Design Decisions

Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 are among the most popular workloads delivered by Citrix today. Both Microsoft and Citrix have worked together to develop the best user experience when running Microsoft 365 from a Citrix session in Azure. Their collaboration created applications, processes, and guidance to help you deliver the best-of-breed solution. You likely have other applications hosted on the Citrix servers that must be analyzed and migrated to Azure. These applications have applic

Overview The goal of the document is to help answer FAQs on Autoscale to achieve the best cost optimization. It provides guidance for configuring Autoscale for different admin use cases and their infrastructure and technical requirements. This document keeps evolving as more use cases and capabilities are introduced within Autoscale. Use cases related questions Can an admin configure Autoscale to first exhaust on-premises resources and only then on-demand burst to the cloud? The Autoscale s

Azure accounts are used for consolidated billing, but cannot contain Azure resources directly. Azure accounts contain one or more subscriptions. Subscriptions serve as security boundaries and they contain the actual Azure resources, such as virtual machines. A subscription is an agreement with Microsoft to use one or more Microsoft cloud platforms or services. Charges accrue based on either a per-user license fee or on cloud-based resource consumption. Subscriptions can be used to further subdi

Overview Policies provide the basis to configure and fine-tune Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops environments. Policies allow organizations to control settings based on various combinations of users, devices, or connection types and include settings for: Connections Security Bandwidth When making policy decisions, consider both Microsoft and Citrix policies to include all user experience, security, and optimization settings. This article focuses on Citrix policies only. For a list of all C

Overview Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops supports various printing solutions. It is essential to understand the available technologies and their benefits and limitations to plan and successfully implement the proper printing solution. Decision: Printer Provisioning The process of creating printers at the start of a Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops session is called printer provisioning. Multiple approaches are available: User Added Allowing users to add printers manually gives them the fl

Every business needs to be operational to generate revenue. The longer a system is down or not functioning, the more revenue that is lost for the business. At some point in the future, if the system is down long enough, the business becomes a going concern and eventually end. For some businesses, the outage can be several months, while other business cannot survive after several days. The key to a good plan is identifying what systems are critical for the business and setting the appropriat

Introduction The article covers guidance and best practices for using Citrix User Profile Manager to manage user profiles on Azure Files as the back-end storage location. The primary objective of this article is to provide you the necessary information to determine the best way to deploy User Profile Manager with Azure Files. The article discusses the Citrix and Microsoft components, describe the test methodology, and report the test results. The article also provides an analysis of the findin

Overview Citrix HDX is a broad set of technologies that provides end-users a high-definition experience for their hosted desktops, designed around the three technical principles of: • Intelligent redirection • Adaptive compression • Data de-duplication Citrix HDX decreases bandwidth consumption and optimizes the end-user experience. How much bandwidth is required for each user session is an age-old question and challenging to predict. How the user interacts with the desktop generates most o

How can I use Citrix Autoscale for both on-premises and cloud workloads? Use cloud workloads for burst capacity or for business continuity by tagging cloud workloads in the delivery group. Set Autoscale to power manage these tagged workloads. Use the selective power management feature to set the zone preference and failover to prefer on-premises workloads. Use the dynamic provisioning feature of Autoscale with low and high watermark machine counts. This approach reduces costs and still su

Overview Designing a desktop virtualization solution is simply a matter of following a proven process and aligning technical decisions with organizational and user requirements. Without the standardized and proven process, architects tend to randomly jump from topic to topic, which leads to confusion and mistakes. The recommended approach focuses on working through five distinct layers: Users are segmented into logical groups, based on personalization, security, mobility, resiliency, and ac

The purpose of this article is to dive a little deeper into Citrix Gateway integration with StoreFront: what the settings mean and design considerations for how to configure them. Gateway URLs, Call back URLs, and GSLB URLs StoreFront allows administrators to define multiple Gateways that can be used for Gateway passthrough authentication in a single Store. This feature is greatly beneficial as it minimizes the number of Stores that have to be configured in large, global deployments. We see th

A core functionality of StoreFront is the ability to aggregate and de-duplicate "common" application and desktop resources from multiple Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops) Sites. This functionality is commonly referred to as multi-site aggregation. Duplicate applications and desktops are identified based on matching Application Display Name and Application Category properties. This functionality has been available in the console as of version 3.5 and was previous

Overview This guide assists with disaster recovery (DR) architecture planning and considerations for both on-premises and cloud deployments of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. DR is a significant topic in breadth of scope in and of itself. Citrix acknowledges this document isn't a comprehensive guide to an overall DR strategy. It does not consider all aspects of DR and sometimes takes a layman’s perspective on various DR concepts. This guide is intended to address these considerations which

Overview Evaluating which is the best application delivery method is an activity as old as Citrix and has grown more complex as more application delivery technologies have been developed. Although it is a question asked frequently, the answer isn't always straightforward. Circumstances like different user demands, various application types, and new or changing delivery technologies can strongly impact the evaluation. This article is meant to be a guideline to help you identify the best applica

Introduction To meet different user requirements, the Citrix HDX protocol allows for different graphics modes to be configured. The purpose of this article is to outline the different HDX modes and how they are configured. It gives you a starting point from where you can configure your environment to best fit the needs of your users, your workload, and the current network conditions. Important to note: This article is based on Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 1912 unless stated otherwise. DIS

The primary image management solution used in Azure is Machine Creation Services (MCS) and until recently was the most common option for Citrix image management. Citrix has been focused on improving the image management within Citrix Cloud. These improvements help ease our customer's migration to the Azure cloud and spin up any workload in a matter of minutes. One of the new Citrix services includes the Image Portability Service (IPS). This service provides a way to port images between you

Citrix servers can be hosted on various platforms, including Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, and physical servers. The most time-consuming part of moving Citrix to the cloud is the planning process. The planning process requires both discovery and analysis to determine the best path for the migration. The end result of the analysis is a document that provides a migration plan. Here are the questions that you need to answer about Citrix Workload Migrations: How do I migrate my Citrix VDA hosts to Azure

One of the most common design decisions that needs to be done for every Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (CVAD) project is which provisioning model meets the business and operational requirements. The goal of this article is to describe the most common decision factors, recommendations, and different scenarios where certain provisioning model might be a better candidate. For image management, there are two provisioning models that are commonly used by Citrix administrators to manage their Citrix

Overview Remote PC Access is an easy and effective way to allow users to access their office-based, physical Windows PC. Using any endpoint device, users can remain productive regardless of their location. However, organizations want to consider the following when implementing Remote PC Access. Deployment Scenarios There are multiple ways to connect a PC to a user, each applicable to different scenarios. Office Workers In many deployments, Remote PC Access gets deployed in an office worker

Overview This article provides recommendations and guidance to estimate how many users or virtual machines (VMs) can be supported on a single physical host. This is commonly referred to as Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops “single-server scalability” (SSS). In the context of Citrix Virtual Apps (Citrix Virtual Apps) or session virtualization, it is also commonly called “user density”. The idea is to find out how many users or VMs can be ran on a single piece of hardware running a major hyperviso

Overview This paper is a joint effort between Microsoft, Citrix, and AMD to help consumers make better decisions on selecting instance types within Azure for hosting their Citrix Workloads. The goals of this document include determining the most efficient instance types to host Citrix DaaS workloads and providing guidance for customers when selecting AMD compute instances, with or without GPUs, within Azure. Azure Platform Azure is Microsoft's cloud environment where physical assets, such as

The goal of this document is to provide guidance to enterprises that are moving towards deploying Citrix Desktops-as-a-Service (DaaS) in the Microsoft Azure cloud. To provide the best possible advice to our customers, we decided to determine the answer to four key questions that impact Citrix architecture and design decisions: What is the most efficient instance series for hosting DaaS What is the most cost-effective instance type in the most efficient family What impact does the Machine

Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS): This service is the traditional on-premises Active Directory infrastructure that supports GPOs, Kerberos authentication, and domain joins. A new AD DS can be created and hosted on virtual machines in the cloud. Alternatively, an existing AD DS infrastructure can become a hybrid model with some controllers in Azure and some on-premises. In both deployment scenarios, the AD DS domain can be synchronized to Azure Active Directory (AAD) using Azure AD Connec

Overview Profile Management solutions are designed to make a user’s local profile portable so that it can be accessed from any session or device. Both Citrix User Profile Management (UPM) and Microsoft FSLogix improve on the traditional roaming profile model used in data centers. Both solutions improve the response time for users and store the user profile using Azure Files. The benefits of Citrix Profile Management are outlined later on. Citrix User Profile Management Integrates with the fo

Overview Selecting the best VDI model starts with properly defining user groups and then aligning the requirements with the capabilities of the VDI models. Although there are multiple approaches towards defining user groups, it is often easiest to align user groups with departments. Typically most users within the same department or organizational unit consumes the same set of applications. User Segmentation Depending on the size of the department, there might be a subset of users with unique