July 2021 marks the one year anniversary of Citrix’s impactful multi-year agreement with Microsoft. In these 12 months, Citrix users have launched over 250 million apps and desktops hosted on Microsoft Azure. As we work together to modernize IT, Citrix and Microsoft continue to drive innovation in the hybrid-cloud space, helping our joint customers transition to Azure at record pace.
The last year has brought unexpected IT challenges around the globe. As we look toward 2022, we see increasing change unfolding in the way we do business, the way we work, and the technologies we use to empower productivity. As employees move from home to new hybrid-work environments, there is more demand than ever for flexible, cloud-hosted IT infrastructure to support these needs.
With our July 2020 agreement highlighting Azure as a preferred public cloud for Citrix customers, our partnership has grown stronger and has given us opportunity to streamline our technology integrations. Our top engineering priorities revolve around making cloud more accessible — improving performance, reliability, and economics of cloud solutions — while ensuring that organizations can make the most use of the datacenter resources they still have in use today.
New Citrix and Microsoft Joint Engineering Innovations
Citrix and Microsoft engineers have been hard at work on key challenges to enhance cloud scale and performance. We’re excited to bring Provisioning Services (PVS), a core Citrix image management technology, to Azure.
“Citrix and Microsoft have worked together tirelessly over the past year to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing cloud deployments,” says Calvin Hsu, Citrix VP of Product Management. “For over a decade, customers have proven that PVS is the best way to manage large scale deployments, with high performance and simplified manageability — and now we have made it possible in the cloud.”
“Organizations worldwide are looking to the cloud for new ways to support hybrid work,” says Girish Bablani, Corporate Vice President of Azure Core at Microsoft. “Together with Citrix, we are delivering powerful solutions to modernize IT deployments and enable productivity from anywhere.”
Citrix, in collaboration with Microsoft, is unveiling powerful new technologies to help your business move to the cloud even faster, including:
Preview: Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) on Azure
Citrix and Microsoft engineers have been hard at work for over a year, delivering our flagship provisioning technology — Citrix PVS — to the Azure platform. This innovation allows Azure-hosted VMs to be rapidly provisioned and re-provisioned on the fly and streamed over the network backbone on demand. Citrix PVS on Azure behaves much the same as a traditional PVS deployment, with the ability to stream hundreds (or thousands) of Azure virtual machines from a single shared vDisk image. PVS technology not only saves storage costs, but dramatically reduces administration overhead, patching, and rollback capabilities in deployments of all sizes. We’re opening this technology preview for signups today as we prepare to enable this for production deployments. If you’re an avid consumer of Citrix PVS on-prem, be sure to sign up for the preview now to give PVS for Azure a try and share any feedback you have.
Preview: New Citrix Image Portability Service
Citrix has always been a champion of hybrid-cloud environments. While the move to cloud is fundamental to IT modernization, we recognize the importance and investment you’ve made in on-premises datacenters. With the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service lineup, it is easier than ever to deliver VDI and DaaS solutions, but we are always looking for ways to simplify image management and maintenance. One of the biggest challenges of a hybrid-cloud deployment today comes from the simple fact that an image built for an on-prem environment won’t be optimized to run on a native cloud platform and vice-versa. The Citrix Image Portability Service changes that by giving you the technology building blocks to revolutionize the way you manage images today. Using the Image Portability Service, admins will create an image one time — from their on-prem or cloud environment — and the service will automatically deconstruct, then reconstruct the image for all of its target platforms. Imagine maintaining a single base image for all of your Azure regions and on-prem datacenter locations and then simply selecting all the locations you want it deployed to. It’s that easy. Sign up now to join this preview, which is specifically designed to simplify management between on-prem hypervisor deployments and the cloud.
Continued Innovation Across the Portfolio
Of course, in addition to these new advancements, we are continuously improving our joint solutions, with an eye toward making the customer experience better than ever. MCS provisioning has seen a dramatic boost in performance, now supporting 50 percent more workloads than just a year ago, and we have introduced Microsoft Teams optimizations across our Citrix Workspace app product line, with over 2.5 million Teams calls and meetings launched via Citrix every day.
As we look back on a year full of innovation, change, and flexible work, we are excited to see what the next year will bring. The Citrix and Microsoft solutions continue to be “better together,” and our teams are hard at work to continue to give organizations the best possible experience. Don’t miss out. Be sure to sign up for the PVS on Azure and Citrix Image Portability Service previews today to experience the latest in what Citrix and Microsoft have to offer.
