Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops™ 7 2507 LTSR

September 8, 2025

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File based licensing system EOL notification

File based licensing system, traditionally used for activating various on-premises components, will be End of Life (EOL) on April 15, 2026. License Activation Service (LAS) is the next generation technology for product activations across the suite of Citrix products. LAS will be the only way to activate and license Citrix on-premises components after April 15, 2026. To remain supported, your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployment must be on a LAS compatible version. The minimum required CVAD versions that are LAS compatible are:

CVAD 2203 LTSR CU7
CVAD 2402 LTSR CU3
CVAD 2507 LTSR
CVAD 2411

If you have questions or concerns, contact Customer Care. Citrix might limit or suspend your Citrix Maintenance for non-compliance with these requirements without liability in addition to any other remedies Citrix might have at law or equity. These requirements don’t apply where prohibited by law or regulation.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7 2507 LTSR

The Long Term Service Release (LTSR) program for Citrix Virtual Apps™ and Desktops provides stability and long-term support for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops releases.

LTSRs are also available for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 2402 and 2203.

This Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops release includes new versions of the Windows Virtual Delivery Agents (VDAs) and new versions of several core components. You can:

Install or upgrade a site: Use the ISO for this release to install or upgrade core components and VDAs. Installing or upgrading to the latest version allows you to use the latest features.
Install or upgrade VDAs in an existing site: If you already have a deployment and aren’t ready to upgrade your core components, you can still use several of the latest HDX™ features by installing (or upgrading to) a new VDA. Upgrading only the VDAs can be helpful when you want to test enhancements in a non-production environment.

After upgrading your VDAs to this version, you do not need to update the machine catalog’s functional level. For more information, see VDA versions and functional levels.

For installation and upgrade instructions:

If you are building a new site, follow the sequence in Install and configure.
If you are upgrading a site, see Upgrade a deployment.

Documentation for supported and legacy versions

Documentations for supported versions are in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.

The End of Life (EOL) version documentation PDFs are archived in Legacy Documentation.

Unicode keyboard layout mapping

The feature “Unicode keyboard layout mapping” is prohibited by default in CVAD 2507, you can enable it through Group Policy. For more details, seeKeyboard and Input Method Editor (IME)

Delivery Controller™

Licensing Server version compatibility with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops site

For Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops site creation and upgrades, ensure that the Licensing Server is running a minimum of version 11.17.2 build 53100.

Virtual Delivery Agents (VDAs)

Passkey support for in-session applications

This enhancement allows users to register and use passkeys for authentication to applications within HDX sessions, eliminating the need for physical security keys.

Web Studio

Support for Citrix-managed OpenShift plug-in

With this feature, Citrix manages your Red Hat OpenShift workloads through a Citrix-managed OpenShift plug-in. With this plug-in, you can create hosting connections and hosting units to your OpenShift cluster, create catalogs, and power manage machines in the catalog using Web Studio. Alternatively, you can use PowerShell commands. For more information, see:

Support for image management in Red Hat OpenShift environments

Image management functionality is now generally available for OpenShift virtualization environments. You can use Images node to create image definitions, versions, and MCS machine catalogs. This implementation significantly reduces the storage and time costs, and simplifies the VM deployment and image update process. You can also use PowerShell commands to achieve this goal. For information, see Create a prepared image machine catalog in Red Hat OpenShift.

Support for creating Red Hat OpenShift catalogs using machine profile

With this feature, using Web Studio, you can now create a Red Hat OpenShift catalog in MCS using a machine profile. The input of the machine profile is an existing VM. Creating a catalog using a machine profile allows VMs in the catalog to inherit hardware properties such as CPU count and memory size. For information, see Create a Red Hat OpenShift catalog.

The Settings node in Web Studio now includes two options to enhance the Web Studio login experience:

Login page notice: Display a custom message to share important information with administrators.
Show connected Delivery Controller: Display the FQDN of the connected Delivery Controller for added visibility and transparency.

For more information, see Settings.

Citrix Director

Microsoft call quality dashboard for monitoring and troubleshooting

This feature enhances Citrix Director by providing administrators a unified view of Microsoft Teams call performance using Microsoft Graph API integration. It enables aggregate monitoring and troubleshooting, improving user experience by streamlining IT operations for Microsoft Teams in Citrix.

The dashboard shows call details and quality metrics for each participant session. You can distinguish between regular calls, video conferences, and other collaboration sessions.

For more information, see the Microsoft Teams documentation.

Improved handling of vertical and horizontal load balancing alerts

Previously, when you set UseVerticalScalingForRdsLaunches to true and configured the “Maximum number of sessions” policy in Studio, machines moved to the “Maximum capacity” state. Director triggered alerts for “Maximum capacity” whether the limit was reached due to vertical or horizontal load balancing. There was no way to distinguish between vertical and horizontal load balancing when encountering specific errors, such as “Max Load Reached.” This caused unnecessary alerts for expected behavior in vertical scaling scenarios, wasting your time, and creating confusion.

Now, when vertical load balancing is active and a machine reaches its session limit, it moves to a new state: “Maximum capacity for vertical scaling.” Director no longer generates alerts for this new state. Alerts only trigger for “Maximum capacity” in horizontal scaling scenarios. You can view the new state in the Filters and Custom reports pages, making it easier to distinguish between expected and exceptional conditions. This enhancement helps you avoid unnecessary alerts and focus on real issues, streamlining monitoring and troubleshooting. It applies when you configure UseVerticalScalingForRdsLaunches using Set-BrokerSite and set the “Maximum number of sessions” policy in Studio.

Change in default policy behavior of the endpoint data collection used in Session topology

The default settings for the “Endpoint location data collection” and “Endpoint network latency measurement interval” policies are now disabled. These policies involve interactions with external cloud services. You can enable them in Studio to give administrators the details they need to troubleshoot Citrix performance issues reported by users.

For more information, see the End-to-end Network Hop view documentation.

Enhanced definitions of ICA® RTT and Network latency measurements in Director

The definitions and measurement methods for ICA Round Trip Time (RTT) and Network Latency in Director are now enhanced. This update changes the underlying counters and the sampling interval for these metrics. These improvements address previous limitations in how the metrics were reported. You now get more accurate and reliable insights for monitoring user experience in Citrix environments.

For more information, see the HDX metrics documentation.

Enhanced visibility of plug-in manager and optimization state for real-time communication applications

Plug-in manager details for troubleshooting third-party optimization are now available for Zoom and Webex applications. Microsoft Teams Slimcore, Zoom, and Webex now show plug-in information and optimization state on the endpoint. This information helps administrators quickly identify causes of user experience issues.

The feature provides a plug-in manager and relevant Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) details for troubleshooting. These details are available on supported client platforms in both on-premises and cloud deployments.

For more information, see Real-time communications optimization visibility documentation.

Scout

Enhanced Scout functionality for StoreFront™ machines

Scout now supports displaying the Add machine button on the Collect page when running on StoreFront type machines starting from Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops LTSR 2507. This enhancement enables you to manually add multiple StoreFront Server machines in the same cluster and trigger collection simultaneously, improving the efficiency of data collection across StoreFront deployments.

Note:

Older versions of TelemetryService do not support this feature.

Machine Creation Services™ (MCS)

Power management of Azure Local VMs with Azure Arc plug-in

Azure Local is a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution that connects the on-premises system to Azure for cloud-based services, monitoring, and management.

With this feature, MCS supports Azure Local as a new platform, and thus supports power management of VMs created on Azure Local.

For more information, see:

Azure Local for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 2507 LTSR is only available for customers with Hybrid Rights/Universal License.

Migration from unmanaged to managed disks in Azure

On September 30, 2025, Azure will officially retire unmanaged disks (that is, VHDs). After this date, you will no longer be able to start Azure VMs that use unmanaged disks. With this feature, you can migrate your MCS-provisioned Azure VMs from unmanaged to managed disks through Citrix.

The migration applies to both persistent and non-persistent machine catalogs, supporting both on-demand and legacy VMs. This ensures seamless integration with Azure’s updated disk management standards and prevents any service disruptions due to the retirement of unmanaged disks. For more information, see Migrate from unmanaged to managed disks.

You can now use the Images node to share image versions across hosting connections in VMware. This implementation ensures consistency and uniformity of images across different clusters or vCenters, enhancing deployment flexibility and operational efficiency. Alternatively, you can use PowerShell commands to achieve this goal. For more information, see Image Management.

You can now use the Images node to share image versions across hosting connections in Azure. This implementation ensures consistency and uniformity of images across different subscriptions or tenants, enhancing deployment flexibility and operational efficiency. You can also use PowerShell commands to achieve this goal. For more information, see Image Management.

Autoscale™

Exclude maintenance mode VMs from the Autoscale pool

Previously, VMs in maintenance mode were included in the Autoscale pool depending on the delivery group. For example, single-session delivery groups included VMs in maintenance mode in the Autoscale pool, while multi-session delivery groups excluded them.

With the new desktop group property PoolSizeExcludesMaintenanceMode, you can now exclude VMs in maintenance mode from the Autoscale pool irrespective of the delivery group. If you set the property to true, VMs in maintenance mode are excluded from the Autoscale pool. Conversely, if set to false, they are included. For more information, see Set-BrokerDesktopGroup.

Preview features

BCR now offers a streamlined user experience with the new Profile Sharing feature, enabling VDA-side authentication and single-sign on persistence. This enhancement eliminates redundant logins, boosting productivity by maintaining authentication and cookie persistence across BCR sessions, even after the BCR window is closed. This seamless experience further enhances security by ensuring authentication originates from the VDA, not the client.

Browser Content Redirection is further enhanced with certificate sharing support. When accessing a website from the client, the client browser may not trust the certificate from the server or the MitM proxy. In such cases, BCR may validate the Host or Proxy certificates against the VDAs certificate store. For more details, see BCR Documentation

HDX graphics superresolution upscaling

Starting with the Citrix Workspace™ app for Windows 2507 version, the HDX graphics superresolution upscaling feature enhances session performance and significantly reduces bandwidth consumption.

HDX Graphics Superresolution upscaling seamlessly downscales video regions on the Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA) and utilizes a compatible endpoint Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to upscale them back to their original resolution without noticeable quality degradation or performance impact.

For more information, see HDX Graphics Superresolution Upscaling.

Citrix Assistant application

The Citrix Assistant is an intuitive GUI tool that provides a simple, convenient experience, often requiring just a single click to significantly improve session performance or facilitate troubleshooting. You can now optimize system resources, perform network status checks with personalized recommendations, identify and terminate unresponsive applications, and manage storage by cleaning temporary files or deleting large items directly from the interface. It also includes hardware diagnostics for audio and camera devices. For information, see Citrix Assistant application (Preview).