Summary of the 2018 Citrix Migration Survey Results by eG Innovations

eG Innovations, in conjunction with DABCC, conducted a Citrix Migration Survey between November 2017 and February 2018. 795 Citrix professionals around the world completed the survey and a webinar was hosted in February 2018 to discuss the results.

I was honoured to co-present on this webinar with both Vinod Mohan, Sr. Product Marketing Manager and Srinivas Ramanathan, CEO of eG Innovations.

Watch Webinar: 2018 Citrix Migration Trends

Without any further delay, below I summarise the results of the webinar.

XenApp continues to lead the way:

40% of respondents use XenApp alone, and 93% run a mixture of XenApp and XenDesktop. These results fit well with my thoughts that pure VDI has a more specific organisational use case, such as when staff must receive a more customisable desktop that has a greater connection to them than a shared desktop would, or when greater peripheral support is required. However, the results prove that shared desktops and of course published applications fits the bill for most organisations.

2018 is the year of Citrix Migration to 7.x:

With XenApp 6.5 end of life coming in June of 2018, organisations around the world have made 2018 the year to leap across to the 7.x platform.

70% of organisations aim to be on 7.x by the end of the year, and likely motivating factors of course include XenApp 6.5 EoL however I feel that another factor has been how Citrix closed the feature gap with the latest 7.x releases, including new innovations.

Pre-migration is the customers biggest concern:

To me, it is no surprise when 46% of respondents reported that pre-migration was their biggest concern. As Srinivas mentioned during the webinar, “Migration from 6.x to 7.x requires a lot of pre-planning”. He could not be more correct. Reasons this is so:

• You have to plan for the build of a brand new 7.x site, including the build of all the 7.x components.
• You also have to make decisions and plan for potentially new operating system deployments, new SQL version deployments, new hypervisor deployments, and so on.
• You have to factor in re-training for support staff, and potentially some budget for procurement of new licenses, software and hardware.

XenServer adoption has dropped:

This was a surprise to me given that the XenServer team made many great enhancements to the product over the last 12 months with new support for NVIDIA, AMD and Intel GPUs and the release of solutions such as PVS Accelerator. The results of the survey show however that XenServer adoption is down 40% since 2016. vSphere continues to be the leading hypervisor among the respondents, sitting at 74%.

Citrix Cloud is still in its infancy:

Citrix gave cloud a big push throughout 2017 and on to 2018, but the survey results show that just 5% of respondents currently use products from Citrix Cloud, and 50% have no plans for cloud services.

It is worth mentioning though that 45% are considering using it in the future, and I fully expect adoption rates to go up as there are many benefits to some of the Citrix Cloud offerings and further enhancements are on-going.

Application compatibility is top of mind for Citrix administrators during migration:

Applications come in all shapes, forms and sizes, and 80% of you are concerned with how applications and desktops will work going forward as we transition to 7.x. Srinivas highlighted that many respondents do not want a Citrix upgrade to cause more pain such as performance issues, or loss of functionality to applications.

Customers struggle to adopt a one-for-all monitoring solution:

67% of respondents use Citrix Director to monitor their environment, however 72% use at least 2 different monitoring tools, with some organisations using as many as 10. I personally see organisations with 2-10 tools. It is clear here from the results that organisations are crying out for a central solution that monitors not just the management and desktop layers but the network, storage, hypervisor layers and so on. Using the many different monitoring tools out there simply adds complexity to monitoring and makes monitoring a burden.

Logon performance tops the critical list:

Who would have thought? I guess there was a reason why I spent a lot of time with Citrix desktop logons during 2017. 59% of respondents noted that slow logons are their common complaint from end-users. I made the point that we are challenged with providing a slow logon because the majority of our machines may be non-persistent. Luckily enough I’ve had the opportunity to provide some tips, and optimisation scripts that can drive logon times down which you can find by using this blog’s search box.

That is all for now. I hope you found this interesting and I want to thank those of you who attended the webinar and responded to the survey. If you are interested in reading more, I encourage you to read the full survey report results.

Read Survey Analysis Report