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Back in april I stumbled upon and brought forward a nice finding on our internal showcase farm, an application named ICAPipe later renamed to Citrix Fast Launch.
I posted some demos and an interview with the creators of the tool, shortly after announced that we had the intent of releasing the app as a utility on CDN with forum support.
As you probably know, it's been 2 months and the utility has not being released, and the reason why, is very simple.
The demand this app has generated was tremendous, but despite of the community demand, many customers would not be able to take advantage of this app simply because it's not officially supported, therefore making it not suitable for production environments.
We were set with a dilemma, release the app anyways, assuming web support would suffice or review our release process and attempt to sneak CFL in the XenApp product roadmap.
I can tell you that in the meantime we've been putting the app thru many tests, while identifying the scenarios users could benefit from it, and at the same time, talking to our engineering group trying to lockdown a possible target for this application to be introduced as part of our product.
Of course, there is no guarantee Citrix Fast Launch will be included in the future, however one thing is certain, you as customers can influence these decisions, helping us identify where does faster launch times fit on your list of priorities.
With that been said, here are some questions for you...
| Community Release vs. Product Integration? | Results: (3663 total votes) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I'm OK with a community release supported on CDN forums |
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| Integrated is preferred but a community release is better than nothing |
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| No rush, I can wait until it becomes officially part of XenApp |
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| I cannot implement apps in production without official support |
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| Would faster launching times impact your decision of deploying XenApp? | Choose |
|---|---|
| Yes |  |
| No | |
Make your vote count, and we encourage your comments and feedback.
Comments (4)
Aug 18, 2008
Simon Bramfitt says:
Gus We've discussed this previously, but to reiterate in public. While I'd lov...Gus
We've discussed this previously, but to reiterate in public.
While I'd love to see a Citrix supported solution to reduce session startup time, I really don't think that Fast Launch is the right direction to take.
To recap my understanding of how Fast Launch works and the implications it holds: FL is a server side published app which when launched establishes a hidden session to a XenApp Server. This initial session is subject to the normal (i.e. long) startup time, but once it is established any subsequent applications can use session sharing to bypass the initial session setup/login time and hence launch much faster.
However, the direct consequence of this approach is that every FL enabled workstation is going to consume a XenApp License regardless of whether or not the user is running any line of business application. For organizations with any significant delta between concurrent user count and total user count the direct cost buying additional XenApp licenses and servers to support these otherwise idle sessions is clearly going to make it difficult to justify implementing FL.
Beyond that; Fast Launch is going to create significant problems for XenApp customers who leverage custom load evaluators that assign connections based on resource utilization. Generally speaking FL mediated server connections will be established when server load levels are low and as FL does not (cannot) predict future resource requirements it cannot ensure appropriate distribution of application workloads.
Regards
Simon
Aug 18, 2008
Gus Pinto says:
Hi Simon, I do recall our conversation. Fast Launch back then had some comple...Hi Simon,
I do recall our conversation.
Fast Launch back then had some complex implications as you have described. FL is still a server-side utility, but however some of the hurdles of launching a initial session can be overcome with simple best practices for publishing the application, including ways where the application can be properly identified by the load balancer logics. I will do a brief video and post on our site showing the later improvements.
We have architected different productization requirements that would completely zap the constrains of the free utility. I can't quite discuss the details publicly, but as eluded in my post, we have used the last few months to study the use cases of FL in order to come up with improvements to the stand alone utility as well as a fresh architect for the possible integrated/productized version.
Thank you so much for you post.
best,
Gus
Aug 02
Ron Kupferschmied says:
Hi guys, One way of dealing with this is to review connection statistics and on...Hi guys,
One way of dealing with this is to review connection statistics and only open the Fast Launch app for clients who regularly use the farm on a daily basis.
They would also be the ones who will get the greatest benefit from this.
What do you think?
Aug 25, 2008
Anonymous says:
If FL is based on using Session Sharing as Simon described, then there is anothe...If FL is based on using Session Sharing as Simon described, then there is another potiential issue. Session Share does not work through Web Interface when connecting to a fully loaded server. So say I have a server set to have full load with 10 users, if my FL session is the 10th on that server I will not be able to launch another application on that server. Instead I will be directed to another server hosting that published appication and suffer the standard long logon time.
This is a known issue at Citrix and I have put in an enhancement request into the system to fix this, but we all know how enhancement requests go.
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