This white paper was published a few weeks ago but got lost in the pre-Lotusphere shuffle. Since we talked about virtualization in the Notes/Domino keynote at Lotusphere, I heard from many customers that having more details on how we view client virtualization is important. We've come a long way since Notes 8.0, which supported about 14 concurrent sessions on a Citrix box.
Therefore, we present
This white paper provides an overview and recommendations for how to get the most from your IBM Lotus® Notes® 8.5.1 client on the new Citrix XenApp™ 5.0 server. In particular, we show that, by tuning your environment so that you get the most from your applications, you can realize significant improvements in running the Notes client on XenApp. This is true for both the standard and the basic configurations of Lotus Notes.and look ma, no registration required :-)
Moreover, the new support for Microsoft® Windows® 2008 SP2 by Notes 8.5.1 together with memory improvements means we can scale to even higher numbers than before at a much reduced cost.
Link: ibm.com: scalability analysis of Notes and iNotes 8.5.1 on Citrix XenApp 4.5/5.0 >
Post a Comment
- 2
Reinhard Steurer http://www.dachser.com | 1/29/2010 5:06:45 AM
First of all it is good to see that IBM makes more focus on Lotus Notes on Citrix.
I missed a session about Notes and Citrix on the Lotusphere 2010 in Orlando? I think IBM goes the right way with the support and testing but I think there are a lot of open topics which are still not clear:
• Notes Standard Client Performance at all (this is not Citrix special but) cold start still not good, Eclipse Framework to overloaded.
• Installation guide/package at all on a citrix terminal server (for now its not really easy to install Notes on a Citrix Server)
• File server > simple way to copy the data directory on the local terminal server during a start of a Notes session > same way back after closing Notes, or IBM starts to support the file server ;o)
• What about the local files (bookmark, perweb, autosave > they are growing very huge within some time and currently there is no (easy) way to compact them.
• What about the new “workplace” folder in the Standard Client > there a static files which are the same for all users about 6 MB on a clean installation for each user, on 10.000 user we currently have we speak about 6 GB Data volume for what ?!
Our plan is to set up the Base Client 8.5.1 within the 32-bit platform and we try to implement the standard client when we go to 64bit platform. Our internal tests show that we were only able to run 16 Notes Standard Users on a single Citrix server(only Notes) on W2008 – 32 bit.
Hope we will see another session(s) next year on Lotusphere and IBM goes also into those deeper investigations as well.
- 3
Volker Weber http://vowe.net/about | 1/29/2010 7:27:46 AM
Thanks for the heads up, Ed. Very useful paper.
- 4
Charles Robinson http://www.cubert.net | 1/29/2010 9:25:19 AM
@1 - What?! Windows Terminal Services isn't supported?! Do you know if it actually works?
- 5
GarryL | 1/29/2010 11:06:06 AM
@1, @4 Wow - I really didn't know that. That could change things a lot for us as we are planning to go thin this year.
Can someone confirm that Notes is NOT support in Terminal Server? If it isn't then can someone explain why?
- 7
Charles Robinson http://www.cubert.net | 1/29/2010 1:39:11 PM
@6 - Notes on WTS has never been officially supported as far as I know { Link } , but it has worked since at least R5 in 1999. It honestly never occurred to me to look for a statement of support from IBM because it worked. You probably never heard anyone ask about support because it's mostly SMB's running WTS. Larger companies will shell out the money for Citrix products so they can check off the boxes for auditors.
Since XenApp runs as a layer on top of WTS { Link } it is a little puzzling that WTS isn't supported directly. Even without the statement of support, though, it would actually take more effort to make Notes *not* work on WTS.
- 8
GarryL | 1/29/2010 3:02:36 PM
@6 I think it probably is worth looking into again.
Microsoft has increasing improved the Terminal Services aspect of it's server products. Server 2008 has raised the bar again and has some things now that you used to need Cirix for. I'm not saying that Citrix is no longer needed by all but I suspect that for some companies TS only would be good enough for them.
We are an SMB so yes, the cost of Citrix/VMWare is a big issue - if you can get away with pure TS the costs are much smaller. We pay maintenance for our Notes so it would be a worry coming up with an issue only to be told that we are running in a unsupported enviroment - even if the issue had nothing to do with that. The other side of the coin is that in order to get support in a thin enviroment we would have spend the extra money on something like Citrix.
- 9
Hans Miller http://www.mortenson.com | 1/29/2010 3:36:11 PM
Ed, thanks for the heads up. I've passed onto my Citrix tech. staff. BTW: my company would be very interested in running Inotes in citrix (1500+ users)
What would be really great is if Notes was supported on Windows Terminal Server. Had a customer ask about that and had to state that that configuration isn't supported.