Is your organization moving to the cloud or taking a hybrid-cloud approach? Or perhaps you’re building out a cloud strategy to address scenarios such as disaster-recovery planning, bursts scenarios, or seasonality. Or are you looking at reducing capex to opex? Is your management worried about prohibitive public cloud costs while still wanting to provide a great end-user experience?

If the answer is yes to any of those, keep reading!

At Citrix, we have engaged with several customers who’ve told us about their challenges around their cloud-transformation journey. To make it easier, we needed to give them a nimbler, high-performance power management solution that also provided a fluid admin experience. We’re excited that Autoscale is now available as part of the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service.

This capability will work on all the VDA hosting platforms that Virtual Apps and Desktops service currently supports and can manage both VDI as well as hosted shared workloads.

Let’s take a quick, high-level tour of Citrix Autoscale and some of the key things you can do.

Configuring Virtual Machine Workloads

Autoscale’s capabilities can be broken into three different categories: schedule-based scaling, load-based scaling, and miscellaneous settings. You can leverage one of the scaling settings, or you can use a combination of both based on your organization’s needs.

  • Schedule-based scaling — If you expect your end users to be logged in, for example, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on the weekdays, then you can define a schedule from 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. with the number of machines (or as a percentage) that you would want to be powered on. That way, end users coming into work get their sessions without having to wait for them to be powered on. Autoscale lets you set multiple schedules that include specific days of the week and adjust the number of machines available during those times.
  • Load-based scaling — If you expect unpredictability in your users’ launching sessions, Autoscale can dynamically scale by powering on/off machines as the load increases or decreases. It can work in conjunction with schedule-based scaling by keeping a capacity buffer available so that new users coming in do not have to wait for the machines to power on.
  • Miscellaneous settings — This section can be broken up by idle, disconnect time, power off delay, or cost of a virtual machine per hour. These settings provide fine-grained control to help you optimize cost and experience and visualize cost savings for you, important information that can be shared with peers and management teams.

We’ve created a quick video tour that shows you where to find these settings in the Autoscale tool in Citrix Cloud.

Example Scenarios and Use Cases

So now that we’ve covered what Autoscale is and how it works from a high-level, let’s talk about how this could play out in specific situations and why this feature enhances the employee and admin experience.

  • The employee who works a fixed shift from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. during weekdays — You can define a weekday schedule from 8:30 a.m. (so that machines are available at 9 a.m.) to 6 p.m. so that the machines are powered on and get their sessions right away. This ensures that users won’t have to wait for their machines and have instant access and stay productive.
  • During disaster recovery or bursts scenarios — A hybrid approach comes with the benefits of being able to dynamically scale in the event there’s a disaster or you need to bring on more users temporarily. Let’s say you have multiple delivery groups serving the same apps and the preferred zone is based on premises and the failover zone in the cloud. In the event of a disaster, you can easily program your Autoscale policies to make sure you can service the end users, providing them access to their apps from the failover zone in an optimized fashion. In case of bursts, you can define capacity buffer to handle burst situations where the capacity is completely utilized from your on-premises delivery group and then as load increases, bursts starts getting handled from your cloud-resource location, while optimizing the costs and user experience.
  • Visualizing capacity utilization and cost savings — One of the biggest barriers customers mention when considering public cloud is costs and how to mitigate those costs; they’re consumption-based and sometimes can be difficult to predict. With Autoscale, you can visualize your capacity utilization to understand whether you are powering on more or fewer machines than you configured in schedule-based scaling. You can also check your monthly savings and pass the information to your management to understand the cost savings in the cloud to improve resource planning in the future.

How Do I Get It?

For Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service customers, Autoscale is available for you with the latest Citrix Cloud release. Just log into your Citrix Cloud account. It’s in the “Manage –> Delivery Groups –> Edit Delivery Group” section of the Virtual Apps and Desktops tile.

You can find more information in the product documentation. You can also leave feedback or discuss Autoscale with peers and product managers in our dedicated discussion forum.

These are just the features built into the initial release of Autoscale, but we’ll be adding more enhancements in the future so stay tuned to the Citrix blog.