Citrix delivers choice with support for VMware-based clouds

Migrating or extending a virtual desktop/application environment to the cloud can offer exceptional flexibility and benefits. Many organizations are eager to realize the flexibility and scalability of cloud computing, but the migration to cloud needs to be balanced with existing workload demand.

Citrix continues to lead with customer choice and to facilitate the seamless deployment of enterprise workloads in any chosen hybrid cloud architecture. This week at Citrix Synergy 2019 in Atlanta, Citrix announced our intent to officially support enterprise customers with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service subscription licenses with VMware-based clouds — starting first with VMware Cloud on AWS.

With a single management tool, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service will allow you to easily manage Citrix workloads to extend your virtual apps and desktops in vSphere as needed between either on-premises deployments or within VMware-based clouds.

Add and Extend App and Desktop Workload

Running Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service workloads with VMware-based clouds enables you to easily add and extend app and desktop workload without investing time or capital in additional data center resources.

Soon you will be able to choose to combine the market-leading capabilities of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop service as a flexible, secure and scalable solution with VMware-based clouds. You will further benefit from:

• Flexibility to migrate your existing Windows, Linux and line of business applications to your chosen hybrid cloud architecture — starting with VMware Cloud on AWS
• Rapid time-to-value and cloud-scale elasticity with no refactoring of applications
• Advanced app and desktop management, delivery and performance at scale on a flexible cloud-based infrastructure.
• Automatic scaling up and down your app and desktop workloads with pay-as-you go IaaS

In summary, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service customers will allow customers either of the following deployment options:

• Simply leverage Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service capabilities to easily manage and deliver workloads running within VMware Cloud on AWS
• Manually install the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop management components and the app and desktop workloads within VMware Cloud on AWS as part of your hybrid-rights entitlement.

Either option gives you a simplified management solution to take advantage of cloud services at scale with simpler workload migration while extending your data center to further support disaster recovery, colocation, rapid provisioning, enhanced security and compliance.

VMware Cloud on AWS was originally verified as Citrix Ready in Q4 2018. Today’s announcement to communicate our intent to officially support Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service with VMware-based clouds, starting with VMware Cloud on AWS, further shows our commitment to continually offer additional cloud deployment choices as organizations accelerate the move to hybrid cloud solutions.

Citrix introduces SD-WAN for Google Cloud Platform

Enterprises want choice. According to 451 Research*, this is especially true when it comes to selecting cloud and IaaS services: 63 percent of surveyed organizations have multiple vendors supplying them with IaaS services and 59 percent are running mission-critical applications on these platforms.

Because you are moving mission-critical workloads outside your data center to the cloud, your WAN might not be up to par to ensure your business’s future success. While your move to the cloud might be based on factors such as agility, efficiency, and scalability, modernizing your network shouldn’t be an afterthought. Your users depend on a great experience no matter where apps and services are hosted. Connectivity issues such as unreliable links, latency, and congestion can slow business down, frustrating users and customers, and putting your brand’s good name at risk. Poor application performance can even impede your digital transformation objectives.

If you’ve decided to use Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Citrix has good news for you. Providing more freedom in cloud choice than ever before, we’re now offering an easy on-ramp to GCP with our virtual SD-WAN appliance, available in the GCP Marketplace. This delivers all the advantages of Citrix SD-WAN and enables you to confidently extend your network to the cloud. It’s the same compelling SD-WAN capabilities, just in a virtual instance in Google Cloud.

Simplify the Enterprise Journey to Hybrid Cloud

With Citrix SD-WAN, you can easily and cost-effectively spin up SD-WAN instances to reliably connect branches to GCP through virtual overlays. Citrix SD-WAN supports highly reliable and performant connectivity from office locations to workloads running on GCP and from GCP to on-premises resources such as database servers, offering advanced features including:

• Deliver an optimal application experience to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on GCP through integration with HDX, which uses the ICA protocol
• Provide exceptional performance to applications running on GCP, including G Suite, with deep packet inspection, QoS, link bonding, and selective packet duplication for critical traffic such as VoIP and SCADA
• Quickly set up high-availability connections to Google virtual private clouds (VPCs) and manage the entire network from the Citrix orchestration service

Automate, Simplify Deployment and Management

With Citrix SD-WAN’s orchestration service, you can:

• Easily set up high-availability connections to Google virtual private clouds (VPCs) from the Citrix orchestration service
• Access Google services such as storage, big data, analytics, and machine learning
• Soon, be able to monitor connections for both performance analysis and network forensics through VPC flow logs

Improving the Application Experience

If you’re moving your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop workloads to GCP, Citrix SD-WAN’s unique ability to see into the ICA protocol delivers an optimal user experience that no competing SD-WAN vendor can. Because of this integration, Citrix SD-WAN delivers unique features like HDX Auto-QoS for prioritization of individual traffic streams and HDX fair sharing of session bandwidth over the WAN, as well as session monitoring and reporting.