In today’s dynamic environment agility is the basis of business. Organizations must be responsive to cope with fast changing regulatory requirements, highly fluctuating economic conditions, evolving consumer habits and disruptive business models. Monolithic infrastructure is unable to support the needs of rapidly changing business requirements and so organizations are adopting public Cloud to become inherently agile.
Traditional IT set ups are often besieged with sprawling infrastructure with large server farms and hundreds of users accessing the network across multiple devices. Managing such an environment along with the threat of shadow IT and isolated, forgotten servers make enterprise security an administrative nightmare. Yet the role of technology is crucial to enable business agility and adaptability.
Citrix Cloud on AWS I was recently afforded the unique opportunity to collaborate on a project to test capacity out of a Citrix XenApp on AWS deployment. The goal of the project was to independently determine the maximum user density for a few different EC2 instance types running XenApp 7.14. Navigate the move from an on-premises environment into Citrix Cloud and learn to deploy resource locations onto Amazon Web Services. Learn the architecture, communications, and management of Citrix Cloud and the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Service and then migrate existing infrastructure and settings into Citrix Cloud. Aug 19, 2020 The combination of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Service and VMware Cloud on AWS allows you to: Rapidly achieve time-to-value and cloud-scale elasticity without refactoring of applications Seamlessly deliver enterprise-grade desktops and apps from the cloud to end users. Nov 05, 2018 A Citrix customer can choose to deploy a new site, extend an existing (via zones) site, or even migrate to Citrix Cloud with no excuses. In conclusion, we are extremely excited to have the VMware Cloud on AWS cloud published as Citrix Ready for Citrix Apps and Desktops. We believe this validation will deliver further value to Citrix customers.
Cloud is helping organizations modernize the way IT services are delivered and there is a surge in moving Windows desktop and applications on Citrix to AWS Cloud. Citrix Cloud enables digital workspace and delivers apps, data and desktop in real time on any device, with unified endpoint management (UEM).
Citrix is a leader in the Virtual desktop Infrastructure market with 53% market share according to VDI Like a Pro End User Computing, 2019. As a market leader Citrix has pioneered the migration of virtual Windows environments to the Cloud partnering with AWS. These efforts have resulted in two innovative concepts—secure perimeter and digital workspace. Citrix secure perimeter recognizes the consumerization of IT and identifies the user as the new perimeter. While its digital workspace is an integrated technology framework designed to facilitate employee productivity by enabling secure access to applications and data in real-time on any device, at any location via Cloud services or through the datacenter.
So, what are the benefits of moving Citrix-Windows workloads to AWS Cloud
Citrix and AWS have partnered since 2010 to enable reliable, scalable and secure alternative to on-premise deployments of Citrix solutions and workloads.
Specific benefits of deploying Citrix on AWS Cloud include the following:
- Quick access to on-demand resources such as compute, database, network on AWS Cloud without incurring huge upfront costs or long deployment cycles. Scale up or down resources to reduce costs and meet elastic user demand.
- Reduce risks with high availability, scalability and performance using AWS Regions & Availability Zones along with autoscaling to make Citrix Workspace highly available and scalable globally.
- AWS Cloud Formation templates for Citrix enable to deploy virtual apps and desktop services quickly and easily by automatically provisioning infrastructure and Auto Scaling groups. Basic Windows PowerShell scripts for Windows-based EC2 instances are available to kickstart deployment.
- Securely host Citrix application and deliver applications to end devices by leveraging AWS VPC. You can segregate network into public and private subnets and use security groups to define and monitor policies—control where data resides, who can access and what they can do with it.
- Citrix Application Delivery Control (ADC) is natively integrated with AWS Outpost to help customers who have latency-sensitive applications or are bound by compliance regulations to deploy apps on premises. Customers can bring native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to on-premise using same Citrix ADCs, AWS APIs, tools, and infrastructure across on premises and AWS Cloud for a consistent hybrid experience.
- Citrix tools such as CloudBridge Connector enables to provision and deploy desktops and applications using existing access methods. Citrix licensing, management and authentication can be integrated with existing on-premise tools to establish secure connectivity between AWS Cloud and on-premise resources.
Citrix Workspace on AWS delivers users a seamless experience while enabling IT to simplify control via unified platform. AWS complements Citrix Workspace by providing a global footprint and a choice of EC2 instances optimized to meet performance needs of any workloads. Citrix and AWS have collaboratively prepared The AWS Quick Start for Citrix ADC to enable easy migration by automating configuration and reducing time, costs and skills involved.
Umbrella is a Citrix Platinum Partner and AWS Premier Consulting Partner—both elite category status. We have large teams of certified Citrix and AWS professionals, equipped to migrate Citrix workloads to AWS with extensive experience migrating more than 400 workloads to AWS Cloud.
If you are interested in moving your existing Windows Desktops and Applications based on Citrix solutions to AWS Cloud or want to know more about it, write to us at info@umbrellainfocare.com or call us at +91 9873892249.
I have been strugling with this one for a while and finally was astonished by the simplicity of the solution.
Let's talk about provisioning virtual desktops with Citrix Cloud (Virtual Apps and Desktops Service) with Amazon Web Services as a public cloud to host the virtual machines. The goal is to provision Windows 10 VMs with Citrix MCS on AWS Dedicated Hosts.
Then, there are 2 solutions, either you reserve the number of Dedicated Hosts needed for 1 or 3 years or you choose to go On-Demand. I will bring you more visibility on how to calculate your best option in another post soon.
Let's take the On-Demand option. You can manually launch the number of Dedicated Hosts you need to run your 100 Desktops. But it will be a waste of money if you run only 30% of your VMs. Worse, it will be a huge waste of money if all of your VMs are turned off! You will pay your Dedicated Hosts for watching the grass grow. That's not what we can call cost efficiency right?
So here is what you should do to avoid a sweaty conversation with your FinOps or your Cost Controller... Use an AWS Host resource group! It enables the AWS License Manager to manage your Dedicated Hosts. It will allocate, release, and recover your Dedicated Hosts when needed. So you can have your 100 Virtual Desktops all turned off, the License Manager will release all of your Dedicated Hosts. Therefore, you won't pay an extra dime for the EC2 Dedicated Host cost, only for the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) used by your Virtual Desktops.
Long story short, as of today (Jan 25 2021), you can't provision Virtual Desktops natively with the Citrix Cloud GUI on AWS Dedicated Hosts managed in a Host resource group.
...But! If you're still reading this, it means you want the solution, right?
The good news is that you can do it doing 3 things:
- Create a Host resource group in AWS. Find the AMI ID of your master image uploaded to AWS
- Create your Machine catalog with Powershell (New-AcctIdentityPool ; New-ProvScheme ; New-BrokerCatalog)
- Find the AMI ID of the volume prepared at the New-ProvScheme step
Enough talks, let's get our hands dirty.
Disclaimer: It's obvious that you should not run actions from someone you don't know and who doesn't know your environment. So please, try in a safe environment (=Not in Prod) first.
1. Creation of the Host resource group in AWS
First. You have to go to the AWS License Manager from the list of AWS Services. Create a Customer managed licenses. Select the type of licenses number and the amount of your needs. In my case, I selected the license type Core and a number of 480. So each time an M5 Dedicated Host turn on, it will grab 48 licenses (the number of expected M5.Large VMs I will run on).
Second. Create the Host resource group. Select the settings you would like your Host resource group to perform. In my case, I selected : Allocate hosts automatically ; Release hosts automatically ; Recover hosts automatically.And the instance family (optional) that can be launched in my Host resource group : M5. Then associate the license configuration created just above.
Then, add the AMI ID of the master image you uploaded to AWS to the Associated AMIs in your AWS License Manager
2. Creation of the Machine Catalog with Powershell
If, like me, you are using Citrix Cloud ❤️, you will have to install the 'XenApp and XenDesktop Remote PowerShell SDK' and create your Machine Catalog like so:
The creation of the Machine Catalog is, in fact, the addition of 3 tasks:
1. Creation of the Account Identity Pool (New-AcctIdentityPool)
In order to get your ZoneUid, check what is the ZoneUid from another BrokerCatalog in the same AWS region. More info on the Get-BrokerCatalog.
2. Creation of the Provisioning scheme (dedicated and persistent VMs) (New-ProvScheme)
This is the most interesting part, as it interacts directly with AWS. You will see some activity in the AWS EC2 Instances and EBS Volumes. The New-ProvScheme action takes usually 20 minutes to complete. Note that I choose the M5 Large instance size to stick with the M5 family I've set in the Host resource group.
In order to check the status of the task (Get-ProvTask):
Like I said, the WorflowStatus should be in a'Running' state for around 20 minutes. Wait until the WorflowStatus is 'Completed'. Status must 'Finished'. TerminatingError must be empty.
Citrix Cloud On Aws Download
Once completed, go to your AWS EC2 Dashboard, in your AMIs. You should see a new AMI created. The name starts with YourMachineCatalogName.
Note the AMI ID and associate it in your AWS License Manager, see screenshot in section 1. You should now have 2 AMIs associated.
Citrix Cloud On Aws Network
3. Creation of the Broker Catalog (New-Brokercatalog)
Once completed, you will see the new Machine Catalog in your Web Studio!
You will be able to provision new Desktops from the GUI only if you associated the new AMI ID created at the New-ProvScheme step.
Configuration part completed! Now let's play turning the machines on and off and check how it works with the Dedicated Hosts allocation and release.
Let's turn on some of new instances created.
Now let's turn off the instances.
Citrix Cloud On Aws
I've informed Citrix about this as it's not documented yet and is not natively running with the Web Studio. I'm sure this will be part of an enhancement request and be released in a couple of sprints. Citrix's Jill Fetscher will also release an article on this. In the meantime, you got mine.
Citrix Cloud On Aws Login
Should you want to read a well written guide on creating MCS Catalogs with PowerShell for on-prem environments, follow this link!
Citrix Vdi On Aws
That's all folks! I hope you had as much fun as I had troubleshooting this.