchas you can share?
I think most organizations have been struggling with packaging the VDA with their ESD tools (SCCM, Altiris, etc.). One thing we learned early on is we have much higher success rates when we package the pre-reqs first in one package and the VDA in a second, separate package. We have some really good guidance on packaging the VDA (updated just this week). Another “gotcha” is a lot of customers have asked us for help with the initial machine mappings or user assignments. So we created a PowerShell script to assist with that task, and I’m proud to announce it’s available on GitHub now (thanks, RobZ!). Lastly, if you’re doing Remote PC Access with Citrix Cloud and you’re using the Citrix Gateway service, don’t forget to enable Rendezvous! This enables a VDA to bypass the Cloud Connector and establish a direct connection to the Gateway service, which really increases scalability of the overall solution (there’s no need to scale out Cloud Connectors).
What percentage of society works remotely in 2020?
I said this during the webinar, but this is definitely a tough question. If we look at pre-COVID-19 era numbers from 2019, only about 5 percent of workers are full-time remote workers (i.e. five days per week). You might be thinking that number is quite small, but about 40 percent of organizations said they have remote workers leveraging their systems at least one day per week. What is interesting is experts predict the number of full-time remote workers to settle in around 25 percent to 30 percent over the next few years since this pandemic is clearly making everyone re-evaluate pretty much everything in their lives. And you can also imagine that 40 percent number doubling fairly easily as we enter this “new normal” of working from home or telecommuting more often.
Where does Citrix host its cloud services? Do you have PoPs in Canada?
Ryan did a great job answering this question live, but the Citrix Trust Center (select the “Cloud Resources” tab) is a great place to track where our Cloud services are (and which specific services like Analytics, for example, are available in each region or geographic area). The other thing we talked about on the webinar is that we just recently added four new points of presence for our Citrix Gateway services. We actually do document where those are (Azure and AWS), and one of the most recent additions was in Canada! Check out all ~20 of our POPs here.
What are the best practices for sizing XenApp?
I received this question so many times over the years that I created a “rule” I call the Rule of 5 and 10. You can learn more on Citrix Tech Zone. And if you’re looking for guidance on sizing Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops instances in the cloud, this new article goes into a lot of detail on Azure (and I personally prefer the larger “F” instance sizes for XenApp or Virtual Apps workloads because they tend to be CPU-bound).
These resources are great. Can you share them, and can we get the slides and webinar recording?
This question came up toward the end, as I was covering some of my favorite business continuity planning resources. You’ll find all the links in my business continuity blog post from a couple of weeks ago. And you can view the webinar here or on YouTube.
I’d like to thank my panelists one last time for making themselves available on short notice and for taking any and all questions that came in (you never really know what you’re going to get when you do these!). If you have any more business continuity planning or work from home questions, please leave a comment below and we’ll do our best to answer them. Thanks again for tuning in, and I hope everyone stays healthy and safe.
— Nick Rintalan, Sr. Director of Customer Success
