eG Innovations & DABCC Announce Findings from 2018 Citrix Migration Survey

eG Innovations, the leading IT performance management software provider, today announced results from its 2018 Citrix Migration Survey. The industry survey, jointly conducted by eG Innovations and virtualization and cloud news and support website, DABCC, Inc., explores the status of organizations’ migration to Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.x from previous versions, in order to better understand the associated plans, challenges and performance expectations from Citrix professionals. With 795 respondents representing all major industries and IT roles, the survey results offer unique insights, trend analysis and predictions that are useful for any IT professional undertaking this impactful technology transition.

Citrix’s desktop and application virtualization solutions are supporting IT service delivery to millions of enterprise users around the globe and a migration to the newest version of Citrix products is a significant technology upgrade that introduces major architectural changes and adds several new functionality improvements.

"Citrix offers a complete solution for securely and cost-effectively delivering application and desktops to the enterprise, but the migration to 7.x has presented some significant operational challenges to Citrix customers," said George Spiers, 2018 Citrix Technology Professional Awardee and EUC Architect. "The benefits of upgrading are substantial, but migration has been slow until last year, in part due to the major redeployment effort that the upgrade requires, and also due to some key feature gaps between XenApp 6.x and 7.x. Citrix has closed many of these gaps over the past two years, and this has enabled organizations to fully plan their upgrades for 2018."

Key Findings: Migration to Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.x

• 70% of organizations are expected to complete the migration to XenApp and XenDesktop 7.x by the end of the year.
• The main driver behind the migration to 7.x is the fact that older versions are nearing EOL/EOM.
• Migration from 6.x to 7.x is not a simple in-place upgrade. 71% of organizations expect to upgrade operating systems, 42% will be upgrading hypervisors, and 36% will be changing their server hardware.
• The actual migration process itself is considered to be simple, but 78% of respondents rate the pre-migration and post-migration phases to be much more challenging.
• Citrix Cloud deployments are in their infancy. Only 5% of organizations are currently using Citrix Cloud services, but 45% are likely to consider using Citrix Cloud in the future.

Key Findings: Citrix Performance Expectations

• When migrating to XenApp/XenDesktop 7.x, the largest concern for Citrix professionals is ensuring that applications and desktops work as expected, and that user experience does not degrade post-migration.
• Slow logon continues to be the most common complaint faced by Citrix professionals. Measuring logon slowness is rated the most important aspect of Citrix user experience.
• Performance monitoring for Citrix environments has become increasingly reactive and admins are constantly in a firefighting mode. 86% of respondents see faster problem diagnosis and troubleshooting as their most critical need.
• Despite using many infrastructure monitoring tools, a major performance challenge during the migration to XenApp/XenDesktop 7.x is pinpointing how infrastructure issues are affecting Citrix performance.
• One of the main reasons for slow and lengthy problem diagnosis is that organizations are using too many tools (up to 10 tools) for monitoring their Citrix infrastructures. 91% agreed that having a single-pane-of-glass monitoring solution would simplify troubleshooting.

"From a performance management perspective, the upgrade to Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.x is a multi-level challenge," said Srinivas Ramanathan, chief executive officer, eG Innovations. "With 7.x, Citrix EdgeSight is no longer available, and so organizations must consider other Citrix monitoring options. Furthermore, with the multi-tier and inter-dependent nature of the Citrix infrastructures, it is not surprising that a vast majority of administrators now recognize the importance of a unified tool for monitoring the performance of the Citrix tiers as well as that of the supporting infrastructure. An end-to-end, holistic monitoring approach can ensure a successful Citrix migration, without any interruptions or user-experience degradation, from day one."

The 2018 Citrix Migration Survey Analysis Report is a free download, available from the eG Innovations website. Download here.

eG Innovations will present a live webinar featuring George Spiers and Srinivas Ramanathan, on Tuesday, February 27, 2018 at 2pm GMT / 9am EST to present and examine the results of this survey. Register online.