Citrix Cloud Hybrid

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Citrix Cloud
Developer(s)Citrix Systems
Initial release20 August 2015; 5 years ago
LicenseProprietary
Websitewww.citrix.com/products/citrix-cloud
  1. If the service package purchased is a Citrix Cloud transition or trade-up package with hybrid rights, those perpetual on-premises licenses which are the subject of the transition or trade-up are rescinded upon the purchase, but are replaced with term on-premises licenses for a license model and term defined by the relevant transition or trade-up SKU.
  2. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop Service account with a Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service entitlement and a resource location setup in Azure. Master VM  (Windows 10 1607 or newer) joined to an Active Directory Domain. Register the master VM to Azure AD, as a Hybrid Azure AD joined device.
  3. Hello All i would like some advice on the options for DR with workspace cloud and multiple Azure regions. I.e US east and west coast failover between the two what config is needed in cloud studio around catalogs / DGs? What config is required in the Azure regions? Is there another way to achieve.

A single place to simplify delivery of Citrix technologies. Provide secure access to apps, data and IT tools. Deploy on any cloud or infrastructure.

Citrix Cloud is a cloud management platform that allows organizations to deploy cloud-hosted desktops and apps to end users. It was developed by Citrix Systems and released in 2015.

Overview[edit]

Citrix Cloud is a cloud-based platform for managing and deploying Citrix products and desktops and applications to end users using any type of cloud, whether public, private or hybrid, or on-premises hardware.[1] The product supports cloud-based versions of every major Citrix product. These can be accessed together as an integrated 'workspace' or independently.[2][3]

Features[edit]

Citrix Cloud enables cloud services for Citrix products XenApp, XenDesktop, XenMobile, ShareFile, and NetScaler.[1] In addition, Citrix has developed several cloud-native services, including its Secure Browser Service.[4]

Citrix

Citrix Cloud is compatible with any device and cloud or data center and can be synced via Citrix Cloud Connector.[5] As of May 2016, Citrix states that Microsoft Azure is its preferred cloud partner.[6] Citrix platforms reside in Citrix Cloud, however other applications and resources may make use of other clouds and infrastructures.[5] A company's IT department retains the ability to choose a custom combination of data centers and cloud providers.[2] Citrix continuously updates Citrix Cloud so that users are automatically running the most current version.[7]

As of 2015, Citrix Cloud offers four different service packages.[8]

History[edit]

Citrix Workspace Cloud was announced in May 2015 at the company's industry conference, Citrix Synergy.[2] The offering launched in August 2015 with four core services: App and Desktop Service, Lifecycle Management, Secure Documents, and Mobility.[9] The company positioned Workspace Cloud as an alternative to XenDesktop and XenApp, the company's traditional desktop and application virtualization platforms.[5]

The company renamed Citrix Workspace Cloud to Citrix Cloud in May 2016.r[10] In addition, cloud services were renamed with cloud-based versions of other Citrix products. XenDesktop and XenApp Service, ShareFile, and XenMobile Service replaced Desktop and App Service, Secure Documents Service, and Mobility Service, respectively.[11] The company also announced in 2016 that Citrix Cloud users that are Windows 10 Enterprise customers would be able to access Windows 10 images on Azure via XenDesktop without having to pay an additional license fee.[1]

Reception[edit]

Prior to its release, Citrix Workspace Cloud was praised by desktop virtualization blogger Brian Madden for its concept[12] and CMSWire noted that it stood out among competitors as the only product of its kind.[13]

Following its release, TechTarget stated that the platform was 'intriguing' that it 'provide[s] something IT professionals have wanted for a very long time: centralized management of on-premises and cloud desktop and application workloads', but 'also surprisingly expensive'.[14] A review in Computerworld suggested the hybrid nature of the product was compatible with the rising use of hybrid cloud implementations by businesses, but that Citrix would need to ensure 'adequate support for critical applications and [make] sure that company policies, such as access rules, are followed properly'.[15]

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ abcPhil Goldstein (24 May 2016). 'Citrix Synergy 2016: Citrix Updates Cloud Tools, Promises to Unlock Productivity'. BizTech Magazine. Retrieved 28 July 2016.
  2. ^ abcBridget Botelho (May 7, 2015). 'Citrix Workspace Cloud to be the belle of the Synergy ball'. Retrieved 15 July 2016.
  3. ^'Cloud Computing Company'. Sunday, June 7, 2020
  4. ^Jeffrey Schwartz (March 24, 2016). 'Citrix Launches Secure Browser Service for Virtual Web Apps'. Redmond Magazine. Retrieved 28 July 2016.
  5. ^ abcBrien Posey (April 16, 2016). 'How Citrix Workspace Cloud compares to XenApp and XenDesktop'. TechTarget. Retrieved 27 July 2016.
  6. ^Edward Gately (May 25, 2016). 'Citrix Announces New Products And Services, Picks Microsoft Azure As Preferred Cloud'. Channel Partners Online. Retrieved 29 July 2016.
  7. ^Gabe Knuth (January 2016). 'Pricing adjustments position Citrix Workspace Cloud for success'. Retrieved 15 July 2016.
  8. ^Keith Ward (August 20, 2015). 'Citrix Unveils Workspace Cloud'. Virtualization Review. Retrieved 15 July 2016.
  9. ^Jits Landedijk (February 25, 2016). 'Build, connect and extend to the cloud with Citrix Workspace Cloud – Part 1'. Retrieved 15 July 2016.
  10. ^Jefferey Schwartz (June 30, 2016). 'Microsoft and Citrix Solidify Deep Friendship'. Redmond Magazine. Retrieved 15 July 2016.
  11. ^Joe Vaccaro (May 18, 2016). 'Citrix Cloud: The Delivery Fabric to Say 'Yes' to Cloud'. Citrix.com. Retrieved 29 July 2016.
  12. ^Brian Madden (May 11, 2014). 'Why Citrix Workspace Services is the future of XenApp and XenDesktop. (And why it's awesome!)'. BrianMadden.com. Retrieved 16 November 2016.
  13. ^Virginia Backaitis (May 13, 2015). 'Is Citrix's Workspace Cloud All That Special?'. CMSWire. Retrieved 16 November 2016.
  14. ^Gabe Knuth (December 4, 2015). 'Citrix Workspace Cloud pricing is an opportunity for VMware to pounce'. TechTarget. Retrieved 16 November 2016.
  15. ^Katherine Noyes (May 12, 2015). 'Citrix launches Workspace Cloud with BYOD flexibility'. Computerworld. Retrieved 16 November 2016.
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Citrix_Cloud&oldid=997381934'

The evolution of cloud computing has transformed all aspects of the IT landscape – how applications are deployed, how data is consumed and stored, how security is managed, and so on. A recent Forbes survey reports that in the span of 15 months, about 80% of all IT funds will be committed to cloud solutions. Cloud adoption has also started in the end-user computing (EUC) world. From Citrix’s latest financial update, we can see that Citrix Cloud accounts for over 10% of their annual revenue and is growing at over 40% year on year.

32% of organizations are using virtual desktops or virtualized applications in the cloud, while 48% are considering this in the future.

A survey by eG Innovations and DABCCCitrix Troubleshooting 101: Watch Webinar »

Citrix Cloud services offer a simple, fast, and flexible way of delivering digital workspaces. These are rendered as hybrid cloud services where Citrix provides cloud-based management while customers decide where workloads are located. In the hybrid deployment model, Citrix implements and manages the Citrix Delivery Controller, StoreFront, ADC Gateway, SQL Server, License Server, etc. This is called the Citrix Control Plane. On the other hand, the Citrix customer or service provider is required to implement the Virtual Apps and Desktop VDAs in their datacenters (or private/public cloud). The Citrix components in the datacenter are referred to as the Resource Plane. To enable connectivity between these two planes, one or more Citrix Cloud Connectors need to be installed (usually installed in pairs for HA) and managed in the resource plane.

A typical Citrix Cloud deployment

The Performance Monitoring Challenge: On-prem vs. Citrix Cloud

Solution

Monitoring the performance of Citrix Cloud services is challenging for several reasons:

  • The Citrix Cloud architecture is distributed and involves several domains of control. There may be multiple administrators responsible for elements in the Resource Plane. The Control Plane is hosted and managed by Citrix, and organizations do not have visibility into its operation and performance.
  • Some organizations may deploy the Resource Plane in a public cloud – AWS, Azure, etc. Performance of the public cloud can also affect the user experience.
  • Network connectivity between the Resource Plane and Control Plane is also important. Slowness in the inter-connecting network will affect the quality of Citrix services.
  • At the same time, end users are not aware of or interested in knowing the complexity of the Citrix Cloud architecture. They will still expect the performance of Citrix services to be on-par with that of physical apps and desktops.

Therefore, performance monitoring of Citrix Cloud is challenging, and when users complain about slowness, Citrix administrators have to be able to determine what is causing the problem – is it to do with the Citrix Resource Plane and its components, or the public cloud, or the Citrix Control Plane, or the network interconnecting the resource and control planes?

Requirements for Citrix Cloud Monitoring

From the above analysis, it is clear that the built-in tools from Citrix are not sufficient for monitoring Citrix Cloud environments effectively. Organizations deploying Citrix Cloud need to be able to:

Built-in Tools from Citrix: Do They Suffice for Citrix Cloud Monitoring?

There are several tools available for monitoring the availability and performance of Citrix Cloud services:

  • Citrix admins can check the Citrix Cloud portal – status.cloud.com. Citrix posts updates if they have known problems that are impacting their cloud services. Typically, only significant outages that are affecting many customers are reported here.
  • Citrix’s SLA for Citrix Cloud is based only on availability. So, if there are performance issues, they are mostly attended to reactively. Often customers must report issues to have them investigated.
  • As part of your Citrix Cloud subscription, you have access to Citrix Director in the cloud. This gives you insights into session usage, activity, logon times, and such. But you don’t get end-to-end insights to troubleshoot the cause of slowness – i.e., whether it is in your infrastructure, with a hypervisor or storage, with your PVS server, or with your network connectivity to the cloud, or in the cloud.
  • Finally, Citrix has just introduced Performance Analytics. This is mainly a way to easily interpret aggregate metrics collected by Citrix Director into a single metric that indicates if your users are happy or not. Analytics does not provide you any additional insights for troubleshooting performance issues. Plus, this is a paid tool that must be purchased additionally.

Definition Of Hybrid Cloud

Citrix cloud hybridstatus.cloud.comCitrix DirectorCitrix Analytics

Citrix Hybrid Cloud Solution

  • No performance SLAs: Only availability guaranteed
  • Monitoring is reactive: Issues are reported only when many customers are impacted
  • Performance issues need to be reported to Citrix support and wait for their response and resolution
  • Mainly session-level data
  • No visibility into the infrastructure and cloud-connectivity issues
  • Limited root cause diagnosis
  • Limited historical data retention (only 90 days)
  • Focuses only on some UX metrics: logon, latency, failure, reconnects
  • Aggregates data across multiple sites
  • Licensed and priced separately
  • Limited historical data retention
  • Not very helpful for troubleshooting

In summary, the built-in Citrix monitoring tools:

  • Lack the ability to monitor user experience end to end
  • Do not provide monitoring to all the Citrix and non-Citrix tiers of the Citrix Cloud service delivery chain
  • Force organizations to use several monitoring tools to troubleshoot performance issues
  • Do not provide the analytics that organizations need to right-size, optimize and plan their Citrix Cloud deployment

eG Enterprise: Enabling Four Best Practices for Citrix Cloud Monitoring

eG Enterprise addresses the performance monitoring needs of organizations that are deploying Citrix Cloud. Using eG Enterprise organizations can:

  • Measure the user experience of virtual apps/desktop service delivery: As with any cloud service, synthetic monitoring is important as it touches every tier of the service delivery chain. eG Enterprise has built-in synthetic monitoring tools to simulate user logons, application launch and application access in virtual apps/desktop sessions. Simulations can be set up from multiple locations to understand performance from each location. At the same time, through integration with Citrix Cloud APIs and using agents deployed in the Resource Plane, eG Enterprise collects real user experience data. Every user logon to the Citrix site, every application launch and the latencies seen by every user session are tracked, so administrators can be alerted to performance anomalies in advance.
    • Deep user logon drilldowns into Citrix Cloud Delivery Controller
  • Monitor every layer and every tier of the hybrid Citrix cloud infrastructure: Once you know that there is a performance issue, the immediate next question is what is causing it. And because of the distributed nature of the Citrix Cloud environment, Citrix admins need visibility of all components of the Citrix delivery stream – from the Control Plane to the Resource Plane and the Cloud Connectors in between. With eG Enterprise, Citrix admins get a single pane of glass to monitor all aspects of the Control Plane and the Resource Plane, as well as any public cloud infrastructure used and the interconnecting network’s performance.
  • Isolate the root cause of performance problems: When you get data from all the tiers, you will need help determining where the root cause of the problem is. By understanding the dependencies between tiers — i.e. between the Virtual Apps server and the underlying virtual machine and host, between the Cloud Delivery Controller and the Cloud Connector and so on — you will be able to pinpoint the potential root cause of performance bottlenecks. Using intuitive topology maps, eG Enterprise allows administrators to visualize interdependencies easily between the Control Plane, the Cloud Connector, components in the resource plane, and the supporting on-premises/cloud infrastructure for root cause diagnosis. An automatic root-cause diagnosis engine automatically analyzes performance anomalies in each tier and uses the dependency map to determine where the root-cause of a problem lies.
    • End-to-end topology of a Citrix Cloud environment
  • Get insights for performance optimization and cloud migration: Historical insight plays a vital role in performance management. There is lot to learn from data – trends, patterns, anomalies, bottlenecks, and so on. eG Enterprise provides Citrix admins the historical reports that provide actionable insight to optimize capacity on their Virtual Apps and Virtual Desktops servers and hypervisors. Historical reports also help perform migration assessments to compare KPIs pre- and post-migration.
    • Webinar: Is Citrix Cloud Enterprise Ready? How to Prepare for Your Cloud Migration »

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