The best way to connect to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service

How can you deliver the best user experience with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service?

With Citrix SD-WAN, of course!

We’re making it easy for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service customers to benefit from Citrix SD-WAN. Our preview introduces:

• Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service and Citrix SD-WAN admin workflow integration, and
• HDX QoS for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service

And, customers with a Citrix SD-WAN subscription don’t need to pay the licensing fee for the Citrix SD-WAN virtual appliance in the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service environment on Microsoft Azure.

Most users demand a highly responsive, always-on experience when working with their virtual desktop and the apps within it. This can present a technical challenge when networks conditions are less than ideal. Latency due to indirect routing, which unnecessarily increases the distance between the user and the cloud, is a widespread problem that degrades user experience. On top of that, broadband internet connections suffer from intermittent periods of congestion, jitter, and packet loss.

A Two-Pronged Approach to Performance Optimization

Citrix’s solution starts with the HDX “High Definition eXperience” technology suite, native to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service and the Citrix Workspace app.

Key to this technology stack? Our industry-leading ICA remoting protocol.

Adaptive Transport featuring EDT — Citrix’s UDP-based data transport protocol — offers superior performance compared to TCP when the user isn’t in the same location as the virtual desktop. Progressive Display intelligently adjusts image quality as latency and bandwidth fluctuate. Adaptive Throughput dynamically scales bandwidth consumption. And multi-stream ICA creates subgroups of virtual channels to enable HDX QoS and maintain interactivity, even when the network becomes congested.

The second piece of our connectivity solution is Citrix SD-WAN.

You could connect to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service without SD-WAN. Some organizations still backhaul internet traffic from their office locations to their data center. But that legacy architecture adds latency, which has a negative impact on user experience. It also adds traffic to your wide-area network, which could lead to congestion or the need to increase bandwidth on expensive MPLS links.

On the other hand, if your office locations have direct internet connectivity, you could use that to access Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service. But beware. Looking at data collected across many U.S. 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 are just so severely degraded that nobody can get any work done. For many businesses, the impact could be a significant loss of revenue.

You could add a second internet link with a different ISP. But without automated failover (an SD-WAN feature), who’s going to manually switch back and forth between the two connections as issues arise?

You could implement ExpressRoute at all your locations. But that would be expensive and take a long time.

There’s a better way: Citrix SD-WAN.

How Citrix SD-WAN Optimizes Desktop Delivery

By bonding two broadband connections or automating failover to the cellular network (4G/LTE), Citrix SD-WAN provides reliable, always-on connectivity. Users are unaffected when one of the links exhibits high packet loss, jitter or congestion, or goes down. Their virtual desktop just keeps on performing.

And now, with our new tech preview, Citrix SD-WAN can also provide Quality-of-Service (QoS) on the all-important ICA connection between each user and their virtual desktop. While simple Internet access to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service is limited to TCP data transport and a single traffic stream, connectivity using Citrix SD-WAN supports superior HDX technologies. UDP-based EDT outperforms TCP in the face of network latency. Multi-stream ICA enables HDX QoS, ensuring a responsive user experience even when someone at the same location is printing a long document full of graphics or downloading a large file. Advanced SD-WAN techniques like packet racing (selective packet replication) ensure that keystrokes, mouse movements and touch input are transported over the network in minimal time.

HDX continues to evolve. The Citrix SD-WAN team has unique access to HDX and ICA specifications and works closely with the HDX team (for which I was the product owner for many years).

But Citrix SD-WAN doesn’t just optimize the ICA protocol. When HDX redirects video to the user device for local processing, Citrix SD-WAN provides support for client-side content fetching directly from the media source.

Citrix SD-WAN works together with HDX and the Citrix Workspace app to optimize the delivery of standards-based unified communications applications such as Microsoft Teams. VoIP quality is ensured by sending each audio packet over two internet links, minimizing the impact of jitter and packet loss. If your users find audio drop-outs to be irritating and detrimental to collaboration, then Citrix SD-WAN is for you.

Citrix SD-WAN also gives the virtual desktop access to resources that might still reside on-premises in a data center. Examples include Active Directory, file shares and databases, and the server-side of client-server applications. This is a big benefit if you don’t have ExpressRoute between your data center and Azure. In addition, Citrix SD-WAN secures access from the virtual desktop to the internet with its ICSA-certified firewall, while providing visibility on such traffic through its reporting capabilities. Proximate DNS provides efficient traffic steering to SaaS apps like Microsoft Office 365.

We Make It Easy to Adopt Citrix SD-WAN

To make all these benefits easy to consume, our tech preview integrates Citrix SD-WAN into the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service admin workflow. After the SD-WAN network is configured (typically by a Citrix partner or service provider), your desktop admin can link in the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service environment by entering in two IP addresses.

Thanks to zero-touch deployment, all you need to add Citrix SD-WAN office appliances is someone at the site to connect a network cable and a power cord. They don’t need to be a technical expert. Once the box is plugged in, it calls Citrix Cloud to authenticate, discover, and register the network. Citrix Cloud authenticates the device and confirms its owner. Then the SD-WAN Orchestrator automatically and remotely configures the device, and it seamlessly becomes part of your network. It’s simple!

We’ve also made it easy to fit Citrix SD-WAN into your budget. Just buy a “zero-capacity” hardware appliance for each office location, with a subscription model for the software. Depending on your company’s capital expense threshold and the size of the appliances, you 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 on Azure with no additional licensing fee.

Learn More about the Tech Preview

Contact your Citrix Solutions Advisor for more information about the tech preview for Citrix SD-WAN and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service. They’ll work with our product team to help you prepare for this integrated solution. Then, download our solution brief, Optimizing Citrix DaaS Solutions with Citrix SD-WAN, to learn more.

When high reliability and top-notch performance with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service are important, Citrix SD-WAN is the answer!