SVS in Practice in a Company with More Than 500 Users

This is an article detailing my experience using SVS in a customer's environment with over 1000 workstations, Windows 2003, and Citrix Metaframe 4. Hopefully I can share some information that will help you learn from my experience.

Sizing up the Client

In April I worked with a customer with 800 PCs in their head office. They also had 10 smaller offices across Europe. In total, they have more than 4,000 employees. The customer has several employees who are contacting the Citrix farm with portable and home PCs.

Identifying the Issues

One of the big issues for the customer was an application that needed monthly updates. Scripting and testing the application took too long, and many times the new version was pushed to production after the release of an even newer version. This was a big issue for the customer and he was searching for a solid solution.

Starting with Softgrid

Their first attempt at a solution involved Microsoft's Softgrid. The sequencing of the package took 4 to 5 days. This solution worked for more than a year, and to everyone's satisfaction.

Also it was very easy to deploy the package over the network to the employees who ran the software locally.

Upgrade Time

The software, a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) package, was altered in February of this year, and the newer version had many more options. The new version had better MS Office integration and it talked to the financial database that was also virtualized with Softgrid.

After that update the customer noticed that the virtualized app could not talk to the Office integration and also not to the Financial database.

The local installed Office on the Citrix server was not able to get the additional buttons that the CRM gave them.

In their search for an answer they detected that Softgrid was having a problem with virtualized apps talking to other virtualized apps.

The only way to overcome this was to package all the software into a single virtual package.

You can imagine this takes a lot of extra work, in addition to the fact that it needs to be done every month to get the latest updates.

Discovering SVS

One of the employees found the website www.svs4u.nl in their search for an answer. They sent an e-mail to me, and I made an appointment to see if SVS could overcome the problem.

I checked out the situation and agreed to do a proof of concept. In this proof of concept I installed a fresh Windows 2003 server with Citrix metaframe 4 in a new farm. I used SVS 2.1 beta 1.6 on the server. Then I installed DVS4SBC.

DVS4SBC is an add-on for SVS that makes SVS Multiuser aware to make it Citrix compliant. It also takes the user settings out of the layer and places them in a profile. This works for Mandatory, Roaming and Hybrid Profiles. DVS4SBC takes out the ability to exclude data from layers. All data users create or use is placed in the user's home directory.

The standard version of SVS can work on Citrix, but there are problems with visibility of created and altered documents, instability, and it creates a memory leak in Windows 2003 Enterprise server.

With DVS4SBC I created packages of Office 2003, Office 2007, the ERP client and the CRM software. All these packages were deployed manually on the server.

Testing

After publishing a desktop to a group of 20 test users, They started to work with the application. During normal hours with all 20 users working on it, I started a script that simulates another 25 users doing a series of tasks from starting the application, logging on to the database, getting results from a query, and putting them into Excel and Word. One week later there was an update for the CRM package, and I created a new package.

When performing updates in the old situation they would stop the old Softgrid package and start the new one. If something went wrong, they stopped the new package and started the older one again.

The SVS Advantage

With SVS, I was able to let the old package run and while I started the new package. All the buttons worked, and the behavior was great.

In a meeting with the test users to discus the new situation, the following points came forward:

• The response was faster.
• The buttons worked. (From the customer's perspective, this was a great addition.)
• They did not have to copy and paste the data, because the CRM started Word and Excel if necessary. (This, again, saved them lots of time every day.)
• They ware very enlightened about having the old and the new version at the same time. This gave them the possibility to compare new functionality.
• The server was very stable, and they did not see any crashes. Crashes used to happen about once a week.

Packaging and Deployment

I was asked if it was possible to get newly-created packages to the various users on site. I chose to create a small install file that performed the following tasks:

• Copy the newest version to the local C drive.
• Import it in SVS.
• Activate it.

During the application packaging they now create a shortcut on the desktop that overwrites the old one. In the start menu it is altering the older version with the addition of -old, and puts the new one in place. This works for all packages if needed.

The customer is very satisfied and at this moment they are creating the budget to buy it for all employees. They wish to go SVS and DVS4SBC all the way.

More Info

Need more information about SVS on Citrix and/or terminal server?
You can always contact me:
erik.westhovens@svs4u.nl