30 virtual Citrix Terminalservers (Windows 2022 Datacenter), each of them hosts ~ 8-10 users and has 6 CPUs, 48 GB RAM
Citrix Image (“Golden Image”) of these 30 Servers contains Office, legacy Software (Health Care), partly Visual Basic 6.
The problem: legacy Software running slow in this environment – There are no real peaks/bottlenecks when looking on vSphere Performance overview – also the NetApp is terribly bored – produced IOPS are not worth to mention…
We are planning to replace the 3.5 years old servers in short by Dell R7725 with AMDs 9575F and hope for a performance boost.
What about your experience? Doesn’t CPU makers care anymore for “Office Workload”?
There is so much lousy programmed (and old) software out there (especially in Health Care Business / Hospital) which can´t be easily replaced.
Is there any “best practice” how to boost Citrix on modern CPUs?
From a sysadmin point of view there is at least one resource that represents a “bottleneck” meaning, it holds back the overall system from consuming more of the other available resources.
Clearly, the resources you’re monitoring don’t contain the system bottleneck. More detective work is needed to find the culprit and monitor that.
Since you’ve not mentioned it specifically, the first thing I would look at is single core performance. A pegged CPU core is easily missed looking at servers with dozens of cores. Your upgrade path is clearly designed to make a big upgrade in this regard, but you need to find out if this is actually the bottleneck you’re looking for.
“Office workload”, which I understand to be predominantly MSTR Office products, seem to be dominated by cloud performance in 2025 as MSFT has forced everyone onto Office365. If true for your workload, no server upgrade will offer improved performance.
The other special purpose software you mention (“healthcare”) I don’t have experience with, so this can be bottlenecked by anything.
Lastly, I offer my condolences on your server software stack (vSphere+Citrix) assuming you’re stuck since you plan on upgrading that in 2025. The vendors will suck your IT budget dry over time…
Blind guess:
The Intel 8358’s only boost to 3.4GHz, which is not that high. If bad software requires high single core performance, this would make it feel sluggish.
