Latest Citrix Updates – March 2024
In 2023 and the first part of 2024 Citrix introduced new features to products such as Autoscale, vertical load balancing, and ITSM adaptor to their Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops subscriptions to help customers to optimise their Citrix investment.
With an ongoing narrative from IT Departments being all about savings and optimizing their existing investment, Citrix have pinpointed this to be their north star. They want to support their customers’ focus by adding more cost optimizations to their products and support the requirement to have Hybrid environments. Through their universal licensing, Citrix are now delivering on this.
Citrix Subscription Bundles
Citrix have introduced new subscription bundles and a streamlined portfolio. They are offering an all-in-one suite that securely enables high-performance access to enterprise applications. There are 4 SKUs (see table below) with ‘Citrix Universal Hybrid Multi-Cloud’ bundle being the go-to offering. This subscription combines the best capabilities of Citrix DaaS, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, NetScaler, and Citrix Security, and Monitoring. Providing a complete offering with VDI, Zero Trust access, and high-performance secure application delivery, all with end-to-end observability.
While not a direct replacement, at a high level, the new subscriptions portfolio equates as follows:
| New Subscription | ~ Equates to |
| Citrix Universal Hybrid Multi-Cloud | Citrix Daas (cloud) with Hybrid rights & NetScaler bundle |
| Citrix Platform License | New: As above with additional security & sitewide licencing |
| Citrix for Private Cloud | Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktop for on premises only |
| NetScaler Fixed Capacity | NetScaler only |
Compare Citrix Subscriptions: Find the Ideal Solution for Your Business Needs – Citrix
Product Roadmap
Citrix have announced a roadmap for 2024 with feature updates, along with some exciting technology previews to back up their focus.
Here’s a couple to look forward to:
Improving Visualization
Citrix wants its administrators to make decisions in real time to improve resource utilization. With enhanced visualization from Citrix, administrators can make data driven decisions faster.
VDI Update
Citrix are planning to introduce new features to make your current VDI environment more cost effective, by minimizing the number of persistent VDIs in use.
Provisioning with Azure backup SKUs in Web Studio
After successfully bringing the ability to list backup VM sizes into PowerShell and they are now working on bringing that functionality into the Web Studio Console. This feature will only be supported for a catalog that uses a machine profile and will support both persistent and non-persistent MCS machine catalogs. This feature is currently only supported for Azure environments.
Provisioning Cost Modeling (Azure)
Small differences in instance types, storage, and disks can significantly impact the costs you pay. Citrix are working on integrating cost modeling into the Citrix provisioning console for both MCS and PVS. With certain information like instance sizes, daily power on times, and workdays, the console will forecast your monthly cost for provisioned virtual machines. It will also have a comparison feature to compare the savings you would get by either enabling Storage cost saving or non-persistent write-back cache disks.
Tech previews
Citrix have released a number of exciting previews for you to get a look and feel for. Here is a list of some of the tech preview being released:
- Azure Hibernation with AutoScale (Tech Preview)
- VDI reclamation service (Tech Preview)
- Autoscale Insights (Tech Preview)
- DaaS Monitor – Cost Optimization & Savings Reporting (Tech Preview)
You can read more about all these tech previews here
You can read more details about these new features and their roadmap here: Maximizing IT Efficiency and Reducing Costs – Citrix Blogs
To learn more about the Citrix updates and to find out specifically how these will impact your subscriptions email us on asktheexpert@enterprise-solutions.ie to schedule a call with one of our Citrix experts.
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