Acquiring / accessing Citrix environment for QA purposes

Question

We have a Windows Forms, .NET 2.0 application delivered via ClickOnce and driven by web services, that our customers occasionally wish to deploy into a Citrix environment. In some cases, the customer elects to allow our application to be deployed locally to user machines and bypass the Citrix server, in one case we've provided a static installer for a customer to use with the proviso that updates would not be pushed automatically, and in some cases, our customer IT departments have had the technical savvy to make the ClickOnce deployment work in their Citrix environment.

My question is not about the ClickOnce vs. Citrix issues themselves -- we've learned a fair amount from online research and talking to customers -- but about the most cost effective approach for us to look at the issues first hand. Particularly for those of you who are Citrix customers or vendors, what is the most effective way for us to set up a Citrix QA environment (specifially, Citrix for desktop virtualization), given that we have no real use for a Citrix server otherwise?

Answer 1

The simplest Citrix farm can be a single computer, and licenses can be purchased from Citrix for development purposes at a reduced rate. One of my past employers had a single laptop set up as a Citrix server in its own farm, for performance testing, since it only took about 5 users connecting to its published application for that laptop to start significantly slowing down. If part of your development work is to test load-balancing, two computers can be set up as a farm and load balance across them. If you have no other use for the servers, and don't need to demonstrate the software running blazing fast on them, workstation-class computers can fill the need (rather than the added cost of server-class computers), along with development licenses rather than production licenses from Citrix.