Optimization for Microsoft Teams | Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7 .
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Discover best practices, product information, and IT tips that you can use to help your business. As a part of Covid precautions driving business trends, Microsoft Teams usage increased exponentially when the solution was added to the default Office suite and increased in functionality. Usage of Teams in compared to was up around percent and holds steady as businesses worldwide continue to figure out how to best support their remote workers. At first glance, admins could believe Teams is a typical co llaboration tool, such as Citrix Podio, or a meetings app, such as Cit rix GoToMeeting.
It is possible for Teams to replace these tools. However, getting there requires significant pre-planning and implementation of additional Microsoft components. Managing Teams within a virtual desktop infrastructure VDI environment also requires some considerations. Install Location: Per-machine or Per-user? Endpoint Device.
Citrix Optimization Feature. Is your VDI infrastructure or hardware making it difficult to use Teams? Should I Install Per-machine or Per-user? A zero-day or a business enhancing feature released will be able to be introduced to the environment quickly. However, an environment breaking patch can also be released uncontrolled if installed per-user. For example, Citrix optimization was only available when deploying on the system drive. But with a recent patch, this was no longer true, and Teams automatically switched to Citrix optimization mode, which has limited features.
These types of issues result in a significant number of help desk calls until a workaround could be implemented. In early , it was recommended to install per-user as it allowed preventing Teams from auto-starting. This let users who were not interested in Teams not have it launch and reduced the infrastructure resource requirements of every user having a Teams session.
However, as Covid precautions stuck around and adoption drastically increased, it no longer made sense to allow per-user installs to persist and provide inconsistency in the environment. The migration from per-user to per-machine is automatic.
Microsoft will convert the install when a per-user logs into a per-machine image. We noticed that the Taskbar shortcut must be unpinned and repined as it still pointed to per-user install. Also, the Teams Outlook add-in pointed to the old per-user install and had to be fixed with a registry key update.
And finally, on rare occasions, the migration did not work successfully; In the session as an admin, Teams had to be uninstalled and then reinstalled. Pros and cons of per-machine and per-user installments:. How many end devices are needed is largely dependent on whether optimization will be enabled see section below. If unoptimized, the end-device is less important as most of the computation occurs in the VDI.
H owever , all audio and webcam must still traverse the network to the VDI. This can provide a wide disparity in end-user experience if a standard is not implemented. This increases outbound network load to the internet for your branch sites.
Microsoft has worked together with virtual desktop vendors, such as Citrix and VMware, to implement an optimized mode of Teams. This enables H. While significantly improved over , there are still feature limitations in the optimized version of Teams.
It can be tempting to include the Teams app with the rest of the Office installation to gauge end-user interest. However, Teams uses Electron and Optimization, and some of those limitations require a VDI architect to consider unique design decisions compared to the rest of the Office suite. The fast pace and complexity to implement Teams requires careful planning, design, and proper hardware prior to implementation to prevent data loss and performance degradation.
Consider using a managed virtual desktop infrastructure provider to help your team avoid set-up and implementation errors, and keep Teams running smoothly for your entire remote workforce.
To learn more, download the complete solution brief: Deploying Microsoft Teams. Have VDI questions? Our Info sessions are always free.
Schedule one for your team:. Capital View Center S. Whitehat Virtual Blog Discover best practices, product information, and IT tips that you can use to help your business. There are three major design decisions for an admin deploying Teams for VDI: 1.
Endpoint Device 3. Installing on the system drive prevents this scenario. Per-machine install prevents auto-updating, which allows proper QA of new Teams releases. Most virtual desktop optimization clients recommend per-machine installs. Per-machine Cons: Teams updates frequently and bug fixes must be implemented often to keep up to date in the golden image. Once a user launches Teams, they are unable to prevent auto-launch. Teams will always auto-launch and cannot be turned off by the user.
Teams consumes all session resources to launch. This effectively means auto-launching is increasing your user logon times because the session will be unusable until Teams finishes launching. Per-user Pros: Teams can be prevented from auto-launching by an admin by default and a user can toggle auto-launch on or off. This reduces login times as well as resource consumption for virtual machines.
Teams stays current by automatically updating. Per-user Cons: Teams disk storage requirements multiplies by every user instead of the number of machines. Don't have time to read the entire article? Should I Leave on Optimization? Optimize Pros: Optimizing allows Teams to efficiently manage and redirect audio and video, improving performance while reducing server resource utilization.
Audio does not have to double hop between end-device, VDI, and Teams servers but instead goes directly to Teams servers. Also, audio and webcam video are not rendered in the VDI reducing resource utilization. Mapping of audio and webcam devices functions more natively without leveraging VDI vendor technologies, such as Citrix HDX audio, which can be buggy. The pace with which versions are released provides a significant operational requirement to stay up to date.
End-client agent versions must be released by vendor and then updated on the end-device. The Teams version in the VDI must also be updated if per-machine installed. If thin-clients are used as end devices, the updates can be further delayed as the vendor agents are typically included as part of the thin-client OS.
This means operations must validate and deploy new OS versions of thin clients as well as testing in VDI. Features are limited, as defined in section below. Unoptimized Pros: Almost the full feature set of Teams as compared to physical device install. Teams functions the same way as all other conferencing tools, such as WebEx, reducing user confusion. Unoptimized Cons: Audio and video performance is reduced and heavily dependent on the end-device and VDI network stability.
Any latency or bandwidth issues are compounded due to the double hop between device, VDI, and Teams servers. Audio and video device instability causes users to have to restart Teams, and sometimes the VDI session itself, to continue working after crashing. Leave Comment. Subscribe Our Blog. Most Popular. Whitehat Virtual Technologies. Search website Search Google. Healthcare Finance Manufacturing Retail. P:
Teams for Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs - Recommended Posts
Delivering a Good Microsoft Teams Experience in VDI.
Asked by Michele Rusconi. Supported only during a PowerPoint sharing session. Do you guys know if there's a way to have the "Full Version" in order to have this feature in a Citrix VDI environment? You can have the "full version" if you do not use the Teams HDX Optimization feature, and if you install Teams as per-user and not per-machine machine based.
Hello Kasper, thanks! Are there any drawbacks in deactivating the HDX optimization features and installing Teams as per-user?
Hi, Yes, there are a few drawbacks. With the per-user mode of Teams you can no longer control which version the user has access to, as it lives in the user's profile and updates at random times.
So, if I understood correctly, you think is better to keep the HDX Optimization enabled and keep Teams as per-machine, even though this means not having those features available?
I just asked to Citrix Support, they told me that we have to wait for Microsoft to update the HDX, per-machine version in order to have those features And the machine-based Teams is a recommendation by Microsoft and with that you have control over which version of Teams you are on. I think you are on the right path with contacting Citrix support. I actually think it's mostly Microsoft we are "waiting on" in regards of supported feature with Teams HDX Optimization, but yes let's hope Microsoft ups their game with Teams in virtualized environments.
I use the the following article to get it working, On a side note, I am running OneDrive in "Online Only" mode successfully on both apps. Full unlocked version with give and take control features? In that article you mentioned they specifically say that some functionalities are limited in the VDI version.
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Learn more. Follow, to receive updates on this topic. Sign in to follow this Followers 3. Michele Rusconi 6. Michele Rusconi Enthusiast 6 Members 11 posts. Posted May 7, Hello, according to this article Optimization for Microsoft Teams citrix. Which is really annoying. Share this post Link to post. Recommended Posts.
Mark this reply as best answer, if it answered your question. Upvote if you found this answer helpful or interesting. Kasper Johansen Kasper Johansen Scholar Members posts. Hi, You can have the "full version" if you do not use the Teams HDX Optimization feature, and if you install Teams as per-user and not per-machine machine based.
Thanks for the information. Thanks, let's hope that MS and Citrix will fix this in the future releases. Thanks again for your help! John Ferrini 0. John Ferrini 0 Members 3 posts. Posted May 17, Posted May 25, Please sign in to comment You will be able to leave a comment after signing in Sign in now. To use our site, please take one of the following actions: Upgrade your version of Internet Explorer. You can find more information here Install the Google browser.
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