Hello there - we use Office 365 and also have a citrix farm where we are currently publishing Outlook 2013 to be used company wide via a VDI. Bullet points will probably get my question over in the best way;

- We have around 3500 employees who will be predominantly using Outlook in this way.

- We have noticed that the performance of Outlook when not in cached mode is bordering on unusable. Simply scrolling down your list of emails will cause the application to halt, whilst it pulls the relevant data from Exchange on-line.

- Due to the nature of Citrix and OST's, we cannot use Cached mode.

- We have raised tickets via our O365 Portal and have simply been told that we cannot be offered any support via MS and we in fact, need to speak to Citrix. Citrix however, is working fine, this is an issue with the way Outlook communicates with MS's on-line environment.

Has anyone set up a similar environment before? Does anyone have any info on best practices? Is there any kind of throttling that Microsoft use which can be adjusted? Does this setup simply not work?!

Any feedback would be greatly recommended. As I say, 3500 users are depending on a solution and if that means we have to spend more money, we will certainly look in to that.

Many Thanks,

Tom

• Edited by neqinox Friday, May 23, 2014 9:14 AM .

While the problem persist I will have users access their email via OWA for now.

For Outlook on Citrix I must check with Outlook team or Technet if Outlook is really compatible and supported and if it is UN-supported then you are on your own.

Hi Tom,
Although the Outlook experience is poor, in your scenario, possibly, Outlook is a victim of some other fundamental issue?

e.g., diskIO=constrained? network=constrained? memory? it might be a compound problem?

some generic guidance for optimising (Windows7) VDI: http://blogs.technet.com/b/yongrhee/archive/2013/11/09/performance-optimization-guidelines-for-windows-7-desktop-virtualization.aspx

Are you publishing a full desktop? Pooled or persistent? XenApp involved too?

I'm assuming you are using O365ProPlus (the Click to run variety, which embeds/consumes App-V)?

Some further thoughts: http://www.virtuallyvirtuoso.com/microsoft-office-and-vdi-performance-tips/

A common issue (at least on older physical desktops), is the Office graphics hardware acceleration feature. Is this enabled or disabled in your virtual desktops? (Outlook > File > Options > Advanced > Display )

Also see: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2768648/en-

Hi ExchangeITPro - did you have a chance to check with your team at all?

See below,  everything has been verified from the OS/Deliverable.  The issue seems to be the concept of office 365 with outlook online mode enabled.  Would we potentially need MS to verify our subscription model so we can verify throughput/bandwidth limitation and or settings?

Hi Tom,  Although the Outlook experience is poor, in your scenario, possibly, Outlook is a victim of some other fundamental issue?

e.g., diskIO=constrained? network=constrained? memory? it might be a compound problem? I have validated session and not IO issues exist.  Session runs fine outside of Outlook

some generic guidance for optimising (Windows7) VDI:

Are you publishing a full desktop? Pooled or persistent? XenApp involved too? This is in place an validated

I'm assuming you are using O365ProPlus (the Click to run variety, which embeds/consumes App-V)?

Some further thoughts: 

A common issue (at least on older physical desktops), is the Office graphics hardware acceleration feature. Is this enabled or disabled in your virtual desktops? (Outlook > File > Options > Advanced > Display ) This is disabled

Also see:

Hello Tom,

I know this sounds silly but which DNS forwarders do you use in your environment?

When you do a ping to outlook.office365.com, what address does it resolve to?

(outlook-emeacenter.office365.com, outlook-namwest.office365.com or outlook-nameast.office365.com?)

We had performance problems because we used Google dns (8.8.8.8) which resolved outlook.office365.com to outlook-namwest.office365.com while our tenant was located in EMEA. After switching DNS (do not forget to clear cache) there was a huge performance improvement. (Outlook starts up in 3 second instead of 10. E-mail en calendars opens fast.

If you are located in Europe i can suggest using the OpenDNS ip addresses for DNS forwarders.

Alex

• Edited by Alex Oosterom Friday, September 26, 2014 1:40 PM

Tom, did you ever resolve this?

We have XenApp 7.5 (app not desktop), Outlook 2013 online mode

and have intermittent freezing/exchange server not responding issues

DNS resolving correctly

Thanks,

Dave

Hi Dave

Just a long shot,check out this link:

http://discussions.citrix.com/topic/352370-outlook-2013-performance-issues/

The last bit about the "legacy graphipcs mode" mode

Let me know if it works.

Jan

Thanks for the suggestion Jan.

I have turned off Hardware graphics acceleration and all Office animations via GPO

I get conflicting info on whether you should use cached mode or not. The performance in non cached mode has gotten a lot better lately with no change on our part. I suspect Microsoft / Office 365 is upgrading their infrastructure but they flatly deny that.

A consultant also told me that Citrix has a white paper on this specific subject. I will post it here if I can find it / get him to send it.

Thanks

Hi Wintermute_ ;)

We are in the initiation phase of a huge worldwide Office365 project ourselves and also have identified Bu's that heavilly use Xenapp 6.x / 7 in combination with PVS as a way to provide a centralized desktop.                             (all running lotus notes for now still)

Setups are quite similar in a sense that mandatory profiles are used, some folder redirection is being done and Profile management is being taken care off by Appsense 8.x

As I understand, you can not keep .OST files on a network share unpunished. That being said, you can not keep them locally on the citrix server because next time a user logs on he will probably not get the same citrix server meaning you will have to re-download the .OST file again into the 'profile' folder. If it is big, it takes time.

I know you can manage history (1,3,6,x months) via some reg/policy settings but you don't know the size of what you download.

As environments are centralized in 2 different datacenters, that means your internet bandwidth will be quite large so I assume non-cached mode makes perfect sense.

That being said, I woud really be interested in that white paper to see what Citrix is providing as a solution.

On the other hand, I would not really see it as a Citrix issue because by the looks of it the same issue would arise with a remote desktop environment.

Hope to hear you soon!