This is the first of two blogs from the Citrix App Layering team detailing recent updates, as well as improvements that are coming to the App Layering product line over the next few months.

Citrix App Layering unlocks a new world of freedom where IT admins can manage individual components of a Microsoft Windows image — the OS, apps, and user data (what we call layers) separately. It reduces the number of variations of a Windows environment you need to build individually and can dramatically reduce the overall time and resources an IT organization spends on maintaining their images. If you haven’t had a chance to set up App Layering and see this magic at work, there‘s no better time than now.

The App Layering team has worked hard this year to add a steady stream of new features and updates. These include full support for the latest versions of Windows 10, Server 2019, and Office 2019, as well as improvements to the management UI and performance updates.

We have also pursued some larger projects that we’re excited to be putting the finishing touches on. Driven by customer feedback, we have been focused on three main areas of improvement: performance and scalability; automation; and integration. In this post, the first of a three-part series, I’ll cover what we’ve been doing in the area of performance and scalability.

You’ll find all latest features and updates on our What’s New page, and you can get Citrix App Layering 1910 on our downloads page.

Performance/Scalability: Compositing Engines (offload compositing)

We have some big announcements with our recent App Layering 1910 release, which is all about dramatic improvements to performance and scalability. As the App Layering system matures, we are starting to see customers begin to drive layering management at greater scale, and we’ve optimized the back-end systems to enhance these capabilities. One major area we’re focusing on is image composition. But before diving into what’s new, let’s review how we’ve been doing things up until now.

The Old Way — ELM Compositing

Historically, we’ve depended on our layering appliance (the ELM) to do all the work to stitch together the OS, platform, and app layers into a single image that you can deploy. This is a process called compositing.

This architecture has been deployed in the field for years but has some challenges around speed and scale. It requires copying disks multiple times, which adds time to processing jobs. If multiple jobs are requested in parallel, they queue up on the ELM, increasing the time to publish.

Introducing New Compositing Engines!

We have put a lot of thought and energy into solving these problems. The solution? A new architecture in 1910 we call compositing engines, which bring dramatic improvements in layer-management time to our customers.

What’s so great about the new compositing engine?

  • It’s fast! The time to process layer-management jobs is reduced dramatically.
  • It’s scalable and efficient! Compositing engines offload work from the ELM, reducing overhead and increasing job throughput.
  • It unlocks opportunities to support new technologies in the future! It adds better support for the latest NTFS features. It introduces support for UEFI and, in the future, will allow us to also support Secure Boot. And we can now use any virtual disk format (such as VHDx) supported by the target hypervisor platform where the compositing engine is running.
  • It will enable better integration with other Citrix technologies (and cloud in general)!

Reduced reliance on the ELM will help Citrix App Layering more tightly integrate with the rest of your Citrix deployment, and compositing engines make Citrix App Layering more affordable and efficient in cloud environments.

Performance Benchmarks

You can see the dramatic difference when offloading compositing with compositing engines in the benchmark results below. Please note, these results are meant to highlight the difference in composition time between enabling and disabling offload compositing on the Hyper-V platform connector. Actual times will vary greatly depending on the resources available in the environment where Citrix App Layering is deployed:

On average, when offload compositing is enabled, publish and packaging machine deployment times are cut nearly in half. (That’s about 200 percent faster!) In the case of deploying packaging machines when there is a cache hit, enabling offload compositing will cause a small delay because it takes some additional time for the compositing engine to boot and become available. Given the overall dramatic reduction in the time to complete most layering tasks, though, we think offload compositing will be a huge time saver.

Our benchmarks also show that these results scale as the number of app layers increases. The graph below shows the comparative time for publishing an image composited with 200 layers.

In this case, with offload compositing enabled, we observed nearly a 60 percent reduction in publish time, from five hours down to two hours in our test environment!

That means a lot less time waiting around for images to get composited, which will give you the opportunity to queue more concurrent tasks, driven by automated workflows.

Compositing Engine Availability

Offload compositing with compositing engines are available for Hyper-V first as part of our 1910 release of Citrix App Layering! You read that right. If you are publishing layered images using the Hyper-V connector today, just upgrade your layering appliance to 1910 and the ability to offload compositing with compositing engines will be available to you within the connector configuration. Compositing engines for vSphere will be out soon in a future release. We will continue to extend compositing engines to all currently supported platforms, as well as to any new platforms we add in the future.

How to Configure Offload Compositing

Enabling offload compositing couldn’t be easier. After you’ve upgraded your ELM to version 1910, simply create a new Hyper-V connector and make sure the box labeled “Offload Compositing” is checked. Save your chagnes, and that’s it!

It is worth noting that enabling offload compositing within the connector is optional. If left unchecked, we will continue to composite images on the ELM.

Refer to the updated Citrix App Layering 1910 release documentation for additional details for how to set up a Hyper-V connector and for information on all the great new Citrix App Layering features.

We’re Just Getting Warmed Up

Compositing engine, as significant a new feature as it is, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the updates we have planned for App Layering. In addition to performance, we are targeting enhancements to help admins managing large numbers of OS and app layers.

In the next part of this series, I’ll focus on the enhancements we are making with User Personalization Layers – a new technology integrated with Virtual Apps and Desktops management.”