Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service) Scalability

DavidWood1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Provisioning Server is a fantastic option for image management in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. It offers excellent performance and reliability. On the other hand, while Machine Creation Services can be scaled easily, they can significantly increase storage consumption. For instance, creating a Windows 10 image in MCS typically requires at least 80 GB of storage, in addition to any separate disks needed.

To store changes made by users in Machine Creation Services, the differencing disk must be equal in size to the base disk, leading to significant storage consumption. On the other hand, Provisioning Server uses image versioning, creating a new image version every time it's modified. As a result, virtual machines streamed from the server revert to their original state after a reboot, which is similar to their state during the first boot.

Using the provisioning server, I start by configuring a virtual machine with either a 2016 or 2019 server operating system. I install the necessary Citrix client provisioning server target device software, followed by installing the required applications. After that, I capture the entire configuration to a file share. The image is then streamed from the file share to the hypervisor, which can handle multiple machines. In some large-scale deployments, we have used a single image to provision thousands of servers.

Once the image is captured and stored on the file share, it is set to read-only mode, and any changes made to it are not accepted until it is put in read-write mode. When a virtual machine is rebooted, it returns to its previous state before the changes were made. This feature can be beneficial in situations like a virus outbreak, where a simple reboot of the virtual machines can remove any malicious code or changes.

A provisioning server offers a faster recovery time from a bad change and is generally faster than machine creation services. With the provisioning server, changes are not accepted until the read-write mode is enabled, and if a virus outbreak occurs, rebooting the machines restores them to the previous state. On the other hand, machine creation services' speed is dependent on the storage's speed, and recovery time from a bad change can take longer, especially with a large number of devices. If a bad change is made with machine creation services, the replication process can take a while to revert, whereas, with a provisioning server, all machines can be rebooted quickly.

Within thirty minutes, I can restore my system to its previous state using the provisioning server.

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MB
CIO at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We're happy with the scalability. We were able to increase a 200-user solution to a 1,000-user solution simply by buying an upgrade to the license. We chose to buy two additional NetScalers, bringing our total to four, but that was largely because we bought the initial upgrade from 200 to 1,000 to allow us to connect the 640 staff who work in the community. But then, the hospital's need for remote access and remote control overtook that. That's what drove us then to buy a second set of NetScalers because we didn't really want to put some 4,000 users through just one gateway (pair). We felt having two gateways would be safer from a resilience point of view. And having two NetScalers per gateways means that we can take one down to do maintenance updates without disrupting the service.

In the next couple of months, we'll start to plan what next year's digital program looks like. The way in which we operate is that through November, December and January we engage with operational and clinical colleagues to determine how we are going to exploit IT to enable transformation going forward. We then build a digital program for our Digital Board to sign off on. As we go through that exercise, looking at how we can deliver better healthcare for our patients and improve the clinical experience, we will be looking to Citrix to help us understand how we can better exploit the new software that we've invested in. Normally by now, having bought it last year, we would have been well into it, but the pandemic has somewhat focused our minds elsewhere.

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AP
Director System Integration at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

We use this solution ourselves in our own organization and have a 60,000-70,000 userbase currently. We have more than 40 customers within the virtual workspace. Most are medium-sized entities. A few have 20,000-40,000 users. We'll be adding another client in healthcare that has about 20,000 desktops.

Scalability is not an issue. You can scale up to any number. There's only the requirement of adding the infrastructure and building that horizontally. You'll need to set up the different components horizontally. For example, if we have a 10,000 user base, then we can probably have 10 master servers. If the user base is around 40,000, then we can double the master servers so that they can take up the load.

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Buyer's Guide
Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service)
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
DK
Sr. Architect at Philips

We haven't had any issues with scalability. That said, scaling also depends on how many users are trying to access it at a given time. As we move some of these applications to the cloud, we will face the scalability question. However, those issues will be addressed later. 

We currently have hundreds, or even thousands, of users on the solution right now.

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IA
Group IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have companies that have around 500 users, 100 users, and 50 users. The biggest company has around 1,000 users. This company is all across the region.

We will increase its usage depending on the business and the requirements.

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SC
Manager of Virtualization Services at a university with 10,001+ employees

It scales very well, but it can be expensive. We've been able to scale the environment quite nicely by using the Citrix Remote PC. I can't say enough about that. And because that relies on utilizing your existing hardware resources, and making those available as a part of your Citrix farm — with a second level of authentication and security pieces around it — we added some 4,000 workstations without an additional overhead or cost. That has been key for us through the COVID pandemic.

In our environment we have about 20,000 people who use it regularly.

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FC
Virtual Desktop and Applications Offerings Global Offering Manager at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

The solution is quite scalable. 

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YM
Multi-Cloud Operations Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

We are always adding new PVS machines. As an operator, we're always asked to add new PVS machines to batch them, update them, add new machines, and add new images. It has been very easy to scale and everything is a click away. There are no issues while scaling.

The organization is huge, so I cannot say exactly how many people are using the solution. The organization has around 750 servers. On each server, there may be hundreds of machines. There are lots of users. There are maybe tens of thousands of end users actually using the desktop as a service through Citrix.

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RV
Vice President (Technology) at Shaligram Infotech LLP

The solution is scalable.

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AH
Solution Architect at Kimberly-Clark

The solution is scalable. Approximately 10,000 users use the solution in my company. We often use Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops in our company, but it all depends on the use cases. If we find the solution convenient for our projects, we will definitely use it. However, we'd only do it on a case-to-case basis. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is our go-to solution for any server-based computing.

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Grant Waddell - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of IT Architecture & Operations Support at Lyntia

We have 400 Citrix DaaS users in our organization. We might increase its usage. I rate its scalability an eight out of ten.

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JF
Technical Manager at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is a scalable solution.

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Erez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at Integrity software

If you can afford the licenses, you can scale Citrix up as much as you want. 

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RV
Delivery Head - Major Incident at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Both scalability and reliability are really good. If supporting components like Active Directory, networking, and storage are functioning well, then Citrix DaaS proves to be highly reliable. 

Scalability is easy too, thanks to Citrix's image management system, which allows for quick expansion, scaling thousands of machines in hours, a feat not possible with physical infrastructure.

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Giovanni Golinelli. - PeerSpot reviewer
Hybrid IT Architect at Quanture Spa

My company deals with around 12 to 15 customers Who need the product in their complex Citrix-based environment.

In our organization, we have very little installation of Citrix products for our administrative purposes, so not more than five people use Citrix DaaS in the company. If you look at the number of our customers using Citrix DaaS, I would say that there are about 2,000 users.

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Vishakha Rathod - PeerSpot reviewer
Graduate Apprentice Trainee at Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt

I rate Citrix DaaS ten out of ten for scalability because it is scalable and it's been used in a huge form. Around 1,000 users are currently working with the solution in our organization.

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Alan Thomas - PeerSpot reviewer
Technological Solutions Architect at Grupo Techint, S.A. de C.V.

It is a very scalable solution. In the last semester, we updated the video graphics on the virtualization and video 3D graphics for the simulation on the hardware, and it was implemented in three days. It took six to seven months to get the GUI and firewall, but that was because of the problem in the country rather than Citrix. Four thousand users are using the solution presently.

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PB
Consultant at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We didn't face any scalability issues as we had a limited number of users, around 20 to 30, who needed access to the end-of-life applications.

The scalability was a nonissue. However, we didn't get into hundreds or thousands of users. I definitely don't have the experience to tell you that.

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Onurcan Yahyaoglu - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtualization Solution Expert at Migros Ticaret A.Ş.

It is a scalable product.

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MA
Senior Manager, Corporate IT at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Since I use one machine, I don't need to worry about scalability, high availability, etc. I just have it up when I need it.

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RM
Technical Team Lead at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

In terms of scalability, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops have a lot of technologies baked in there that allow an organization to scale up or down, as required. Further, leveraging Azure for scalability has added value to our organization. For example, pre-COVID-19, we had very few resources in Azure. We had some Virtual Desktops and no application servers. When COVID-19 came along, we knew people were going to be home. We knew that we had to ramp up very quickly. We fully leveraged MCS to be able to scale. Being able to take a single image and build 400,000 Virtual Desktops, all within minutes, was second to none in terms of any other technology out there that we could have used. The scalability to be able to do that in Azure, where we really don't have to worry about storage and compute power because Microsoft does that for us, was fantastic. It was almost like giving our environments steroids. It has been amazing in terms of that scalability. Now, as people start coming back to the office, we can just as quickly scale down so the compute and resource costs in Azure aren't so great anymore.

We have really leveraged Smart Tools to be able to scale up and down. They let us see what the cost looks like, because that is always a consideration. An organization always wants to be able to build the right amount of resources to serve our end users needs, but not more than what is actually needed, because that will just cost an organization more money. The Analytics, Smart Tools, and Machine Creation Services are allowed to do all of these things in a transparent way as well as scale up and down very quickly.

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GD
Manager - IT/Telecommunications at Banco Galicia

We have done a lot of integrations using different applications and vendors with Citrix. Everything is well-documented. All integrations have been tested, and we have proof that they work. You feel confident when you move forward. An example is that four months ago we had our Citrix solution sized for 2,000 employees. Since the pandemic exploded, we were able to scale up to 7,000 users in 48 hours. If that is not simplicity, I don't know how to define it.

From an administration point of view, everything looks simple, consistent, and seems to have been designed to provide the same type of user experience that we are providing to our users. However, you have the same kind of feeling when you have to perform all the administration of the suite. It's very simple to use it and perform all the maintenance and monitoring activities. We have only two administrators for 7,000 users. This means that it's not that simple because it does require skill, but the experience is good and everything looks simple on the platform.

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Manjit Chakravarty - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

This is a scalable solution. Citrix is able to increase its capacity and functionalities based on demand for both on-prem or cloud-based scenarios. 

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JB
Senior Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

The solution is incredibly easy to scale.

We have about 200 users of the solution in our company. Everybody, every single role in the business, uses it. It has been adopted 100 percent in our company, but we use the solution to showcase what's possible to other companies.

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GT
Solutions Architect at GE

It is scalable. We have about a hundred desktops and we have about 1,100 people that access it externally.

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ED
Works at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The scalability of Citrix is incredible because we use the Provisioning Services (PVS) solution. With this technology, the same image can be streamed to all servers. With this technology, I don't need to install, reinstall, nor repackage it. 

Globally, we have 600 to 700 users with Citrix access in the company. Their roles of Citrix users are private banker, operations, and sales. 

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MS
Systems Architect at Conviso Inc.

The scalability of the product is quite good and you can expand it if you need to.

It can expand into a larger organization and into an enterprise infrastructure from on-premise to a cloud environment.

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Daniel Vásquez - PeerSpot reviewer
Bachelor at Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas

I would rate the tool’s scalability a nine out of ten.

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Rey Mendoza - PeerSpot reviewer
Desktop Support Supervisor at Emirates Steel.

The solution is scalable.

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DK
Technical Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

We don't have that many users, but the scalability is good. If required, there is no limit on the number of users. Currently, we have about 5,000 users on virtual desktops and about 1,000 are using Citrix.

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HS
Deputy General Manager at a construction company with 501-1,000 employees

As of now, we don't have any plans to increase our usage. Our consumption has been good during COVID, but we have been able to achieve what was required from our existing licenses.

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JG
Citrix Engineer at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It scales very well. The limitations we face are our own hardware constraints, because we purchase what we need and we don't generally provide much overhead. Our scalability problems come from limitations on hardware purchases, probably due to budget. If our company doubled in size, we would not have a problem scaling what we have today to meet that. We could probably do it in a couple of days and be just as fine.

We're licensed for 3,000 users. Our primary usage is in the U.S. and the AMEA region. We have about 2,400 users in that region who are active on it at any given time. The rest of those licenses are used in the Asia Pacific region. They're not as active in Citrix because a lot of their stuff is not as centralized as our other infrastructure is. They still don't use a lot of the same stuff. But they do use Citrix for email and for a couple of other things.

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RohitSaluja - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder and Director at Decoding IT Solutions LLC

It's a scalable solution. In our company we have about 20 users but some of our customers have between 250-1,000 users.

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PH
IT Director at a legal firm with 51-200 employees

In terms of scalability, it seems that the only things that limit you are your number of licenses and your compute. So scaling is very easy.

Prior to the work-from-home initiative, I had about a dozen users who consistently used it. After COVID and the work-from-home, even though I had only 20 licenses, I had 24 people who were using it. Those four extra people were working part-time in the office and part-time from home so they shared the license. When one was in the office, the other would use it, so I never exceeded my license capacity. And now, since the State of Idaho lifted work-from-home, I'm back down to about eight people who are on it consistently.

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YG
IT Operations Service Delivery Senior Manager at e-finance

It is flexible and very easily scalable.

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TT
Solutions Manager at ICSI

The scalability of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is good because you can integrate it with other solutions.

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RV
Delivery Head - Major Incident at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

It is quite scalable and robust as well. On our platform we have more than a million users. And we are trying to increase the use cases so that we will have better penetration among all users.

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Nicholas Stapley - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Architect offering Consultancy Services and Technical Governance at Various Clients

We did not encounter any scalability issues. By design, Citrix offer a very modular solution whereby you can bolt-on and build-up on features and functionality as required. Citrix tends to do future-proofing. It is still the market leader in Server Based Computing deployments.

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EP
Senior Technical Consultant at The Instillery

If you need more hosted shared desktops, boom it's really easy, and only takes couple of clicks and in minutes the new workloads are available and ready to be used.

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Robert Prugarewicz - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Specialist at Unum Życie Towarzystwo Ubezpieczeń i Reasekuracji Spółka Akcyjna

As I review the possibilities of adding a second site or more users, or advantages like multi-screen, I believe this is a scalable solution.

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RN
Owner at 1st Solutions

I think the product is very scalable. I would say it is really infinitely scalable from my experience.  

I have 16 customers and the customers use XenApp every day, all day. But I can scale that as needed as my client base increases.  

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YG
IT Operations Service Delivery Senior Manager at e-finance

Scalability is easy and straightforward.

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it_user482313 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Project Manager at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

We did not encounter any scalability issues.

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it_user101136 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Director at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Scalability is good, but it required a lot of learning while our organisation were going through it.

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MM
Sr. System Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

It's also scalable.

We have deployed it to companies that have between 500 and 3,000 employees.

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DW
Senior Manager of Engineering at Mechanics Bank

Very easy to scale, virtual servers can be stood up quickly on your virtual platform using Citrix PVS

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DA
CDO at SGROUP

I don't know yet how the product rates in the area of scalability. We are currently moving from one environment to another, and that is an early step in our process. I don't know about scaling because it is a step we will worry about later. These are interim steps we are taking in the plan that we have right now. Our end goal is to be completely in the cloud or in some kind of hybrid environment. When we achieve that, the next step is to use the application to scale. So we are still in a sort of proof of concept period right now where we don't want or have the need to test scalability.  

We currently have 53 people using the solution. Most of them are just users from the office, but we have around 10 engineers and IT people who are capable of doing everything we need for implementation and maintenance.  

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SD
Citrix/VMware Administrator at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Scalability depends on the server and the number of users in the organization. You need to have capacity planning on how you are providing to users. If the server is a bit old, like the hardware is HPE Generation 4 servers, you are requesting the server to handle more than a hundred users, then it will work slowly. Therefore, capacity planning and the way you plan the architecture is very important for this.

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PV
Senior Systems Engineer at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The scalability of Citrix matches with almost all devices. 

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MR
Controller at a translation and localization position with 51-200 employees

I give the scalability a nine out of ten.

We have around 40 people using the solution.

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KG
Managing Director at a tech services company

The scalability is good because, once you've set it up with the correct architecture, you can just add servers. It's very easy. You can't clone it because there's something with the SID that makes it difficult to clone. But with the latest version, you have that ability where you provision a server according to a template. It's very good.

One of the environments we deployed it in has about 180 concurrent users, and the other one has about 85 concurrent users.

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it_user200937 - PeerSpot reviewer
System & Network Engineer at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We did not encounter any scalability issues. However, scalability is the key to user performance. The administrator needs to check performance counters to ensure the best user experience.

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SS
Assistant Manager - IS Infrastructure at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

No issues encountered, and we run 600 virtual desktops.

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SS
Assistant Manager - IS Infrastructure at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

No issues encountered, and we run 600 virtual desktops.

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SN
CTO at Greenware Technologies LLC

Citrix is scalable. In my company over the past seven years, we have had many users. In addition, our clients using this solution have many thousands of users.

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it_user197484 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator with 501-1,000 employees

No scalability issues at all; in the beginning, we had only 20 application servers and 900 users. At this time, we have double the application servers and more than double the number of users. The process was straightforward.

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it_user283545 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

There were some issues.

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VC
CEO at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

We have about 400 people and we have implemented it for about 130 people. We're implementing it for the other employees as well.

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it_user212976 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Assistant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I have not encountered any issues with scalability. It actually is a strong point in its favor.

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JS
Sys Eng at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees

The scalability is fine. We have about 400 users, who are supported by six staff members.  We use the product company-wide throughout 40 different locations, and we currently do not have plans to increase the scale of use. 

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JL
System Administrator at a non-tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

In terms of scalability - it is easy to scale it.

We have about 200 people using this solution.

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it_user613110 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant

We sometimes have issues after updates.

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it_user560277 - PeerSpot reviewer
Citrix Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

We did not have hot-production outages in the environment. When we deployed the products, we set up rigid environment monitoring which has helped us to reduce scalability issues.

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ER
Project Leader at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Scalability depends on the hardware, but it is easy to scale.

We have between 60 and 80 users who are managers and engineers. In addition, we have external customers that we support. These companies have between 10 and 50 users.

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it_user311946 - PeerSpot reviewer
Citrix / Virtualization Pre-Sales and Implementation Engg. at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

No issues with scalability.

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Buyer's Guide
Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service)
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.