Citrix and Cognos Planning

Background information for Citrix Administrators

Overview

When you have a large number of administrators for your Cognos application, each one in different countries, or separated by a low bandwidth network, Citrix is an ideal choice of platform for providing access to the Cognos Planning tools.

As a Citrix administrator, get the background information that you need to understand Citrix sizing for Cognos Planning applications.

Citrix and Cognos Planning Analyst

Cognos Planning Analyst is a powerful software package, if you are here reading this then the chances are that you already know this. The amount of RAM that is required to run Analyst is quite high and the data volumes processed are also larger than the average application. And certainly larger than the average application that is deployed on Citrix.

There are a few reasons to run Analyst on Citrix despite the fact that Analyst is by far not an application designed to run on this platform. Cognos, it is important to point out will support the use of Analyst on Citrix, and this in its self is an important fact.

Reasons to run Analyst on Citrix

• Analyst is not supported for use over a Wide Area Network
• You cannot use Analyst over VPN (not at acceptable speeds anyhow)
• There are multiple environments (development / test / production) at your company and some users need access to all three when using Analyst.

Whatever your reason, there are certain considerations that need to be made when thinking of running Analyst on your Citrix platform.

A typical desktop PC installation of Analyst will be configured to use around half the physical RAM amount in the computer, these days this can be anything from 512mb to 1024mb, this can have a severe impact on the performance of your Citrix server if you do not size correctly.

Some Analyst processes will also run for extended periods of time whilst consuming a considerable amount of CPU power, and though Analyst is a single-threaded application by nature, having four users running similar processes on the same quad-processor Citrix box can quickly lead to a maxed out server.

But do not worry, it is not common for all users to run long processor-intensive macro jobs all at the same time or even all day long. This is simply a recommendation that the Citrix server that is used for Analyst users should likely be a dedicated box, specifically for the use of this application.

There are other benefits to running a dedicated Citrix server for Analyst however, by doing this we are able to eliminate network bottlenecks by locating the Analyst server installation (a windows file-share repository of data and configuration files) directly on the Citrix server, this has been shown to provide vastly superior performance in many cases for clients running Analyst in this way.

Configuration

Excel Add-in

It is very important to remember that a manual configuration step needs to be made in the Cognos Configuration Manager program to enable "Terminal Server" use, this should be done at the time of install.
To do this, open "Configuration Manager", then open "Current Configuration" and navigate through the tree to find the entry for "Cognos Planning" / "Cognos Planning - Analyst Excel Add-in" and after clicking "General" change the drop-down menu to "Yes" for "Enable Terminal Services Support".
Always remember to apply the configuration before exiting the Configuration Manager program.

This alters the configuration to avoid problems when using the Excel Add-in on a multi-user system.

Workspace Sizing

So I guess it is fairly obvious that nobody is going to want to provide half the total RAM of their Citrix Server to an Analyst user, in fact due to other factors you would not be able to allow more than 2GB anyway. Current versions of Analyst can only use 1GB as a maximum.

Assuming you have a large enough server you could indeed provide a default workspace size of 1GB, though it is more usual to limit this to somewhere between 256mb and 512mb, power users can either increase their workspace manually during each session, or occasionally even be provided with a dedicated "Power User" Citrix Server, though this is mostly common in large scale deployments where there are in excess of 20 Analyst users.

The table below shows you the differences in sizing the Workspace for each user on a Citrix Server from that of a desktop PC user.