Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops

Autoscale

May 16, 2025

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Note:

You can manage your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployment using two management consoles: Web Studio (web-based) and Citrix Studio (Windows-based). This feature is available only in Web Studio.

Autoscale is a feature that provides a consistent, high-performance solution to proactively power manage your machines. It aims to balance costs and user experience.

Autoscale enables proactive power management of all registered single-session and multi-session OS machines in a delivery group.

Autoscale features include:

Typical use cases

The following are the scenarios where AutoScale is commonly used.

Scheduled-based machine powering on to handle expected workload

Autoscale allows admins to vary the powered-on capacity with 30 min granularity and allows for different schedules on different days. If a volatile workload is expected, it is advised to configure the capacity buffer to avoid users having to wait for machines to power on.
Cloud burst use case

Autoscale provides the flexibility to power manage only a subset of machines in a delivery group. To achieve this, apply a tag to one or more machines and then configure Autoscale to power manage only tagged machines.

This feature can be useful in cloud bursting use cases, where you want to use on-premises resources (or reserved public cloud instances) to handle workloads before cloud-based resources address additional demand (that is, burst workloads).
Users ramping up slowly or seasonal users

When an organization has users onboarding slowly and does not want to provision the entire capacity ahead of time, then the dynamic provisioning feature can help. The feature constantly evaluates the load on the delivery group and dynamically scale up or down the number of machines in the delivery group based on the current load conditions. An admin must define the high and low watermark for the load on the delivery group to create machines. Admins can optionally define the maximum number of machines to be provisioned and tags to be applied to these machines.

Supported VDA hosting platforms

Autoscale supports all the platforms that Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops supports. This includes various infrastructure platforms including XenServer, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure Resource Manager, VMware vSphere, and many more. For a complete list of supported platforms, see System requirements for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.

Note:

When adding public cloud host connections to your deployment, you need Hybrid Rights License. For information about Hybrid Rights License, see Transition and Trade-Up (TTU) with Hybrid Rights. For information about adding a license, see Create a site.

Supported workloads

Autoscale supports both multi-session OS and single-session OS delivery groups. There are three user interfaces to be aware of:

Autoscale user interface for multi-session OS delivery groups (formerly RDS delivery groups)
Autoscale user interface for single-session OS random (pooled) delivery groups (formerly pooled VDI delivery groups)
Autoscale user interface for single-session OS static delivery groups (formerly static VDI delivery groups)

For more information about the user interfaces for different delivery groups, see Autoscale user interfaces.

Benefits

The Autoscale feature delivers the following benefits:

Provide you with a single, consistent mechanism to power manage machines in a delivery group.
Ensure availability and control costs by powering machines with load-based or schedule-based power management, or a combination of both.
To monitor metrics such as cost savings and capacity utilization, and to enable notifications, use Director.

Watch a 2-minute video

The following video provides a quick tour of Autoscale.

The official version of this content is in English. Some of the Cloud Software Group documentation content is machine translated for your convenience only. Cloud Software Group has no control over machine-translated content, which may contain errors, inaccuracies or unsuitable language. No warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, is made as to the accuracy, reliability, suitability, or correctness of any translations made from the English original into any other language, or that your Cloud Software Group product or service conforms to any machine translated content, and any warranty provided under the applicable end user license agreement or terms of service, or any other agreement with Cloud Software Group, that the product or service conforms with any documentation shall not apply to the extent that such documentation has been machine translated. Cloud Software Group will not be held responsible for any damage or issues that may arise from using machine-translated content.

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Autoscale

May 16, 2025

Contributed by:

May 16, 2025

Contributed by:

Autoscale

Typical use cases

Supported VDA hosting platforms

Supported workloads

Benefits

Watch a 2-minute video

In this article