In this article I’d like to outline some of the work we’ve recently done for one of our customers.

This customer is running SAP – the software product that needs no introduction – in combination with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. I’ve personally seen this combination many times, typically to provide secure access and to minimize the effects of latency to back-end servers.

One of the problems this customer was facing where delays in SAP that they could not account for, this environment was complicated with many custom applications within SAP. The customer wanted to find out:

• What is causing the delays in SAP?
  • SAP Base installation
  • SAP Custom applications
  • Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops

After the initial scoping meeting they found out that Login Enterprise was able to a lot more than the base questions, so the following enquiries got added to the project.

• What is the performance of SAP with one user on a Citrix environment over an extended period of time?
• What is the performance of SAP with multiple users on one Citrix environment?
• The performance impact of running the browser Standard / Incognito mode?
• The performance impact of running SAP workloads from multiple sites?
• The scalability numerous instance sizes on Azure?
• The performance of Citrix Cloud while setting up connections

With Login Enterprise browser support and the Application x-ray we set out to create a workload. This SAP workload template created by Kevin Kingdara is available for download if you’d like to perform the same tests. See the video below.

After many (automated) tests the customer was able to select the ideal instance size, and the tip to run the browser (Chrome) in incognito mode proved to be helpful for SAP’s performance. As is clearly visible on the 3rd row in the screenshot below containing the test overview. Everything is at a 100% score.

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Naturally you can continue to deep dive from there. If you’d like to see the performance of individual actions within SAP for example, or just want to analyze the logon times.

As SAP is a software as a service application (partly) there might be changes to the platform that impact performance. Centralized desktop environments such as Vmware Horizon and Citrix virtual apps and Desktops are particularly sensitive to this. In addition to that the connections are being setup via Citrix Cloud where: you guessed it changes might also impact performance.

That’s why we’ve configured a continuous test, this means a couple of synthetic users will continue to measure the performance of SAP over a longer period of time and as soon as performance changes, or worse, something doesn’t work anymore the administrator will be alerted.

Click to enlarge

If you’d like to try this for yourself, grab a copy of Login Enterprise today.