Fusion, Windows, Citrix Receiver and Workspace

[mctavish]

I have been using VMware Fusion for a number of years to access hospital websites through Windows via Citrix Receiver and now Workspace. I keep Fusion up to date, as I do Windows (now Windows 10), and my Macs. Using Citrix on my Mac (without Fusion and Windows) never worked very well, and I was never able to print from a Citrix connection using a Mac.

For a long time Fusion/Windows worked well in every respect. But then I began having trouble with one of the hospital sites, trouble which progressively worsened, and then with the others. Now I can't access any of the 3 hospitals usefully through Citrix. Either I can't connect, the connection drops soon after access, or the connection is way too slow to work. The Citrix access works fine for all three hospitals on Windows machines. Also, Fusion on my Mac works well for everything else including a clinic that I access through FortiClient.

Interestingly, Citrix seems to often work pretty well on iOS devices (I haven’t tried printing.), but the screens are too small for the kind of work I do, so I haven't used Citrix on iOS much.

The hospitals all use different versions of Receiver/Workspace, some more up to date than others, but if I have a recent Workspace client installed on my Windows computer, it works well with all of the hospitals. The attitudes of the hospital IT departments vary, but the most important hospital won't support Macs at all, VM or directly.

I'm on the road a lot and much prefer my Mac over a Windows computer. I've developed a workaround, accessing my Windows computer through a remote desktop, but that is clunky.

I doubt that I'm the only one having this problem, but I can't find it mentioned in Google searches or in searches on the WMware support site. I know that Citrix and WMware are competitors, but it is difficult to believe that the products would be made incompatible intentionally. Does anyone have any insight in to what the problem may be?

[mctavish · Accepted solution]

I'm answering my own question thanks to the VMware support engineer. It took him a while to figure it out, but what he did was to increase the resources - memory (to 4 MB) and processor cores (to 4) - given to the VM. Also, he disabled the VM's graphic card, and turned off hardware acceleration in the VM.

[DASicari]

I can also confirm that disabling 3D Acceleration in the Windows 10 VM greatly speeds up Citrix Receiver/Workspace, but this is a less than ideal solution as it impacts other Windows applications that benefit from or require 3D acceleration. I have a 3 GHz 10-core, 64 GB iMac Pro with 8 cores/16 GB RAM dedicated to the VM and experienced absolutely unusable performance with Citrix-based apps until I found this thread. Like the OP, this was not always the case and I can't quite pinpoint if this started occurring with macOS Mojave or with Fusion 11. I also experienced equally terrible Citrix app performance under Parallels (I installed a trial to see if this was occurring just with Fusion), so I'm thinking this may have to do with macOS Mojave or newer versions of Citrix Workspace.