At Citrix, we’re constantly looking to deliver innovative new features that help our customers on their journey to the cloud and address key challenges they may face with their on-prem workloads. With this quarter’s iteration of What’s New for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, we have a jam-packed list that includes security and management enhancements, as well as features that optimize the end-user experience.
First, we’ll take a high-level look at key enhancements to our most recent on-premises VDA release. Then, we’ll review some of the enhancements for our Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops cloud offering.
Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7 2009
We’re excited to announce the release of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7 2009! This current release builds out our on-prem virtualization offering with user experience and security enhancements, as well anticipated Linux VDA enhancements. You’ll find the complete list of technical enhancements on our product documentation page, but here are some highlights:
- Security enhancements: One of our biggest updates this month — support for FIDO2 via Windows Hello — improves security and how users access their virtual apps and desktops. Every user is used to passwords, but they can be cumbersome and aren’t the most secure and seamless way to access corporate resources. With the 2009 release’s FIDO2 support, this authentication method helps secure infrastructure from service-side breaches. FIDO2 authentication uses asymmetric cryptography, taking advantage of a PKI architecture, which makes it very difficult for hackers to compromise. This release also introduces alert notifications via email for our Session Recording feature within Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. Now admins can get real-time recording events and a playback link to give them instant visibility into predefined activities.
- Linux VDA updates: As with every VDA release, our Linux product managers are constantly making enhancements that not only close the feature parity gap between Linux and Windows VDAs, but also address key customer requests. With this 2009 release, we’re bringing Browser Content Redirection (BCR) to Linux VDA, allowing the ability to redirect the contents of a web browser to the client device, helping free up valuable server-side resources. We’re also introducing a highly requested security feature — session watermarking! Now administrators can set policies that overlay key identifiable user information for Linux virtual sessions. So if a user were to take a screenshot or photo of sensitive information, it can easily be traced back to the source. We’re also providing new platform support with this release: Ubuntu 2004 and RHEL 8.2.
- User experience enhancements: As with every release, we’re constantly striving to improve the end-user experience for virtual apps and desktops, ensuring users get that truly native-like experience. With this release, we’re introducing PIN caching. With PIN caching, users who are using Fast smartcards in Citrix sessions will have their PINs cached, so the users don’t have to enter their PIN multiple times for different applications. We’ve also made a number of performance and stability improvements to the Citrix Workspace app across all platforms, along with Day 1 support for iOS 14 as well as Big Sur Mac OS, upon its release. While Big Sur is in beta, admins can still start testing it in their environments with the recently released Citrix Workspace app 2009 for Mac. We’re also happy to announce full support for HDX optimization for Microsoft Teams for Linux devices, as well as Mac OS.
Bringing DaaS to your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Deployments
Exciting news for our Citrix Managed Desktops customers, we are bringing the power of DaaS into the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops family. Today, customers that have Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Premium cloud service can now access the DaaS UI via the Quick Deploy feature, located in your Manage tab. Customers can now leverage this service to easily roll out apps and desktops as needed on Azure or even take a quick test drive of the Citrix value-add benefits to Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD).
As part of this change, Citrix Managed Desktops has now become Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Standard for Azure to simplify deployment and expansion. We’re also introducing Remote PC Access capabilities to this edition. Remote PC Access enables organizations to easily allow employees to access existing physical office PCs remotely and in a secure manner. In addition, we are also providing a tech preview for Linux VDAs within Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Standard for Azure.
You can learn more about what this announcement means in our recent blog post.
Automated Configuration Tool
Our product teams are constantly creating innovative features to help customers on their cloud journey and make that transition as smooth as possible. One of those is the Automated Configuration Tool, which is designed to help automate the migration of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops configuration (policies, applications, catalogs, and others) from one or more on-prem site(s) to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service hosted on Citrix Cloud. Currently in tech preview, this tool can also be used to migrate information between different Cloud regions or tenants. Check out the proof of concept in the Citrix Tech Zone.
Citrix Cloud License Insights
Most Citrix Cloud and on-prem Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops customers are familiar with the ability to leverage the Licensing console in Citrix Cloud to understand and see product usage as it relates to user/device licensing — with insights such as usage across multiple deployments, historical trends, license server health, and licensing file expiration dates. However, these insights were only available for U/D licensing. Now we’re happy to announce improved visibility into license utilization, with the ability to see concurrent license usage data and so much more! You can read more about the Citrix Cloud licensing page updates in this blog post.
Google Cloud Platform Enhancements
For our customers running workloads in Google Cloud, we’re introducing some new MCS functionality for Citrix workloads — Shared VPC Support and Sole Tenant Support and Zone Selection.
- Shared VPC Support: Leverage Google Cloud Shared VPC configuration with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops to simplify and share configuration, delegate administration, and define reusable network configurations
- Sole Tenant Support and Zone Selection: Enables configuration of Windows 10 VDAs on dedicated host hardware inside GCP, enabling BYO License scenarios, as well as new data compliance / HIPAA scenarios inside Google Cloud.
Provisioning Enhancements
When running Citrix workloads in the cloud or on-prem, admins need a powerful management tools that help optimize the performance of their Citrix workloads while at the same time reducing overhead whenever possible.
This quarter, we’re introducing MCS and PVS enhancements that can help.
First, we’re providing VMware ESX7 Support for both PVS and MCS. We’re also providing Azure Boot performance improvements, which offer >50 percent reduction in boot time through system disk retention with MSCIO. We’re also providing support for Azure Single Resource Group to help reduce overhead and improve overall catalog organization. Lastly, we’re providing SCVMM 2019 support for MCS.
Citrix Cloud Health Check
When it comes to running Citrix workloads in the cloud, customers want to know how their environment is performing and troubleshoot any problem areas. This is why we’re introducing Citrix Cloud health check. This is an independent tool that enables customers to self-troubleshoot and automate checks on VDAs, StoreFront servers, and Profile Management for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service. Customers interested in testing out Citrix Cloud health check can read more about it our Citrix Cloud health check documentation.
These are just some of the key highlights from this quarter. Be sure, if you haven’t already, to register for our upcoming Citrix Cloud Summit which is a virtual event on October 8. There you’ll learn about these features and much more!
