(imported topic written by smill59)
If we are going to use Citrix to run the console, what are your recommondations for configuration of Citrix and what are the limits? Such as, how many concurrent operators?
(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)
Hi Smill,
Citrix usually provides a very good solution for running BES Consoles from, especially for remotely located operators. Another nice benefit of Citrix is it will maintain your session so you don’t have to re-load the BES Console sometimes.
The two major bottlenecks for BES Consoles on Citrix are memory and CPU. You should spec your citrix box out based on memory usage primarily. Typically, I open up a BES Console for a master console operator and use its memory use as a ‘maximum’. Then I open a BES Console as a typical operator account and use this as an ‘average’ value. Then I spec the citrix box accordingly, if you can provide it enough memory to support all users with ‘maximum’ then you should be fine with a single box. If not, then you can guess at the difference between max and average memory use and guess at how many concurrent users there will likely be to decide if you may need additional citrix boxes. The BES Console performance will drop sharply once it runs out of memory, so if you overload the citrix server with BES Consoles you’ll see their performance degrade very quickly once the citrix box runs out of physical memory.
The next constraint is CPU. The BES Console can use a full CPU during refreshes so you want to make sure there is enough CPU available for the estimated number of concurrent users. Dual core technology is making it much easier to provide lots of CPU power fortunately. If you have an 8 core citrix box you could support up to 8 BES Consoles simultaneously doing data refreshes without major problems (it would be unlikely for 8 BES Consoles to simultaneously do data refreshes so you would likely need many more then 8 consoles running to generate 8 concurrent data refreshes).
The final concern is disk space for the BES Console cache. You can get a feel for the size of the cache by looking at an example on your local box:
C:\Documents and Settings<USERNAME>\Local Settings\Application Data\BigFix\Enterprise Console\BES_bfenterprise\Sites
Disk space is pretty cheap so you mostly just need to make sure there is enough space to have one cache file for each BES Console operator.
(imported comment written by curth)
“Another nice benefit of Citrix is it will maintain your session so you don’t have to re-load the BES Console sometimes.”
If you have multiple Citrix servers, how do you recommend handling the situation when the user connects to Citrix Server 1 the first time and then Citrix Server 2 the next time. Won’t the user’s session appear to have been reset?
(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)
Correct, you will need to re-load the console sometimes 
I believe there is a way to do clustering of citrix servers to do what you want though. So, the cluster remembers where your session was and puts you back onto the appropriate server, otherwise it creates a new session.
I’m not a citirx guru though (yet…), does anyone have experience with setting something like this up?
(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)
I thought I’d share our experience. We have a farily large number of administrators for our system so we use two Windows 2003 Terminal Services. Both servers are 4-way dual-core 2.40 GHz Opteron with 16GB RAM. At the moment, one of them has 18 consoles and the other has 19 consoles open.
We were trying avoid using Citrix (purely a cost decision) and tried some round-robin balancing techniques which weren’t working well. I stumbled upon ww.2x.com who makes a low-cost load-balancer (among other things) for TS or Citrix and tried it out. Using an agent on the TS machines, it monitors your choice of memory, cpu, and/or user sessions to determine which server should get the next session. It also determines if the user already had an open session and reconnect them to it. We’ve been very pleased with very little to no difficulty after about eight months. No, they aren’t paying me; I just thought I’d share in case someone might benefit.
(imported comment written by saidm91)
curth,
Not sure what your Citrix setup is but within a zone you should publish the console to multiple servers (as one app/resource). Citrix will then do the load management based on the default or custom load evaluators you set up. Hence if your session is in a disconnected state then you will get it back by default. You would actually have to turn session sharing “off” for this not to happen.
Im not sure if this is what you were trying to accomplish, but it should be pretty straight forward.
(imported comment written by curth)
saidm,
We have a pretty robust Citrix setup here at my company. Load balancing is not the issue. The issue was capturing the settings for a user. I have accomplished this be exporting the BigFix Registry Key when the user logs out of the published application. When the user then logs in again, I import that reg key if it exists. This keeps all of the user’s settings within the BigFix Console.