{"id":1069,"date":"2017-02-03T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-02-03T01:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/inswwdev.azurewebsites.net\/au\/insights\/uncategorized\/the-last-pieces-of-the-jigsaw-dealing-with-office-365-performance-issues-in-virtual-environments-using-fslogix-office-365-containers-for-citrix\/"},"modified":"2017-02-03T01:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-02-03T01:00:00","slug":"the-last-pieces-of-the-jigsaw-dealing-with-office-365-performance-issues-in-virtual-environments-using-fslogix-office-365-containers-for-citrix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/nz\/insights\/geek-speak\/modern-workplace\/the-last-pieces-of-the-jigsaw-dealing-with-office-365-performance-issues-in-virtual-environments-using-fslogix-office-365-containers-for-citrix\/","title":{"rendered":"The last pieces of the jigsaw \u2013 dealing with Office 365 performance issues in virtual environments using FSLogix Office 365 Containers for Citrix"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ain\u2019t that a mouthful of a title for a post? ?<\/p>\n

\n

Anyways, having spent part of last week at BriForum London, it\u2019s interesting to come away with a broader view of what is happening in the virtualization world.<\/p>\n

One of the things I found most intriguing was the perception that on a number of levels, desktop virtualization \u2013 either on full-fat VDI or hosted shared desktops \u2013 is moving into a much more mature phase. Issues with storage and infrastructure are much less noticeable, and Moore\u2019s Law has seen that we now have solutions that are much more capable of dealing with the nuances of a virtualized desktop environment. Hyperconvergence, superfast storage arrays, GPUs \u2013 technologies that can deliver have overcome a lot of the early blockers to widespread virtualization adoption.<\/p>\n

But of course, there are still problems to be overcome \u2013 the final pieces of the jigsaw to be put into place, the last bumps in the user experience to be ironed out.<\/p>\n

One of these is the performance of Office 365 in the virtual environment \u2013 particularly in the Citrix-provided desktop arena. Assuming you\u2019re using the \u201cExchange Online\u201d version of Microsoft Office (rather than the full-fat web-based version), where there is still a client involved, you may well have come across some of these performance problems.<\/p>\n

Microsoft generally recommends using Cached Exchange Mode for Office 365, in order to provide acceptable startup, session, and search\/indexing performance. But in XenApp environments, the user OST cannot be stored locally as the user may not always land on the same server for their next session. In non-persistent XenDesktop environments, the user profile is discarded between sessions, and again, the OST file cannot be stored locally.<\/p>\n

You also can\u2019t use traditional UEM solutions to deal with the OST file as imagine a user with a 15-20GB mailbox \u2013 do you want to copy that down onto the endpoint at every logon and back to the network at logoff? Redirection doesn\u2019t cut it, because that\u2019s an unsupported configuration. If you bite the bullet and use Online Mode, you\u2019re going to give yourself a lot of availability and performance issues (large calendars being a particular bottleneck), as well as a substantial increase in network overhead.<\/p>\n

So while using Cached Exchange Mode is the main performance tweak Microsoft recommend for Outlook, they also don\u2019t recommend using it for Remote Desktop Session Host. If you\u2019re doing RDSH, then they suggest that you keep the Exchange server on the same network switch as the RDSH server. But we\u2019re using Office 365 \u2013 and we\u2019re not in a position to put our RDSH into Azure as well \u2013 so what do you do?<\/p>\n

Microsoft do offer some mitigation, after a fashion \u2013 for instance, GPOs exist that allow you to limit the cache option to just a couple of months\u2019 worth of email, but this simply \u201chides\u201d the issue until the user starts searching for mail from more than a specified time ago. Creative systems administrators can also attack this issue in a huge number of ways, limited only by their imagination and technical skills\/budgets. They could go fully persistent VDI, purchase themselves a whacking great pipe with incredible amounts of bandwidth, use custom retention policies, get Microsoft to kill off MAPI \u2013 the possibilities are endless. But each of them have pros and cons, support implications, and possible architectural changes to plan and implement. And in the end (and I think this is the most worrying point) \u2013 the overhead of dealing with the performance issues can potentially essentially erase the cost savings in outsourcing email to Microsoft in the first place. Or can possibly drive up your XenApp hosted or VDI costs to the point of not being practical. Not situations anyone wants to be in!<\/p>\n

There\u2019s got to be a simpler answer, hasn\u2019t there?<\/p>\n

Well, step forward FSLogix.<\/p>\n

FSLogix have a track record in providing \u201cpoint\u201d solutions to particular pain areas that users and administrators experience in the here-and-now. None of the \u201clet\u2019s re-engineer your entire infrastructure\u201d approach that you get when talking to some software vendors \u2013 what you get is straight-to-the-crux-of-the\u2013matter solutions for the problems that are burning you today.Image management issues? Flip the whole golden image model on its head and just reveal applications to the user as necessary with\u00a0<\/span>FSLogix Apps<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Java version hell? Just block the out-of-date versions from the operating system and only reveal them when required with the\u00a0<\/span>FSLogix Java Rule Editor<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And now, if you\u2019re suffering from poor hosted Outlook performance on XenApp\/XenDesktop\/VDI\/RDSH, then along comes\u00a0<\/span>FSLogix Office 365 Containers<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Office 365 Containers use the same engine as all of the other FSLogix features, simply using a filter driver to seamlessly mount a centrally-managed container for the OST file into what is effectively local storage. What\u2019s more, it simply slots into your existing deployment infrastructure, managed easily through ADMX files that integrate seamlessly with Group Policy objects.<\/p>\n

Over at my affiliate company HTG, we\u2019ve been testing with the release version of Office 365 Containers and we\u2019ve observed a 45% improvement in initial Outlook startup time, a 52% improvement in search performance, and a 75% decrease in the size of the local user profile, all by using the lightweight FSLogix agent. This was done across XenApp 7.8 on Server 2016 VDA, and XenDesktop 7.8 on Windows 10 VDA. A snapshot of our testing results for these platforms are below (broken down to an average):-<\/p>\n

XenDesktop 7.8 on Windows 10 VDA<\/em><\/p>\n

Outlook \u201clogon\u201d time<\/strong><\/p>\n

In standard configuration \u2013 7m 34s<\/p>\n

With FSLogix Office 365 Container \u2013 0m 34s<\/p>\n

Outlook search time (for obscure item)<\/strong><\/p>\n

In standard configuration \u2013 0m 38s<\/p>\n

With FSLogix Office 365 Container \u2013 0m 6s<\/p>\n

User profile size<\/strong><\/p>\n

In standard configuration \u2013 426MB<\/p>\n

With FSLogix Office 365 Container \u2013 102MB<\/p>\n

XenApp 7.8 hosted desktop on Server 2016 VDA<\/em><\/p>\n

Outlook \u201clogon\u201d time<\/strong><\/p>\n

In standard configuration \u2013 8m 12s<\/p>\n

With FSLogix Office 365 Container \u2013 0m 58s<\/p>\n

Outlook search time<\/strong><\/p>\n

In standard configuration \u2013 0m 49s<\/p>\n

With FSLogix Office 365 Container \u2013 0m 8s<\/p>\n

User profile size<\/strong><\/p>\n

In standard configuration \u2013 408MB<\/p>\n

With FSLogix Office 365 Container \u2013 92MB<\/p>\n

On top of this, there is a noticeable decrease in network utilization and latency observed when using the FSLogix solution. I\u2019m still compiling all the results from the lab (network stuff not being my favourite area!), but it seemed to be in the region of a 25% reduction, which again, in a Citrix environment, is not to be sniffed at. I don\u2019t expect you to just take these lab results at face value, though \u2013 every enterprise is different \u2013 so I\u2019d recommend you get a demo set up and test yourself.<\/p>\n

And this isn\u2019t limited to just getting cached Exchange mode working with Outlook \u2013 you can also use this to work with the OneDrive cache and the cached information in Skype for Business too.<\/p>\n

Of course, now that I\u2019ve said that, you want to know how easy is to set up and demonstrate this saving in your environment? Well, it\u2019s only a six-step setup routine, so it doesn\u2019t get much simpler than this, in my opinion\u2026<\/p>\n