Migrate to the Cloud

VMware Cloud on AWS is now Citrix Ready

I’ve been a huge fan of VMware Cloud on AWS since first played with it earlier this year. VMware Cloud on AWS is my definition of the cloud platform of choice for IT professionals. With the years of experience, you and I have in managing VMware based workloads in my data center, I yearned for a cloud platform that was just as flexible and intuitive to configure. In recent months, the VMware and Citrix teams have been jointly validating the Citrix suite of products on VMware Cloud on AWS. Today, I am delighted to share big news.

For many reasons, this effort was a unique opportunity. We took a modern product, Citrix Apps and Desktops (previously Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop), that historically has been deeply integrated with VMware vSphere and tested it on the VMware Cloud on AWS platform. This testing bubbled down to ensuring the Citrix products would either not notice, or not fail, when connecting to a VMware Cloud on AWS-based vSphere environment. Since the Citrix product is so deeply integrated with vSphere, there were many opportunities where implementation differences between on-premises vSphere and the VMware Cloud products may have required product changes.

Today, we’re delighted to announce that VMware Cloud on AWS has successfully completed the “Citrix Ready” requirements for Citrix Desktop and Applications. No product changes were required on either product. This “like for like” example of support, demonstrates the effort that the VMware Cloud on AWS team to ensure customers familiar with vSphere could leverage the cloud with the same IT runbook and little to no re-training. I’m super proud to see the simplicity their efforts have provided.

Today’s announcement adds support for VMware Cloud on AWS for Citrix customers. These customers can now deploy not only the traditional Citrix products on premises but they can also leverage Citrix’s own Citrix Cloud and leverage VMware Cloud on AWS as a resource location. A full list of supported versions can be found here.

This is a huge win, for both VMware Cloud on AWS and to Citrix Customers today who leverage VMware’s vSphere. Here’s why:

Like for Like configuration, with little to no training required:

Citrix customers can move to VMware Cloud on AWS as their cloud platform of choice, with the confidence that little to no re-training will be required. This allows administrators to get busy with planning and deployment, without needing to completely re-educate their IT staff on a new management platform. Administrators, familiar with vCenter, can be up and running in matter of minutes. Moving to VMware Cloud on AWS instead of other cloud platforms will save your IT staff weeks of time and frustration.

And, unlike other clouds, you can bring your RDSH and Desktop golden images with you, with no conversion or concern!

Support for user centric server workloads:

Invariably, simply delivering a desktop from a cloud of choice is the easy part of any Desktop or Application virtualization project. The real challenge comes in moving the application and data servers from their current location (on-premises data center or branch office) to a location closest to the user for best user experience.

As this is VMware to VMware, you have the confidence that you can simply move these VM’s like you would in a data center today to VMware Cloud on AWS with minimal downtime. Unlike other cloud platforms, customers don’t need to completely rebuild or recreate these solutions to run on other cloud platforms. You can even vMotion your workloads to transition to VMware Cloud on AWS with no downtime.

Support for Citrix Provisioning Services:

VMware Cloud on AWS, like vSphere, allows customers to deploy Virtual Machines in whatever size they want, with any virtual hardware combination that they please. In the Citrix environment, this means that VMware Cloud on AWS is the only cloud environment that can support the Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS).

Further as the networking configuration is completely open to the customer, any DHCP PXE / TFTP configuration can be configured and managed natively by the customer.

As many customers have built their environments to take advantage of Citrix’s Provisioning Services to suit their needs, there is zero compromise or changes required. Just ship your images up to VMware Cloud on AWS and get on with adding value to the users.

Support for Citrix Native Netscaler:

A customer can also deploy Netscaler VPX appliances to VMware Cloud on AWS. This allows customers to deploy external connectivity or load balancing as they would on-premises, extend to cloud or even fail to cloud BY leveraging the Netscaler native GSLB capabilities.

Deploy traditional, scale out or Cloud:

When a Citrix customer decides upon VMware Cloud on AWS as their cloud platform of choice, they get the confidence that VMware Cloud on AWS can support the now and the future of their Citrix user virtualization needs with no compromises. All with the peace of mind provided by the years of excellent experience they have had with vSphere in their on-premise deployment.

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, and also a clear migration path to a familiar and enterprise proven cloud platform for both their user and server-based workloads.

To learn more about VMware Cloud on AWS, please visit https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws. To learn about what’s new with VMware Cloud on AWS, check out this blog post.

Resources:

Related Articles