What needs improvement with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops?

Pricing and technical support need improvement.

I would like to see simplification in the management of the on-prem infrastructure component of Citrix DaaS, particularly in the studio tool used to manage the DaaS infrastructure. This simplification should make it easier for admins to understand and execute their tasks, possibly through an overview of operations and the availability of helpful articles or resources. Making the studio tool more user-friendly would not only ease the administration of the Citrix infrastructure but also ensure it is configured correctly. I'm also interested in a feature that would allow end users to hide their screens. For instance, when launching a Citrix VDI on my laptop, as soon as I start sharing my screen, the VDI should lock out, preventing the person I'm sharing my screen with from seeing anything on that VDI. However, there are scenarios where an end user might want to share the VDI screen as well. Currently, whether this is possible or not is not controlled by the end user. Introducing a feature that provides end users the ability to share their screen along with the VDI would be beneficial.

Recently, my company has started to face some troubles with Citrix at an organizational or corporate level, meaning we have no problems with Citrix as a product. After some new company recently acquired Citrix, my company has observed that it has become quite complex for our partners to maintain apps and follow the vision of Citrix, which expects its users to use Citrix products. I have issues with Citrix as a company and not with the products.

The product’s customization feature needs improvement.

Citrix DaaS is pretty slow. In Citrix DaaS, I have to connect to the computer in another form and always have to keep waiting. Sometimes, I click on Microsoft Teams or Outlook, but it doesn't work at all. We use a few PDM (product data management) software in another company, and they're pretty slow through these things. So we always have to keep waiting, and a lot of time goes wasted. The speed and connectivity of Citrix DaaS could be improved. Most of the time, it doesn't work for any colleagues. At least one or two employees complain about the solution's speed every day.

The support offered by Citrix's partner needs to improve. The partner support platform should aim to provide more technical information to users. The solution is very expensive, including the license, and the support, of all the platforms. For example, the solution of Microsoft, if you are partnered with Microsoft, you have access to the license, and you only need the variable servers from the virtualization with Microsoft.

Citrix should consolidate the multiple tools currently required into a single platform. At present, to access all the features, I need to log in to four separate locations and use four distinct tools.

Using the app layering feature can be quite difficult and cumbersome.

The cost of the solution is high and has room for improvement. The initial setup has room for improvement.

Our experience of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is good, but the environment can become complex and difficult to manage at times. The price is also too high, in my opinion, and could be reduced.

We want to reduce costs. They should offer a different pricing model. Some manual work is required now with Citrix, like installing some client agents, et cetera, which could be automated. We'd really like to see more automation in the future. It is not easy to set up.

We have had issues with certain aspects, which is why we are looking for alternatives. For example, the firewall solution from Citrix is a bit complicated. Integration is hard. It needs a higher understanding of the network. It's not plug-and-play. When I deal with it, I always need assistance from the network team if I need to alter anything. It should be simpler to deal with. When I was doing comparison research, the thing that I found really interesting in Horizon is that the firewall setup is easy. It's like a wizard menu, and it's well-documented, so it's not hard to alter anything in the firewall. Maybe the feature that I want to be added to Citrix is well-written documentation and a wizard just to let me know what is going on in the firewall, how to edit things, and how to easily deploy something on the firewall. Do I initiate a rule or decline a rule? They just need to make it easier for me to troubleshoot firewall issues.

The solution can use more promotion to spread awareness. The cost of the solution needs to be reduced to compete with the other competitive solutions that are available. The setup is currently complex and can be easier.

USB devices are a common issue. I am not sure if this is a Citrix issue or an operating system issue because we are using Linux.

Citrix is a highly mature product, but they could always add more benefits by acquiring a third-party software product to integrate with their their solution and make it more complete. I think they can improve the troubleshooting to make it easier for users to solve problems on their own. For example, it could provide an error code and some instructions on how to reconnect to the database or do something proactive to fix the issue with the system.

The solution works as it is designed to work. However, when you are at the office you do need to log in and load your profile, which takes time. But that is the way it is designed.

They need to adapt more quickly to the latest additions to the Microsoft operating system. If Windows 10 comes out with a new version, there are compatibility issues and it takes them a lot of time to release an update. Also, even though they support Linux, as with Windows, we are not able to use the latest version. They need to bring more simplicity to the Linux Virtual Desktop.

It would help if it were a little simpler. It's a bit complicated and we have hired Citrix administrators. But it's a good solution.

The user profiles could use some improvement. They could use more stability and more functionality as well as user profile redirection.

There is room for improvement because it has a lot of dependency on Active Directory and other things. If they could come up with something similar and native, a complete solution portfolio would help.

We've tested a lot of cases with the Citrix solution and found that it's okay when the Citrix virtualized solution is adopted over the laptop or desktop. But it has some latency issues—a lag between the input device and screen—when we test it with a smartphone or tablet. The reason that users use the virtualized desktop is they want to access a Windows 10 application, but they need their keyboard and mouse. Every employee complains about the performance or quality of their VDI. After we adopted the security solution, I think the performance is quite better. But employees are still complaining about the speed of the VDI. Latency is also a major problem when adopting Citrix for video editing software or 3D editing software, especially editing 4K video or large file size. The Citrix virtualized solution becomes too slow, so we cannot use the VDI. For the streaming, Citrix needs to improve its screen resolution problems because this is a market trend. We produce and use a lot of high-density videos. If Citrix cannot improve these kinds of issues, then we might not be able to use VDI anymore two or three years from now. Citrix doesn't offer any solutions for the virtualization of macOS, either. I think we could use that kind of service.

Templating the deployment process could use improvement. When you start, there are a large number of details that are quite client-specific, although they do share common themes. To get somebody up and running in a day is very difficult to do. They should streamline by use case. There's always going to be an outlier that doesn't really fit neatly into any one use case, so that's going to have to be more customized. An accountancy firm has sensitive data. They are prime targets for identity thieves that are always looking for an easy target and low-hanging fruit. If they were to template a deployment for an accountancy firm with all the needful things that every accountancy firm is going to have to have, it should be that you can just radio button the Apps so that accountants can tell the backend that they're going to need certain things. Then you can say, "We have this number of users and they need this number of spare desktops - go." And it just built the Azure environment. That would be really great. I don't know that it's actually possible, but it would be really good. The other issue is the stocking orders and the monthly reports. They're difficult because we don't do it every day. We do the stocking order once a year and there's always confusion on the backend.

The NetScaler Gateway is very customizable. However, it is also a mess in a sense that you can't find what you want or where it's supposed to be. You are supposed to navigate dozens of manuals to find the right one. It is not well-organized. Then, it becomes messy when we talk about configuration.

I think improvement around the Analytics piece is super important. There has been a lot of maturity over the last year in that area, though a lot more needs to be done. Also, a lot more of the value of those Analytics needs to be sold to end users. Citrix is working on a lot of things that are ahead of the curve and a lot of organizations aren't quite there yet with implementing those technologies and capabilities. Another area that Citrix could improve on, which has nothing to do with the technology, is just selling to its customers, e.g., the importance of taking advantage of those capabilities that are right within the services that they already pay for. These are two key areas that Citrix could improve upon and are kind of an extension to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.

The version of Director we're on, the 1912 version, has improved some of the monitoring capabilities that went back to what EdgeSite used to be as a product, when it comes to real-time analytics. If anything could be improved, it might be some of the Director functionality, and some of the dashboard customization, or the overall Director customization. We're limited in what we do. We use Director, as administrators, more than the service desk does, and we limit their access to Director to a few screens. They don't even get to see the full scope of what we see in there. Director is one thing that could be improved upon.

In the bank, a major part of all our applications is Microsoft App-V. If App-V is at end of life, then we need a new technology to replace it. As of today, I haven't seen in Citrix Studio that there is a new technology embedded directly in it to replace App-V.

As an end-to-end solution for implementing Zero Trust principles I would rate it a six or a seven out of 10, because it doesn't cover all aspects of Zero Trust. There are quite a few aspects you need to cover.

The only thing we have found to be detrimental is when we have tried to find training. I realize that we're looking at it at the worst time possible, with a pandemic going on, but it seems that most of the training offered is learn-by-yourself online. I have a desktop admin who would love to be able to dig deeper into group policy and settings, to be able to admin Citrix a little bit more easily. That's the only thing that I would like to see an improvement on, the availability of training for novice users.

At the moment, we are not using Citrix Endpoint Management. It has provided obstacles preventing it from working on our system. The visibility the solution provides across SaaS, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, for user and application traffic, is also limited if you do not enable all the services and is based on which services you are utilising. Citrix provides end-to-end visibility based on their services you are utilising. In addition, improved "how-to" guides would be hugely beneficial in setting the products up.

The Endpoint Management solution needs improvement when it comes to mobile device management. For example, they are still not supporting Windows 10 and this feature is required by many customers.

The customer is always looking for a unified solution. They need a single place where everything can be managed from while using a web application. With Citrix's system, there's an administrative tool and a helpdesk tool. Those two tools are very different, and the Citrix administrative tool is not meant for web-based use. It's in a heavy application. If they could build it into their web-based applications, that would be ideal. That way, administrators can log in from anywhere on any browser and they can just manage the environment in the background. Citrix does not have an in depth assessment tool. Some customers ask for components in Citrix that can give information around the hypervisor's resources or in-depth metrics of the hypervisor's site. There is a free tool from Citrix, however, it does not give you the deeper information of the other components like hypervisor or the OS or the storage, or downloads in the network. Those are the limitations of that particular tool right now. We might need to use a third party tool to gain that information. If Citrix can develop something which can have more reach towards the backend infrastructure, other components of the Citrix environment, that would be ideal.

Where improvement could be driven is in terms of clarity as to the functionality of some of the solutions. If you go back to the older Citrix Xen products that we had, we understood those really well. As we've come into the new workstation premium suite, there is a lot of additional functionality that we perhaps have not yet fully exploited. It is not because we can't, but simply because we don't yet understand the depth of functionality that's offered. We made the upgrade to the Workspace suite last year we had planned to train this year but then the pandemic struck. We've only had one thing on our minds since March and that's how do we keep the hospital running? How do we make sure we keep people safe? And how do we treat patients in the face of a once-in-a-century experience? Citrix have offered to help with demos or presentations of these new features, but we also simply haven't had time to dive in.

The product advances really fast. For some customers, we need better backwards compatibility. For products that we still have to use some legacy software, the virtualization of applications works okay, but sometimes it requires some additional effort from our team to make it work.

There is room for improvement on the hypervisor side, providing better integration between the hypervisor and the product line. I suspect that they haven't put the work into that because of the move to the cloud. They want everything to be cloud-hosted. But for folks like us, who will always be a hybrid model, that's of some concern.

Citrix has to support all of the hypervisors including KVM. The technical support is not as good as it is with other vendors and it should be improved.

The place where this application can most probably be improved is in the integration with other environments. Right now we have it on-premises, but our plan is to have it on cloud and we have already taken steps with Microsoft to implement this goal. After we move it to the cloud, we will want to add other applications and other data sources to what is already available in order to more easily move the data from one place to another and to use it from different applications. Broader integration would give the user more flexibility. This is why, from my point of view, integrating with other environments is the most important feature that needs to be expanded. As an example, IBM has a cloud solution that gives users the capability to connect between different clouds. No matter what kind of cloud you are using the data becomes universal through the capabilities of the IBM solution. You can ensure data security and can move data from one cloud to another. This is the kind of thing I mean by integration. It is an integration of administrative work, resource usage and also of the different environments. Right now we have some things on-premise and we have part of it in the cloud. Most probably will be not only be using Microsoft cloud in the future but also Amazon and Google as well. We want to have this application everywhere in this environment and to be able to use only one interface to let us know what volume of resources we are using, how much different solutions cost us, and if our usage is effective. This way we can make evaluations and change if necessary. The economy of our model is very important for us. The other less important point is that the deployment could be faster. We deployed the solution with the help of a vendor, and I do not blame the vendor that things seemed to come together a little slowly because it was not easy to do. I think the implementation can be simplified a little by the manufacturer.

For us, pricing is the most important feature to improve.

There are a few things I would like to see improved. First, the price can be improved for sure. Microsoft does not have support for this type of solution to make it easy to use the product. But in using Citrix, I can provide remote access support. The features I use with Citrix cannot be found in Microsoft products with any solid alternative. RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol), which is the Microsoft solution, is limited. If you try to go with the solution in the cloud, the RDP is still very slow because there is an HTTPS overlap on the RDS (Remote Desktop Services), and RDP is not secure enough. They also could improve support for the integration of these products. The other thing I would be looking for in the next release is that they make improvements to roaming profiles. I think they have already made some additional efforts to improve this. It's good, but it could be better. Most of the problems I come across are caused by profiles being incorrect. That should be fixed but it may not be possible on the Citrix side because it is really a Microsoft issue.

We would like to be able to provide VDI, a full desktop, to each of our users.

Direct connection of USB devices on the terminals to be used by streamed applications is very important for printing and the usage of token authentication, but the current version does not support this one hundred percent. It is necessary to support this transparently so that any USB device can be used.

Printing is huge, there are a lot of shortfalls with supporting printing over XenApp. I know it isn't all a Citrix issue, Microsoft needs to do some work to get the print subsystem streamlined since it apparently hasn't been looked at since Windows NT4 days.