XenTegra - The Citrix Session

In this episode of The Citrix Session, episode 168, host Bill Sutton from XenTegra is joined by Citrix experts Geremy Myers and Todd Smith for an engaging discussion on the latest updates and insights into Citrix solutions. Andy Whiteside also joins in, sharing his humorous take on recent Citrix topics and providing a lighthearted but informative atmosphere.

Key highlights of the episode include:

• The latest Citrix updates that IT professionals need to know.
• Deep dives into provisioning services and their real-world applications.
• Expert tips on optimizing Citrix environments for better performance.

Whether you're a seasoned Citrix user or new to the platform, this episode offers valuable perspectives and actionable takeaways to enhance your Citrix experience.

Don't miss out on the practical insights shared by these industry leaders!

Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) is one of the two image management technologies available in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and Citrix DaaS.  Historically PVS has been used to deliver Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop workloads (VDA's) to servers and virtual machines from a single image over the network.  However, it can also be used without CVAD/DaaS as a standalone product, physically streaming the OS disk to an endpoint device. These endpoint devices can be “dummy terminals” with no hard drives at all, zero/thin clients, high-end compute and graphics devices, and everything in between.  This can include additional use cases for Security and locations with devices without hard drives.

 In this episode we discuss the history of PVS and some of its applicable use cases.  We also cover some technical aspects of PVS and the benefits enabled by the roll-forward and roll-back of images. 

Host:  Bill Sutton

Co-Host:  Geremy Myers

Co-Host:  Todd Smith

In this episode of our podcast, Bill Sutton, Andy Whiteside, and Geremy Myers discuss the importance of resource centralization for IT advantage in incident recovery, inspired by a blog post by Adam Lotz, Director of Product Marketing at Citrix. We'll dive into the benefits and strategies of centralizing resources, explaining how this approach can streamline IT operations and enhance resilience during disruptions.

Resource centralization is key for maintaining operational continuity and minimizing downtime, which can have significant financial implications. We'll explore real-world examples and practical tips for leveraging centralization to ensure your IT environment remains robust and responsive, even in the face of unexpected incidents.

Ensuring business continuity through centralized resources allows IT teams to respond swiftly and effectively during disruptions. By prioritizing centralization, businesses can significantly reduce the impact of system outages and maintain seamless access to critical applications and data.

In this episode of our podcast, Bill Sutton, Andy Whiteside, and Geremy Myers explore key resiliency features in Citrix DaaS that are critical yet often overlooked, misunderstood, or misconfigured by administrators. We'll delve deep into the Local Host Cache (LHC) and Service Continuity features, discussing how they enable highly available environments capable of tolerating infrastructure outages while maintaining continuous user access to critical applications and desktops.

Ensuring business continuity through a resilient environment is crucial. It allows users to access highly available resources during disruptions, such as power outages or unexpected downtime. This capability is vital as every minute of inactivity due to system outages can translate to significant financial losses. By prioritizing a highly available and resilient environment, businesses can greatly minimize the financial impact of downtime.

Host:  Bill Sutton
Co-host:  Andy Whiteside
Co-host:  Geremy Myers

XenServer has been a part of the Citrix family since the acquisition of XenSource in 2007.  It is a solid player in the virtualization market particularly for running Citrix workloads.  With purpose built features for improving the performance of virtual desktops such as Intellicache, Read Caching, PVS-Accelerator, and GPU virtualization many organizations leverage XenServer to host and deliver their Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and Citrix DaaS workloads.

Citrix recently announced that XenServer 8 is now included with their new subscription options:  Citrix for Private Cloud, Citrix Universal Hybrid Multi-Cloud, and Citrix Platform License.  In this episode we discuss XenServer generally as well as these new offerings and how they can be leveraged by customers. 

Host:  Bill Sutton
Co-host:  Andy Whiteside
Co-host:  Geremy Myers

In today’s rapidly evolving cloud computing environment, balancing operational costs, user experience, and environmental sustainability is challenging and time-consuming for IT organizations. The recent general availability (GA) of Azure Hibernation with Citrix DaaS addresses these challenges. Since its initial tech preview, over 160 customers have successfully trialed this feature, transforming the management of their Azure virtual desktop infrastructure.

Technology that drives actual cloud cost reduction

Azure Hibernation allows businesses to pause virtual machines (VMs) when not in use, significantly reducing compute costs. It saves the VM’s memory contents to the OS disk and deallocates the machine, stopping billing for compute resources and only charging for storage. Combined with Citrix AutoScale, this feature helps organizations manage VMs efficiently based on user demand, ensuring that resources are used only when necessary.

Host: Bill Sutton
Co-Host: Geremy Meyers

Building upon the robust security of Linux thin clients, Citrix is thrilled to announce the expansion of its Enterprise Browser offerings to Linux, marking a significant step in our access security platform expansion strategy. This empowers organizations to further secure access to web and SaaS applications, particularly for environments reliant on Linux thin clients, which are already locked down by design and managed by thin client vendors.

This release, currently available as a private tech preview, comes packed with powerful features that are waiting for you to explore. As part of this preview, let’s dive into its advanced capabilities, particularly in the context of enhanced security for Linux thin clients:

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Bill Sutton
Co-host: Geremy Meyers
Co-host: Monica Griesemer

If you’re ready to leverage the new LTSR but are still working on your upgrade plan, don’t worry. We have quite a few resources available to help you have a successful upgrade including our plan, upgrade, succeed blog series, the latest Citrix Master Class, an FAQ blog for answers to your most pressing LTSR questions from the Citrix Master Class, and our tech paper on parallel migration. 

We are also incredibly excited to announce that the Citrix Workspace app 2402 LTSR for Windows is now generally available! This Citrix Workspace app LTSR for Windows includes an extended 3 years of support to help ease your client update processes.

Moving fully to the cloud isn’t for everyone, and we know that. That’s why we’ve continued to invest in our on-premises solutions so you can leverage cloud capabilities on premises too. The Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 2402 LTSR includes several years’ worth of features to take advantage of. Some of these features were previously only offered in the cloud, and a plethora of on-premises features have been added since the release of the last LTSR in March of 2022. Additionally, customers on our current release (CR) track can leverage this release as a regular update within their environments. So let’s take a closer look at what the 2402 LTSR can do for you.

Host: Bill Sutton
Co-host: Geremy Meyers

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again – if you are on the Citrix Long Term Service Release (LTSR) track, you’ve most likely been missing out on a lot of great features. But I get it; there are many valid reasons for choosing this path, including extended support. The good news is that Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 2402 LTSR is now available, and you can now take advantage of all the great features and enhancements made available over the last couple of years.

This post is focused exclusively on our high-definition experience (HDX) capabilities. More specifically, the key HDX features and enhancements that we’ve introduced since the last LTSR (2203) was released. If you are still using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 1912 LTSR, you should also take a look at my other post that talks about key features released between Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 1912 LTSR and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 2203 LTSR.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Bill Sutton