Citrix Performance Whitepaper Notes 8.0.2
Daniel Nashed – 26 January 2009 22:54:17
There is a brand new performance whitepaper "IBM® Lotus® Notes® 8.0.2 on Citrix XenApp 4.5: A scalability analysis" downloadable here. IBM promised to work on Citrix Notes Client Performance for Notes 8.0.2 Standard Clients. And the results of the tests look great.
The paper contains performance tests for Notes 8.0.2 Standard Clients on 32bit and 64bit Citrix servers.
Some thoughts from my side:
- You really have to use Citrix XenApp 4.5 and Windows 2003 R2 64Bit with a lot of RAM and CPU.
- 32bit Servers support only up to 4GB RAM.
- A 64Bit machine with 32GB RAM and a Dual Quad-core is a reasonable sized machine which allows much more uses than what we had for Notes 8.0.2 Basic Clients.
- You really have to invest in RAM and CPU to get the right scalability. If you add memory, CPU can become a bottleneck.
- Therefore you should invest in Quad-core CPUs because Notes Client processes use much more CPU than the Domino server.
- You should avoid Notes port encryption and compression! Else you run into trouble with CPU quite easy.
- You should not invest too much into more than those resources for a single machine because if you want to scale higher the costs might grow exponentially.
- 32GB and 2 fast Quad-core CPUs should be a reasonable sized machine
- The team is currently testing 8.5 and the performance should be similar or better than for 8.0.2
- For Domino Servers a 64Bit Windows is already a good idea. Using 64Bit Windows for larger Citrix is strongly recommended after interpreting those numbers.
I have heard from may Domino Admins that their Citrix team is only very slowly starting to look into 64Bit Citrix. I can only encourage you to send them this paper which will speak for itself ...
You can run 100-140 Notes users with standard clients in a reasonably sized Citrix box.
-- Daniel
- Comments [1]
1Christian Henseler 18.02.2009 15:46:38 Citrix Performance Whitepaper Notes 8.0.2
The problem when running Citrix (on 64 Bit Windows) is, that most IBM 3rd party plugins are not supported (at least for Notes 8.5):
Sametime not supported on 64 Bit
Lotus Symphony not supported on 64 Bit
Lotus QuickR not supported neither on 32 nor 64 Bit
Lotus Connections (via Activities) not supported neither on 32 nor 64 Bit
See technote 1329357 for details
Another detail most customers are not aware of:
Lotus Domino Designer and Lotus Domino Administrator are not supported for Citrix, only Notes only is supported.