What better way to get ready for the new year than with a milestone release for our LTSR customers? That’s right. The Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7 1912 Long-Term Service Release (LTSR) is now available for download. This LTSR brings two years’ worth of new functionality and feature enhancements to customers currently running 7.15 LTSR and gives our Current Release (CR) customers a chance to take advantage of all the latest updates.
The LTSR Process
An LTSR release comes along once every few years. The Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops LTSR track is targeted at customers with production environments who prefer to stay on the same version of the product for an extended period of time. The LTSR program offers up to 10 years of support, so administrators have plenty of time to plan, test, and deploy their environments. I discussed the benefits and deployment options in more detail in our LTSR prep blog.
Of course, if you are a CR customer, 1912 is still an important update for you; it’s the natural successor to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 1909 in our CR cadence. We have dozens of new features and improvements bundled in to keep your environments up to date!
What’s New?
If you’re currently on the LTSR track, you have more two years of feature updates since the 7.15 release to catch up on! If it has been a while since you took a look at our new releases, our feature matrix is a good place to start and see what you might have missed.
Additionally, we’ve delivered a lot of great content for your holiday reading. Here are some resources to help bring you up to date on everything this release has to offer:
- Top 10 reasons to upgrade to LTSR 1912 — Nick Rintalan, Principal Architect with Citrix Consulting Services and a certified expert in all things Citrix, gives a detailed overview of some of the most meaningful changes in functionality since the 7.15 LTSR.
- HDX Optimizations for Microsoft Teams — Only Citrix has a solution for virtualizing Microsoft Teams (and Skype for Business!), giving admins the benefits of centralized management while delivering to users a high-performing interactive solution. In this post, Product Manager Fernando Klurfan talks about our new Teams optimization, which applies to both CR and LTSR customers.
- User Personalization Layers — Like the simplicity of non-persistent environments but need user customization? User Personalization Layers persist user settings and applications in a separate, writeable layer that is attached when the user logs in. Dan Lazar, App Layering Product Manager, goes into detail on this new functionality, which is integrated into the VDA and Citrix Studio.
- HDX improvements — Miguel Contreras from our Product Management team does a deep dive on recent HDX improvements and updates to the VDA and delivers tips for deployment and upgrades.
Next Steps
Want to get a head start on the new year? Download the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7 1912 LTSR and start rolling it out to your pre-production environments today. You can upgrade directly from 1909 or previous 7.15 CU4/CU5 LTSR releases. We’ve updated the LTSR FAQ with important new information and will continue to answer your questions there (or in the comments below) throughout the coming weeks.
