If you’re a Citrix partner with customers interested in desktops-as-a-service (DaaS), no doubt our Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service offering has caught your attention. To give your customers the best user experience with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service, we recommend Citrix SD-WAN. We’ve integrated these offerings to deliver reliable, high-performance connectivity to virtual desktops and when delivering unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS).

Citrix SD-WAN improves each network connection required to deliver cloud-hosted virtual desktops and all associated applications. And Citrix SD-WAN is specially engineered to deliver the best desktop experience over the Citrix HDX technology suite.

Is Direct Internet Access Good Enough?

A simple way to connect office workers with their Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service is to treat them like remote users. Office users can connect to their virtual desktops through the Citrix Gateway service, just like people working remotely from home, the airport, or their hotel. With this approach, the Citrix ICA protocol between the user device and the virtual desktop runs over TCP as a single stream of traffic. (We’ll consider the more advanced EDT protocol and multi-stream ICA later in this blog post.)

While a single ISP connection to the internet might be adequate in some scenarios, it’s best to have two, in case one goes down or degrades due to congestion, packet loss, or jitter. Looking at data collected across many customers, average internet link downtime is 3.5 hours per month, while on average internet links are unusable for 23 hours per month. Unusable links aren’t down — they’re just so severely degraded that nobody can get any work done. For many businesses, the impact could be a significant loss of revenue.

Simple internet connectivity may not be the best option for your customers.

There is a better way: Citrix SD-WAN.

Citrix SD-WAN Optimizes Every Connection

It takes multiple network connections to deliver a virtual desktop:

  • ICA connection between users and their virtual desktops
  • Internet access from the virtual desktop to web sites, SaaS apps, and other cloud properties
  • Access from the virtual desktop back to on-prem resources such as Active Directory and database servers
  • Real-time/interactive traffic carried over RTP from the media engine in the Citrix Workspace app to cloud-hosted unified communications services such as Microsoft Teams
  • Client-side fetching of videos from sites like YouTube and Vimeo

Citrix SD-WAN optimizes every connection!

With Citrix SD-WAN virtual instances in Azure and Citrix SD-WAN in on-premises offices, our virtual path technologies maximize connection reliability and performance. By bonding two relatively inexpensive internet connections (whether two landlines or a landline plus 4G/LTE), Citrix SD-WAN can deliver not only the reliability of much costlier MPLS circuits but also higher bandwidth, lowest possible latency, and a variety of Quality-of-Service features.

  • Prioritize ICA traffic — Citrix SD-WAN especially shines with how it handles the critical ICA connection between the user and the cloud. Citrix SD-WAN can see the individual ICA streams and provide QoS to maintain performance when the network is congested. By giving all users a fair share of bandwidth, SD-WAN ensures that tasks such as printing a large document or transferring a file don’t degrade activities of other Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service users.
  • Reduce latency — Proximate DNS optimizes routing while packet racing reduces latency for interactive traffic such as keyboard, mouse and touch input, and VoIP. Each packet can be duplicated over two internet links, with the SD-WAN at the far end taking the first packet to arrive and ensuring proper packet order.
  • Improve app quality — With Citrix SD-WAN, organizations can fully benefit from the UDP-based HDX EDT data transport protocol without worrying about packet fragmentation over the internet. With a bookended SD-WAN deployment, throughput is optimized regardless of MTU size. Citrix SD-WAN will transparently split and reassemble packets going across the WAN. This mitigates many issues for applications that are not tolerant of fragmentation and for networks that drop packets instead of fragmenting them.
  • Security — Citrix SD-WAN provides security via its built-in, ICSA-certified firewall, third-party next-generation firewall options, policy-based traffic steering, strong encryption and automated secure web gateway options.
  • UCaaS and Video — When HDX redirects multimedia traffic to the user device, as it usually does with video applications, Citrix SD-WAN can provide local breakout from the office to the cloud. For Unified Communications apps, Citrix SD-WAN delivers a delightful, high-fidelity audio experience thanks to packet-level processing and packet racing.

The Best Solution for Virtualized Microsoft Office 365

Citrix SD-WAN recognizes over 4,500 commercial applications. For Office 365, it uses Microsoft’s REST APIs to identify and categorize different types of traffic based on trust and latency sensitivity. Users running Office 365 in their virtual desktops get an optimized experience because the SD-WAN in Azure supporting the virtual delivery agents (VDAs) connects to the closest Office 365 front door.

For Microsoft Teams, media processing is performed locally on the user device using the HDX Microsoft Teams Optimization feature. This feature doesn’t just reduce Azure consumption costs; it contributes to an optimal user experience. The SD-WAN appliance identifies Teams traffic and steers it directly to the cloud. With SD-WAN in the office and in the cloud, it bonds the links over that virtual path and reduces latency between Azure and Office 365. Users are spared the aggravation of audio drop-outs, robotic voice and other all-too-common issues. Audio quality MOS scores typically jump up to four or above.

Visibility for IT

For visibility into the desktop session experience, a quality-of-experience (QoE) metric based on network conditions facilitates monitoring of HDX session quality. Administrators can drill down into the performance of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service at each site, by user. Citrix SD-WAN also provides visibility into traffic leaving the virtual desktop environment over the Internet.

Simplicity

Simplicity is key to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service. We’re making it easy to bring Citrix SD-WAN and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service together. We have been busy integrating SD-WAN into the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service admin workflow to make it super simple for desktop admins to leverage SD-WAN connectivity. This better-together experience will be available shortly for Tech Preview.

Citrix partners can provide services to configure, monitor and manage Citrix SD-WAN. It’s like pressing the “Easy button.” Through a single pane of glass, SD-WAN Orchestrator provides complete centralized management of network connectivity for office locations and SD-WAN virtual instances in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service environments in any number of regions. Deployment templates and run-time management via SD-WAN Orchestrator enforce security policies.

Thanks to zero-touch deployment (ZTD), adding office appliances just means you need someone at the office to connect the network and power cables. There’s no need to dispatch a technician. The appliance calls Citrix Cloud to authenticate, discover, and register the network. Once Citrix authenticates the device and confirms its owner, the Orchestrator automatically configures the device remotely. The device then seamlessly becomes part of the customer’s network. Total simplicity.

Low OpEx and No (or Minimal) CapEx — Cloud Instances Included!

We’ve made it easy to fit Citrix SD-WAN into our customers’ budgets. Just buy a “zero capacity” hardware appliance for each office location, with a subscription model for the software. Depending on a company’s capital expense threshold and the size of the appliances, they may not need any CapEx budget at all. The software subscription entitles customers to use the SD-WAN instances in the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service virtual network; they only pay for the Azure consumption.

Get Started Now!

To find out more about the Tech Preview for Citrix SD-WAN and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service, contact your Citrix Partner Account Manager, who will work with Citrix product teams to help you prepare for our integrated solution.

Which connectivity approach is best for your customers? When high reliability and top-notch performance are important, Citrix SD-WAN is the answer.