Optimising TCP for Citrix HDX/ICA including Netscaler

Marius Sandbu – NGCA (NVIDIA GRID Community Advisor)  aka Clever Viking!

The TCP implementation within Citrix HDX/ICA protocol used by XenDesktop and XenApp and also Citrix Netscaler is pretty Vanilla to the original TCP/IP standards and definition and the out-of-the-box configuration usually does a good job on LAN. However, for WAN scenarios particularly with higher latencies and certain kinds of data (file transfers), Citrix deployments can benefit greatly from some tuning.

One of our new NGCAs (NVIDIA GRID Community Advisors) Marius Sandbu has written a must-read blog on how to optimize TCP with a Citrix Netscaler in the equation: http://msandbu.org/tag/netscaler-tcp-profile/Marius highlights some of the configuration optimisations hidden away in the Netscaler documentation and you’ll probably want to refer to that  documentation too (https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/netscaler/11-1/system/TCP_Congestion_Control_and_Optimization_General.html).

Citrix HDX TCP is not optimized for many WAN scenarios but at the moment it can also be tuned manually following this advice: CTX125027 – How to Optimize HDX Bandwidth Over High Latency Connections. This is one configuration I’d love to see Citrix automate as having to tune and configure the receiver is fiddly and also not possible in organisations/scenarios where the end-points and server/network infrastructure might be provided by different teams or even companies (e.g. IaaS).

 

For Citrix NVIDIA GRID vGPU customers with looking at high network latency scenarios – it really is worth investigating the potential and benefits of TCP window tuning. I’d be really interested to hear feedback if you have tried this and what your experience / thoughts are too!

 

Norwegian, Marius Sandbu was recently awarded NGCA status by NVIDIA for his work with our community through his Netscaler, remoting protocols and experience with technologies such as UDP and TCP/IP. You can follow him on twitter @msandbu and of course do follow his excellent blog on http://msandbu.org/ !!!