Citrix/CallManager/WAN

[timrekdgorf]

I now very little about Shortel and the architecture behind the entire system, but i have a very unique situation that i hope one of you shortel pro's can help with:

I work for a hosting company, we have customers...imagine that.
We host entire environments for our customers, usually within citrix.

One of our newest customers uses shortel at 3 or 4 of their facilities, and are expanding this to other facilities.
We have WAN links to all of their facilities, and we have the Shortel Call Manager application installed within their citrix desktop. the shortel servers are not hosted with us, they sit at this customer's Corporate office.

So outside of the Call Manager application within the Citrix Desktop, everything is across the WAN from MY perspective...

we have numerous complaints of citrix users attempting to add contacts to outlook and entering in a phone number, and it basically hangs, takes for ever for the contact to update, if it does. usually we have to kill outlook.

Sniffing the network traffic from the citrix servers, we see lots of connections to the shortel devices over the WAN.

Can anyone explain what is happening here, and how i can make the citrix life a bit better?

Thanks all for your help!!!!
-t

[cburgy]

There will absolutely be connections back to the sites. The Shoretel PCM communicates both with the main Shoretel server and the Shoregear switch they are associated with. Basically, the activities you are performing in PCM are signaling the server, switches and phone on what to do. How many users are we talking about? What type of bandwidth exists between the sites?

[timrekdgorf]

most of the facilities are on an upgraded MPLS circuit. we upgraded most of this when they came on board with us less than 6 months ago.
I would have to consult our network engineers to get finer details regarding that.

Here is a bit more detail about their server environment, which is what i manage:
Citrix Desktop servers - 12
which can support up to 1100 concurrent sessions (we are not seeing near that amount yet, but someday it may get to that point)
total facilities for this customer - ~150
right now i believe they only have the shortel systems at 5-6 facilities, and they seem to be expanding this every month. I cant speak to the exact architecture with the shortel systems.

I obviously cannot limit who gets this shortel client within the citrix desktop, every user who logs in there will have the outlook plugin installed and be subject to this.

is there anyway for us to cache this information once a day for all users off hours? It seems silly for every single user logging into citrix to enumerate (for lack of a better word) all of the end points/devices/etc...
cant imagine what this would be like if all of the facilities had shortel.

thanks for all your help.
-t

[timrekdgorf]

ping.

anyone have any ideas on this?
appreciate your help.
-t

[eazeaz]

Wan

I will take a stab at this.

I am making the following assumptions that may or may not be valid:

1. You are hosting their entire environment (excluding the shoretel VM server and switches). This includes their exchange boxes, etc
2. You have QOS enabled on the circuit between you and them. Prioritizing the Citrix ICA traffic as #1, but giving the shoretel traffic second priority (there really should not be any other traffic on the circuit... right? but still).
3. They are in "ONLINE" mode in outlook (not cached, since technically TS/Citrix does not support cached mode).
4. Since you are not having any session lag issues with the citrix, that this is probably not a bandwidth/latency issue (unless you have QOS allowing 100% upper limit to ICA sessions, which could cause all other traffic to be discarded during contention.

Since the exchange server AND citrix servers are local to you, the bulk of the bandwidth needed stays in house on your network. The LARGE transfers occur when contacts are imported into outlook when the PCM launches. All this data is in house to you.

After the contacts are loaded, the only traffic to and from the wan should be SMALL call control traffic. With the exception of the "Extension Monitor", etc which can take some bandwidth (as it constantly updates all monitored phones status) the bandwidth needed should be extremely low. Basically, Pick Up, Hang Up, Who is calling, etc.

Do they have a bunch of contacts in public folders somewhere? If they had say, 20000 contacts hidden in public folders they would ALL be imported into the PCM by default.... every day. This can take outlook load times up into the minute or two range. This may sound silly, but we do... and the PCM imports them ALL by default.

1. How much bandwidth do you have between YOU and THEM? Is it a Point to Point or some sort of VPN?

If your users are having problems adding a contact in outlook, and having it hang, I do not think this would be caused by the shoretel system directly. I believe there is a special install procedure for the PCM on citrix however, and if it is not done correctly some bad things can happen.

the call manager application only imports contacts at startup. It does not interact with outlook for contacts after that point. It DOES however, create mapi connections back to their VM server to look for new Voicemail messages. While I would believe that this could cause issues with slowing outlook in general, it would not affect "contacts" specifically. It would be more general.

Is it possible the PCM was installed without the citrix/ts instructions and it corrupted outlook somehow?

Hope something in that mess helps.

gary

[eazeaz]

Bump

Did you get anywhere on this issue?

[timrekdgorf]

you have been a tremendous help, but i did a bit more troubleshooting with this issue...i also read thru your other posts with soundfx...

it seems our problem is when we go into outlook and do anything with any of the phone fields. this takes for ever and a day to do anything in there. it seems to do some validation with the shortel software and the shortel server across the wan. lots of talk between the client(citrix server) and the shortel server, constantly back and forth. then it seems to validate the number entered and allows you to move on.

any ideas here?

[eazeaz]

Slowness

I am really at a loss here. Once the PCM is opened and the contacts are fully imported, there should not be any more interaction with outlook (except for voicemail/mapi connections). These connections only display new voicemails in the inbox.

When you are entering a phone number or changing one, the shoretel system should be completely out of the picture. The PCM does an import at startup and then that is it.

It is a bit alarming that two of you are having similar type problems (though different) with TS/Citrix boxes at the same time.

Have you called Shoretel?

what version are you on? Maybe both of the trouble customers are on the same version with a bug?

[nire9328]

More Info

Hi all,
I am working with timrekdgorf on this problem and have some add'l info that hopefully proves helpful.

The Shoretel call manager software is version 6.1. They have appx 1700 people in their global address list and also have contacts in public folders (appx 500).

The delay specifically happens when typing in any field that holds phone numbers in a contact. You can type in it, edit it, etc. but then when you either tab or click to move out of the field, it hangs for about 2 min. If you leave it sit, it works fine for every other contact you edit after the initial hang. If you close Outlook and re-open it (staying in the same Citrix session), you have to wait for the delay again.

I looked through the logs I could find and am noticing the following is recorded in the log when it hangs:

22792: (24024) 11:13:40.949 CDT [AutoCHM] InitializeTrace: OUTLOOK.EXE

22792: (24024) 11:13:40.949 CDT [AutoCHM] CCallHExtCmd::Install(), OCHM Extension installed, but Shoretel OCHM Integration disabled in registry.
22792: (24024) 11:13:41.090 CDT [AutoCHM] CCallHExtCmd::Install(), OCHM Extension installed, but Shoretel OCHM Integration disabled in registry.

I've searched for any reference to this and can't find a thing. Does anyone know what this is in reference to or if it could be related? I can't find a setting in the registry.

Thanks in advance for ANY ideas.

[eazeaz]

Delay

I didn't start to use shoretel until V7. Maybe the PCM used to do some strange things in 6?

Anyway, I know its not an item limit kind of problem.... we have 20,000+ contacts in ours. But we are on 7.5

[nire9328]

We've upgraded to version 7.5 build 12.14.2002.0 and still have the same issue.

We have also discovered that if we remove the ShoreTel Remote TAPI Service Provider from Control Panel, Phone and Modem Options, the problem is resolved as well. From our understanding, this is needed to provide the functionality of dialing a contact through Outlook. This delay only occurs in Outlook in Citrix (with and without roaming profiles); it does not occur locally.

Any other ideas? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[spris]

We are seeing the exact same thing. Running ver 7.0 build 12.5.9303. It's most noticeable for users heavy in PCM - like those using the extension monitor. One Shoretel support rep told us that citrix 4.5 isn't supported in ST versions below 8.1?? This is becoming a large problem for us as we proceed to roll out citrix.