Did you know that the secret to unleashing the ultimate workspace experience is the network? How you connect and the quality of your network connection matter. Users may be far away from the apps they’re connecting to, resulting in latency. And, backhauling through the datacenter can be even worse for the user experience. Or there could be a dreaded, even newsworthy, carrier outage. Even a lack of bandwidth or a brief glitch in connectivity can turn into a big problem when you’re interacting with customers in real time. It’s frustrating when apps don’t perform, or audio dropouts break up the conversation.
How can your network mitigate these challenges? The right SD-WAN solution can make all the difference. SD-WANs can take networks from unpredictable and congested to optimized, secure and centrally managed in less time than ever. But, how do you pick the right SD-WAN for your business needs?
A Cloud-First Approach to App Delivery with Digital Workspaces
The journey to the cloud for Citrix Workspace can start with simply moving the management plane and backend infrastructure components to Citrix cloud services, or it can mean lifting and shifting the virtual app and desktop workloads to a public cloud like Azure or AWS. When it comes to Citrix Workspace, no other vendor can provide a better-suited SD-WAN solution than Citrix.
In this three-part blog series, we’ll look at how Citrix SD-WAN brings together a great employee experience, security, integrated workflows, and deep visibility for your distributed workforce.
Enhanced Workspace Experience with Citrix-SD-WAN
Citrix SD-WAN improves the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops experience through granular optimization of the channels within the traffic flow. Citrix SD-WAN also routes virtual apps and desktops traffic directly to the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops virtual delivery agents (VDAs), avoiding unnecessary complexity and delay. Citrix SD-WAN’s packet-level processing ensures uninterrupted connectivity and a smooth and interactive user experience. Without it, a user’s virtual app or desktop would dim to indicate that it has become unresponsive, or the user experience could become painfully sluggish. Packet-level processing, including selective packet racing, is also key to smooth audio with softphone and unified communications applications.
The key to uninterrupted network connectivity? Having two network connections that behave as a single virtual path. At branch offices, many customers use broadband internet connections from two internet service providers, a combination of broadband internet and an MPLS link back to the data center, or broadband internet plus wireless LTE.
Different types of connections typically exhibit different latency and loss characteristics. By default, Citrix SD-WAN delivers higher priority traffic across the best link. When one link fails or degrades, Citrix SD-WAN maintains a responsive user experience and smooth audio by giving priority to interactive and real-time traffic.
How?
The secret is granular optimization within each HDX session and across user sessions. Citrix HDX technology delivers a “high-definition” experience to users of centralized applications and desktops, on any device and over any network and is built on top of the Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) remoting protocol. Citrix SD-WAN sees each stream within the HDX/ICA protocol. A stream is a group of virtual channels that have similar QoS requirements. There are four streams available to carry the ICA traffic between the server and client. Traditional routers and other SD-WANs are not able to prioritize streams over a single port to/from the VDA server because they don’t have deep visibility into the protocol.
But Citrix SD-WAN can.
Between two peered SD-WANs, Citrix SD-WAN supports single-port, multi-stream ICA QoS. We call it “AutoQoS” because network admins can do this without bothering the virtualization admins. Citrix SD-WAN automatically configures the VDA server to deliver ICA traffic in multi-stream mode.
The benefits of SD-WAN with Citrix Workspace include:
- A great experience
- Real-time and interactive virtual channels are prioritized over the network
- Local internet breakout to the closest PoPs for Microsoft 365 Teams and any other optimized UCaaS
- Improved reliability
- Ultra-fast failover <200ms
- Link bonding across diverse WAN links – leased line, broadband, LTE
In cases of congestion, here are a few examples of how only Citrix SD-WAN can help:
- Finance: A virtualized banking app can remain responsive and interactive even when someone in the branch is printing a large document at the same time.
- Healthcare: Medical imaging files can be sent without disruption, while the virtualized EMR app remains responsive and interactive.
- Manufacturing: Virtualized SAP and CAD traffic is prioritized over all other traffic.
If you’re thinking about moving your workspaces to the cloud, there’s no better time to add Citrix SD-WAN. Get your copy of the Gartner 2020 WAN Edge Infrastructure Critical Capabilities report. And register today for our Citrix Workspace Summit and our Citrix Security Summit.
