The Citrix Session

As I planned out this blog series, my original intention was to cover the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) for Azure in three parts: the first dedicated to introducing the design principles for enterprise-scale landing zones, and the second and third covering the critical design areas. If you’ve read the previous entries in the series (and I encourage you to), you were probably wondering, what about the critical design areas for Azure networking and monitoring?

As I started, and as the content started piling up, it got me thinking back on a few projects and the critical design areas where customers have commonly stumbled. So, I decided to mix up the order and add a fourth part for a more in-depth discussion on the remaining critical design areas:

• Network topology and connectivity
• Management and monitoring

In this post, I will highlight the relevant Azure capabilities and considerations when applying these capabilities to Citrix design and operations. Like before, each of these areas could have enough information for their own blog posts, so I will focus primarily on key insights or lessons learned.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Kevin Nardone

We’re rolling into the new year right where we left off, continuing to release new features that help our customers adapt to business challenges and securely deploy a digital workspace with confidence, regardless of where they are on their cloud journey.

We are happy to announce the rollout of our latest features and developments with the release of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7 version 2103. This release, along with our continual cloud service enhancements, will help you to deliver the IT agility you need for 2021 and beyond.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Bill Sutton
Guest: Nitin Sharma

Over the past year, there has been much speculation about what the future of work might look like in a post-pandemic world. Less often have we talked about what education might look like. The global pandemic has forced everyone to adapt, but education institutions have had a huge mountain to climb, being steeped in tradition and often thriving around a campus-based culture. Up to a year ago, remote learning on such a grand scale was never thought possible, nor was it necessarily the ambition.

So much has shifted in 12 months, and despite best efforts to acclimate to a new way of learning, many challenges remain. Above all, the pandemic has shone a spotlight on the need for universities to offer a consistent learning environment between the campus and those accessing lessons remotely to ensure future success and resilience. If we consider that universities are nurturing the upcoming generation of workplace talent, perhaps this builds a case for us tackling the future of our education system first, to then run in parallel with workplace evolution.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Bill Sutton
Guest: Mark Sweeney

At Citrix, we’re dedicated to supporting the hybrid-cloud world. With the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service managing your on-premises workloads alongside cloud hosted apps and desktops, you can achieve IT flexibility and scaling that dramatically expands on traditional IT capabilities. Our partnership with Microsoft allows us to deliver an optimized experience with Windows Virtual Desktop, delivering new workloads quickly and efficiently from the Microsoft Azure cloud while delivering a better ROI compared to Windows Virtual Desktop standalone deployments.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Bill Sutton
Guest: Vishal Ganeriwala

These sessions discuss the following topics, blogs, and support article: Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service features

“Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service offerings provide simplified IT management and hybrid-cloud flexibility for virtual applications, VDI, and managed desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) deployments. Please refer to the sections below to learn which features are available across editions.

For information specific on-premises releases, please see the on-premises editions matrix. For a comparison of the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Premium service to the latest on-prem releases, please see the release feature matrix.”

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Bill Sutton
Co-Host: Trevor Mansell

A year ago, many of us left our office desks, clutching laptops under one arm and a bag full of desk ornaments and cords under another, thinking we’d be back in the office in a couple of weeks. IT, on the other hand, scrambled to refocus efforts on business continuity initiatives that would support a remote workforce, striving to maintain productivity while ensuring security wasn’t compromised.

And while events over the past year have shifted IT priorities across the board, businesses are in fact accelerating their digital transformation, despite the disruption and, in some cases, declining revenue.  That’s for good reason — organizations and departments that focus on operational efficiency while investing in the future report 10 percent higher growth than their competitors. Combined with the remote flexibility many organizations plan to offer their employees, leaders are asking:

How can we accelerate our digital transformation journey, while also ensuring we’re providing our employees the tools they need to be successful regardless of location?

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Bill Sutton
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

At the heart of delivering that optimized user experience is our HDX technology. HDX spans multimedia, unified communications, graphics acceleration, printing, peripherals, and our ICA protocol with intelligence to dynamically optimize the virtual session.

With every Citrix Virtual App and Desktop release, our HDX team releases a bundle of features designed to optimize the experience of virtual sessions, whether they’re minor end-user enhancements like presenting a battery status indicator or session timeout counter, or something more significant like optimizing CPU/memory load of the VDA. While there have been a number of HDX innovations over the past two years, I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight some of the most popular.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Bill Sutton
Co-Host: Ben Rogers
Guest: Nitin Sharma

Citrix and Google Cloud are longtime partners, and as we’ve moved into this new chapter of work — “The Remote Work Era” — our partnership has only grown stronger. From integrations with Chrome OS, to the ability to leverage Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS) on Google Cloud Platform (announced at our Summit Series), we are evolving together to bring the best experience to our customers.

That’s why we are incredibly excited to announce that we are officially a Chrome Enterprise Recommended partner! Chrome Enterprise Recommended is Google’s partner program for third-party solutions that are verified as meeting technical and support standards for Chrome OS. This program enables best-of-breed solutions to lead the way in the future of computing. Let’s take a closer look at what this partnership means.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Bill Sutton
Co-Host: Ben Rogers
Guest: Monica Griesemer

These sessions discuss the following topics, blogs, and support article: Citrix Analytics for Performance: Delivering true value for customers

Performance Analytics is a Citrix Analytics service (CAS) offering that enables you to track, aggregate, and visualize key performance indicators of your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops environment.

Broadly,

• Performance Analytics aggregates Site performance metrics into easy-to-view User Experience and Infrastructure dashboards. They help you analyze the user experience and optimize the usage of your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Sites.
• Performance Analytics supports multi-Site aggregation and reporting. It aggregates performance metrics across your Cloud and on-premises setups. Hence, you can view data for all the Sites in your environment in a single console.
• Performance Analytics quantifies the user performance factors and classifies the users based on these factors. It provides actionable insights to troubleshoot failures, screen lags, delayed session logons, and other performance indicators.
• Performance Analytics allows you to find and filter metrics to narrow down to specific users or sessions facing performance issues.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Bill Sutton
Guest: Allen Furmanski
Guest:  Eric Kenney
Guest:  Ben Rogers

These sessions discuss the following topics, blogs, and support article: Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service features

“Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service offerings provide simplified IT management and hybrid-cloud flexibility for virtual applications, VDI, and managed desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) deployments. Please refer to the sections below to learn which features are available across editions.

For information specific on-premises releases, please see the on-premises editions matrix. For a comparison of the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Premium service to the latest on-prem releases, please see the release feature matrix.”

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Bill Sutton
Guest: Pete Downing
Guest: Trevor Mansell