Earlier this year I published a blog post about the debate over whether the Long-Term Service Release or the Current Release track was the way to go. In it, I provided eight post-LTSR 7.15 “killer features” that might tempt you to adopt the CR track. And despite my best efforts, a huge number of customers stayed on the LTSR track.
How do I know?
We have some solid telemetry reporting that shows lots of customers are on an LTSR release such as 7.6 or 7.15. But I also travel quite a bit, visit a fair number of customers, and poll every audience when I do a speaking engagement. When I was debating the merits of LTSR versus CR at the awesome CUGC XL Texas event in March, there were more than 100 customers in the room. Only three hands went up when I asked who was on a Current Release! I think it’s fair to assume that many folks out there are firm believers in LTSR and remain on one of those popular releases.
That’s why today is a good day: We’ve announced the third LTSR in our company’s history (it’s technically the fourth, in my opinion, but that’s a topic for another day). And because many of you are on 7.6 or 7.15, I want to tell you exactly what you’ve been missing over the last eight releases and why you should upgrade today.
So, without further ado, here are my top 10 killer features and/or reasons that you should upgrade from 7.15 to 1912 today! I’m not going to go into a ton of detail here because many of these features are well-documented, and I’ve also described a few of these at length in my previous post.
- Thin Provisioning of Block Storage – Eight years back I wrote a post explaining why XenServer kept thick-provisioning block-based storage (even if the underlying storage supported thin provisioning). It really came down to our underlying storage mechanics in XenServer. But with modern Citrix Hypervisor releases, we have added official support for thin provisioning of block storage like FC and iSCSI. Thank you GFS2!
- Linux – If you’re doing anything with Linux, you’re probably on the CR track. But if you’re on an older LTSR and have some workloads that could be a good fit for Linux, then you really should check out LTSR 1912. I just looked at the latest feature matrix, and the most common word in the entire document is Linux. We’ve made more than 10 enhancements to our Linux VDA in the last eight CRs, and most of them have been in the last couple of CRs (1906 and 1909). This includes things like fast smart card support, Director integration, and much more.
- Director Enhancements – This should probably be higher in the list because we’ve improved Director in each of the last nine releases since LTSR 7.15. But there’s just so much other good stuff as you’ll see so I’ve ranked it here. I’m obsessed with logon times, in case you didn’t know (probably because I’ve been asked what a “good” logon time is more than 100 times). I absolutely love the ability to not only drill into the pieces that make up a logon but also the ability to drill into “Interactive Session” that I know bothered a lot of admins out there. And there’s so much other good stuff related to Director that we’ve shipped in the last few releases, like Citrix UPM Load Duration (1903) and Desktop Probing (1906). The moral of the story is that if you use Director for monitoring your Citrix environment in any fashion, you really need the latest release. That’s LTSR 1912.
- User Personalization – You might remember me talking about User Layers when we shipped App Layering 4.14 (right after 1808). That’s when we promoted that killer feature from Labs to GA. Well, we’ve taken this to the next level (and this is something new in 1912). When you install or upgrade a single-session VDA, you can include “User Personalization.” This feature is powered by Citrix App Layering (but doesn’t require separate infrastructure!) and enables you to preserve users’ data and locally installed apps across sessions. This functionality now totally replaces PvD and AppDisks, which we deprecated back in 7.13. Just note that User Layers mount at user logon as opposed to machine boot (as PvD and AppDisks did), so this will require some level of testing. Dan Lazar, our App Layering Product Manager, goes into more detail on this feature in his three-part blog series (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3).
- MCS I/O – Do you remember how we made PVS totally awesome a few years ago with the new write cache option? I even wrote a post saying we put Storage and IOPS “on notice.” Well, we ported that same functionality to MCS in the 1903 CR. This is sometimes labeled as “MCS Write-back Cache v2” but that’s essentially what we’re talking about here – improved storage performance by leveraging memory first and gracefully falling back to disk when necessary.
- PVS Asynchronous I/O – Until PVS 1808 debuted, a target device served incoming OS storage requests by traversing through three different layers (RAM cache, VHDX file and network streaming) sequentially to complete a request. With 1808 (and a checkbox to make your life easier in 1811), we can now send and process the three streams asynchronously, which reduces latency and greatly improves performance. It didn’t get a lot of headlines, but if speed is king and you’re using PVS, I’d encourage you to take this hidden gem for a spin.
- HDX Insight 2.0 (NSAP) – This is a game-changer. We completely re-architected how HDX Insight works. We introduced our 28th virtual channel, called “NSAP,” which provides a dedicated, uncompressed path for Insight data. This can easily double the scalability of Insight/AppFlow, not to mention improve the reliability and stability of your ADC boxes. Read more about it in my HDX Insight 2.0 blog post.
- Microsoft Outlook, Skype, and Teams – These are really two separate things I’m combining under “Microsoft” but who uses Outlook and either Skype or Teams? Oh, almost everyone?! And would you like to deploy those on Citrix? Well, now you can! The Outlook Search Redirection feature that originally shipped in 7.18 changed many of our lives since we finally solved how to deploy Outlook in a non-persistent fashion with native search. And in the last couple of CRs, we also cracked the code on high performance Teams integration. Read our announcement blog. You can now move off the old Skype RTOP and deliver Teams on Citrix.
- Key UX Enhancements – This was No. 1 in my last post, and I did a pretty extensive write-up so I won’t go into a ton of detail here. But I think EDT is an absolute game changer; Adaptive Throughput makes our protocol even better; and Local Text Echo was one of my favorite features back in the day. These all are free when you upgrade to LTSR 1912.
- Cloud Integration – This is almost like Linux: If you’re doing anything with Citrix Cloud or even operating in a forklift type scenario where you’re bridging to a public cloud, you’re probably on the CR track already. We’ve been making tons of major (and low-level) improvements in the last several CRs to ensure smooth hybrid-cloud operation. On the Azure side, it’s things like on-demand provisioning, auto-populated geo lists, Gov and Germany support to name a few. On AWS, the biggest is probably IAM role support via 1811, as my colleague Jill documented several months ago. But there’s one more thing I’m really excited about – the 1912 VDA will support Rendezvous! This means we can bypass the Cloud Connector (so the VDA connects directly to the cloud-hosted Gateway Service), and HDX/ICA Proxy becomes much more scalable. It’s a must-have feature if you’re going big on cloud. (Please note, the server-side piece of this will be shipping shortly, but 1912 is required on the VDA side.) Add it all up and, if you’re thinking about the Cloud, you really need to be on this latest and greatest LTSR.
As you can see, we’ve been quite busy delivering some fantastic stuff over the last couple of years. If you’d like to upgrade to LTSR 1912, make sure you’re doing so from the last LTSR (7.15) or one of the last two CRs (1906 or 1909). Those three particular upgrade paths are officially supported as my colleague Adam pointed out here, and it’s what we’ve been testing internally the last few months. And if you’re still having trouble deciding whether LTSR or CR is right for you, I’ll be at Summit, Synergy and many CUGC events in 2020. Track me down, and let’s debate over a pint. 😊
Cheers,
Nicholas Rintalan
Principal Architect & Sr. Director of Enterprise Architecture
Citrix Consulting Services
