It’s no secret that Citrix continues to innovate and deliver new capabilities to make your environments more flexible, increase deployment speed, and improve end user experiences. Citrix is also fully committed to meeting organizations where they are in their deployment journeys, and the Citrix Universal subscription is only our first step in this journey. 

With the move toward Citrix Universal subscription, we are not only adding features to our Citrix DaaS cloud service, but we are continuing to add features and capabilities to on-premises deployments.

That’s why we are excited to announce the release of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7 2305! This IT-managed current release delivers new end user enhancements, security capabilities, and much more that we will discuss below.

As we evolve and gain input from our customers, we are building more functionality inside of four major categories. We have broken out our feature updates into each of these groups: 

• Operational and IT Efficiency
• Workload and Device Flexibility 
• Security and Compliance
• Employee Experience Technology

Our approach goes beyond the traditional cloud and on-prem categorizations, providing a comprehensive overview of the capabilities offered by the Citrix platform. Let’s dive right into these developments!

Improving Operational and IT Efficiency

Save money with Autoscale for on-premises

Citrix Autoscale is now available for IT-managed Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployments!

This addition allows organizations to save on compute costs with optimizations and automation, while retaining a high performance user experience. This capability allows for power management of load-based and schedule-based scaling alongside cost and capacity visualizations. Additionally, Autoscale includes dynamic provisioning to create and delete machines based on admin controls. 

Lastly, Autoscale allows for vertical load balancing to fill up machines before powering on new ones. It is important to note that this feature is dependent on Web Studio, which is now available for on-prem term or Citrix Universal license subscribers. Check out more about Autoscale here. 

You can now create PVS catalogs from Citrix DaaS Studio Tech Preview

We have introduced a tech preview for PVS to have access to MCS features for on-premises and cloud. Organizations are now able to use MCS provisioning to create VMs for PVS. PVS can now support enterprise MCS features like identity management, on-demand cache disk, and many more. Additionally, admins now can manage PVS provisioning from Studio with unified UI and workflow to streamline tasks. 

Simplifying provisioning with MCS enhancements

Citrix is bringing machine creation services (MCS) updates to on-prem hypervisors. Let’s take a closer look at the new features: 

• Descriptions for image updates: Manage machine catalogs more efficiently through PowerShell, add and retrieve notes for image descriptions, and maintain image update records and simplify audit processes.
• Support for MAK activation: Provision machine catalogs with VMs activated through Multiple Activation Key, provision both persistent and non-persistent catalogs, utilize Multiple Activation Key (MAK) for VM activation, and preserve activation counts during Windows activation.
• Additional Security identifiers: Easily identify machines with unique identifiers, streamline virtual machine creation process, gain better control over virtual machine configurations.

Introducing VDA Upgrade service

The VDA Upgrade service for cloud-based Citrix workloads is a new capability built to accelerate and simplify VDA lifecycle maintenance.

Admins are now able to quickly push VDA upgrades to persistent machines via Web Studio or PowerShell. They can choose how to upgrade VDAs by selecting individual machines, in batches of up to 50, or entire machine catalogs. Additionally admins are able to schedule upgrades to happen automatically when no active sessions are present. This is a huge time saver, eliminating the manual process of automating VDA upgrades without the need for SCCM or custom scripts.

Implementing Session Launch Diagnostics in Citrix DaaS Monitor Tech Preview

This new tech preview allows admins to understand why and where a session failed for any user. The user who receives the error is given a unique transaction ID and is then able to share it with an admin. Upon searching for this ID in Citrix DaaS Monitor, the admin is shown a complete history of the failed session including which component had failures or warnings with the error-code. The admin can then click to learn more about the error including reasons and remediation steps as prescribed by Citrix product teams. This is a great new feature that allows admins to easily troubleshoot user sessions and give end users a better overall experience. 

Reduce costs with VDI Reclamation service Tech Preview

Leveraging unused virtual resources is a huge capability for organizations working to reduce cloud spend. With the tech preview of our VDI reclamation service, Admins are able to auto-tag unused resources to be reclaimed and given to users who need them, instead of those resources sitting idle. Previously, admins created custom scripts to identify and reclaim unused VDIs, now with automated tagging, the need for custom scripts is eliminated as the feature easily identifies inactive machines. Check out more information and configuration guidelines on our Citrix VDI Reclamation service blog. 

Delivering Workload and Device Flexibility

New enhancements with Google Cloud

Citrix Cloud now supports using Google Cloud Identity as an identity provider to authenticate subscribers signing in to their workspaces. By using Google Identity with Citrix Cloud, you can provide a unified sign-in experience for accessing Citrix Workspace and Google resources. This currently only supports end-users and support for administrators is coming soon. More information can be found here. 

Citrix is also excited to announce that we have a new offering on the Google Cloud Marketplace. We are now offering a Citrix-prepared Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) Image. It is a pre-built Rocky Linux multi-session desktop image with the latest Citrix VDA installed and ready to use with Citrix DaaS. More information can be found here. This is a great option for organizations using Citrix and Google as you are able to leverage Google Cloud Commit funds to purchase Citrix DaaS licenses. 

Lastly, Citrix has new capabilities designed to save time for administrators who use Machine Creation Services (MCS) on Google Cloud. You can now select a Google Cloud instance template as an input for the machine profile. Instance templates are lightweight resources in Google Cloud, therefore are very cost effective. More information can be found here.

Provisioning and Performance enhancements with AWS

As we grow our partnership with AWS, we are continuing to deliver provisioning and performance improvements to ease the admin burden. Over the past few months, we have been rolling out a number of enhancements with Citrix and Amazon Machine Images (AMI). We have added a filter capability for AMI inventories and have accelerated AMI resource loading to speed admin processes. We are also enabling Citrix Studio to display useful property information and applicable choices to admin to avoid failures with Machine profile. For more information on implementing Citrix workloads with AWS, take a look at our product documentation. 

Cost Savings and Flexibility on Azure

We are continuously adding more capabilities to Citrix on Azure. This quarter, we added greater flexibility to Citrix and Azure deployments when applying custom properties to existing MCS provisioned machines. We also added the ability for deployments to automatically switch to a lower tier storage type at shutdown to save costs. We have also made it simple to convert to the new machine profile catalogs to ease feature adoption and expand available properties. For all the information on implementing Citrix with Azure, check out our product documentation. 

Citrix Support for Nutanix Cloud Clusters on Azure

We are officially supporting Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Azure for Citrix DaaS and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. The new Citrix plugin for NC2 is designed to ensure seamless migration of Citrix workloads from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. By leveraging Nutanix’s native protection and replication capabilities, admins can also scale their operations effortlessly, save on cloud infrastructure costs, and maintain consistent management procedures. NC2 is available via the Azure marketplace, streamlining operations across multiple clouds without added complexity. Take a look at our latest blog post for more information.

Expanding choice with Linux VDA

The Linux VDA continues to be a great option for developers and test environments, alike. We are continuing to add new capabilities to the Linux VDA, and these past few months have been no different. We added support for FIDO2 authentication in tech preview to deliver more authentication options to admins, We also introduced H.264 lossless compression support for HDX 3D Pro to make the user experience even cleaner. Lastly, we have also added Session Recording to Linux VDA in tech preview to enhance security and ease troubleshooting.