Migrate user workspaces to Azure Government with Citrix Xenapp/XenDesktop 7.16

Steve Downs

In October, we announced that Citrix Cloud included the ability to provision non-persistent user workspaces into Azure Government and today I’m pleased to share that Citrix’s traditional on-premises XenApp and XenDesktop products also includes that capability – with the release of XenApp/XenDesktop 7.16. 

Provisioning user workspaces straight from your existing on-premises Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop environments drastically simplifies your migration to the cloud while also reducing the risk associated with any upgrade or migration. 

You can start migrating user workloads to Azure Government by upgrading your XA/XD environment to 7.16. Once upgraded, you’ll have access to Azure Government as a hosting option. Don’t have an Azure Government subscription? No worries, you can sign up for a free trial. 

With XA/XD 7.16, the following use cases are unlocked for Citrix customers: 

1. Migrate user workloads to the cloud without moving the Citrix control plane: As mentioned, you gain access to Azure Government for non-persistent workspaces by simply upgrading the Citrix software and adding the host connection to your Azure Government subscription. You can keep your control plane on premises until you’re ready to move to Citrix Cloud or deploy the traditional Citrix control-plane within Azure Government.  

2. Deploy the XenApp/XenDesktop control plane and workloads in Azure Government: If you want to build the control-plane in Azure Government then that option is also available. Once built, you can add your Azure Government subscription as a hosting option for session hosts. And don’t forget you can also manage on-premises workloads from an Azure Government hosted Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop environment. 

3. Pilot user workloads in Azure Government: Most migrations start with a pilot and you can do that in Azure Government by performing either of the previous two options and selecting a handful of users to deploy into the cloud. As an added benefit, you won’t need to worry about deploying datacenter resources to support the pilot. 

4. Pilot new user workload capabilities: Traditional on premises VDI solutions lock you into your hardware investments or require significant capital and engineering expense to deploy new infrastructure. With Azure Government hosted workspaces, you can test new solutions without committing to hardware. You can even change VM sizes quickly without analyzing host capacity. 

5. Utilize Azure Government for Disaster Recovery or High Availability: On-premises disaster recovery (DR) or high availability (HA) capacity for user workspaces is an expensive, and sometimes, out of reach solution for some state, local, and federal organizations.  This enhancement from Citrix enables you to deploy DR and HA capabilities into Azure Government without investing in additional datacenters. You can deploy capacity for all your users or just a subset of the user base. 

6. On Demand user workspace capacity in Azure Government: Many government organizations utilize Citrix for on demand capacity to support weather events or natural disaster response. And to provide this capacity, many agencies must deploy peak capacity resources into on premises datacenters to support that demand – even it is just required a few days a year.  With Azure Government, you can scale capacity up and down as needed. 

I had the opportunity to demonstrate this new capability during this month’s Microsoft Azure Gov DC user community meetup and you can watch a replay of that video below: 

You can also check out rest of the Azure Gov Meetup presentations on their YouTube channel.

Check out the Microsoft Azure Gov DC user community and join this group driving government cloud innovation. Their next Meetup is Jan. 31! 

Steve Downs Principal Product Manager, Azure Virtual Desktop

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