As organizations move toward a desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) model to support a secure, simplified, and flexible way to deliver apps and desktops on demand; Citrix continues to advance DaaS technology to meet those demands by offering Citrix Managed Azure service.

Citrix Managed Azure (Consumption Fund) is an add-on offering for use with select Citrix offerings. This pay-as-you-go Citrix Managed Azure offering simplifies the hosting of app and desktop workloads, making it simple to leverage cloud desktops on demand. What makes Citrix Managed Azure unique is customers can purchase consumption (funds) in advance for things like budgeted projects and have them available as needed or it can be leveraged on demand and billed in arrears. Citrix Managed Azure can be ordered conveniently via Azure Marketplace or directly through your Citrix sales representative.

Citrix Managed Azure is supported on Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Standard for Azure as well as Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service and Citrix Workspace Premium Plus on Citrix Cloud via Citrix Quick Deploy service.

Citrix is pleased to announce that Citrix Managed Azure has added new features and capabilities to help organizations meet their ever-changing demands of their business. Some of the latest enhancements include:

Support for Five New Azure Regions

Citrix Managed Azure now supports five new regions for hosting VDA workloads, which now brings the total supported regions to nine global regions. This allows customers to host workloads closer to their end users, enabling a great experience no matter where the user is accessing the workspace. These new regions include Brazil South, Central India, Japan East, South Central U.S., and UK South. They join our core Azure support regions of East U.S., West U.S., Australia East, and West Europe.

Support Persistent (Static) VDA Snapshots and Restore Capabilities

For persistent desktops hosted on Citrix Managed Azure and Bring Your Own Azure, customers can now take snapshots to provide a backup in case of disk failures or data loss. Customers can configure snapshots to be taken daily, weekly, or on-demand. IT admins can easily revert a VDA VM state to a saved snapshot, making it easy to roll back to the previous good state if there is an issue with any manual updates performed by the admin.

Static IP Egress (Public static IP)

Customers requiring static public IP all outbound traffic from VDA hosted in Citrix Managed Azure can now configure an Azure NAT Gateway and obtain the assigned IP for allowing access to their access-controlled networks and systems.

Azure VPN (Preview)

This enables customers to connect Citrix Managed Azure directly to their on-premises datacenter with Azure VPN. The Citrix management console provides a simple, step-by-step interface to make connecting an on-prem datacenter easy.

New Linux Images for Citrix Prepared Images

Customers can easily create a Linux VDA-based deployment using the Citrix prepared Ubuntu Linux images in the Quick Deploy Master Image library. Customers can leverage both single and multi-session Linux images in their workload deployments. Creating non-domain joined Linux VDA deployments in Citrix Managed Azure is now a couple of clicks away.

Standard SSD Disk Support

Customers can now select standard SSD disk for their VDAs hosted in Citrix Managed Azure during catalog creation. Citrix supports standard HDD and premium SSD options.

Limited Time Offer: Free Trial of Turnkey DaaS

To kick off the new year, Citrix is offering a limited number of free 7-day trials of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (CVAD) Standard for Azure (while supplies last). Now you can try the latest turnkey DaaS offering and experience the power of DaaS on Azure.

Our DaaS team is excited about the enhancements we are making with our desktop as a service offerings and are thrilled at what is coming for customers in 2022. Stay tuned.