Last fall, Citrix and Google Cloud announced our commitment to helping customers accelerate and embrace hybrid work models with our strengthened roadmap and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offerings on Google Cloud.
Today, we’re proud to share that we’ve delivered on the first steps of our joint DaaS roadmap — making it easier than ever for organizations with Citrix VDI solutions to transition to Citrix DaaS on Google Cloud. And the timing couldn’t be better. With 90 percent of organizations planning to adopt hybrid work this year, IT needs a way to get there that’s efficient, cost-effective, secure, and flexible.
Here are five new ways Citrix and Google Cloud are making this a reality:
1) Simple procurement of Citrix DaaS via the Google Cloud Marketplace
Google Cloud Marketplace allows organizations to quickly deploy integrated cloud solutions natively on Google Cloud. While Citrix ADC solutions have been available in the marketplace for some time, today we are announcing the addition of Citrix DaaS solutions [formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service] for Google Cloud.
If you’ve ever purchased solutions through the Google Cloud Marketplace before, you understand why it’s often considered a commercial procurement “shortcut,” enabling even the largest enterprises to secure customized terms and pricing without the complexity of the traditional purchasing process. Organizations can also benefit from flexible yearly, monthly, or custom billing cycles to fit their needs. For example, retail organizations can address their seasonal worker needs by purchasing Citrix DaaS Premium for Google Cloud on a monthly subscription from the Google Cloud Marketplace to cover the holiday shopping season.
Additionally, Citrix DaaS spend purchased through Marketplace counts towards a customer’s Google Cloud commitment and is included in their Google Cloud invoice — saving even more time and simplifying the transaction to just one bill.
2) New Citrix DaaS solutions purpose-built for Google Cloud
Citrix and Google Cloud have partnered to develop two new hybrid DaaS (bring-your-own Google Cloud subscription) editions, now available in the Google Cloud Marketplace: Citrix DaaS Standard for Google Cloud and Citrix DaaS Premium for Google Cloud.
Citrix DaaS Standard for Google Cloud is a solution for organizations or departments that are newer to DaaS or VDI and need an affordable, yet comprehensive hybrid-work solution for delivering secure virtual apps and desktops quickly and easily. Citrix DaaS Premium for Google Cloud is ideal for organizations with existing VDI investments that need to modernize their deployments. With the Premium edition, IT admins will enjoy rapid migration and provisioning tools, streamlined management of Google Cloud and/or on-premises resources, advanced security capabilities like App Protection and Adaptive Authentication (coming soon), and exceptional monitoring and cloud optimizations. User/device and concurrent licensing options are available for both editions. Check out the full feature matrix here.
Both solutions leverage a new Google Cloud-hosted, U.S.-based control plane, which means the Citrix DaaS service and your unique customer data plane will run with the leading performance of Google Cloud and the reach of their global network.
Wipro, a Citrix System Integrator and Google Cloud Partner, has been looking forward to these new developments from the Citrix and Google Cloud partnership. “Wipro is very excited and keen to position the DaaS solution from Citrix and Google Cloud by deploying a true hybrid cloud solution for hybrid work”, said Seshu Venkata, General Manager and Global Head of Wipro VirtuaDesk, Cloud and Infrastructures services.
Seshu and the Wipro team participated in the preview of the Google Cloud-hosted Citrix DaaS control plane and “observed great performance for provisioning times and catalog updates. We also see a great benefit to the flexible power management policies with hibernation support,” Seshu said.
3) New migration tools
In addition to these new offerings and simplified transaction process, Citrix and Google Cloud are continuing to develop tools and resources to make it easier than ever to transition from on-premises VDI deployments to DaaS with Google Cloud.
Now generally available, Citrix’s Image Portability Service for Google Cloud automates the deployment of a master image from an existing on-premises PVS/MCS-provisioned Citrix environment, targeting a Citrix DaaS resource location hosted within Google Cloud. This means less re-work when moving to the cloud, as well as burst-to-cloud capabilities for capacity management, improved disaster recovery and business continuity plans, and streamlined image management.
Available in preview, Citrix’s Provisioning Services (PVS) for Google Cloud enables dynamic provisioning of Citrix workloads in Google Cloud, leveraging PVS provision-on-demand technology which is currently used by the majority of Citrix enterprise on-premises customers. This long-awaited capability not only improves VM deployment efficiency and lifecycle tasks, but also brings a familiar Citrix toolset to the cloud.
Even with these tools, we understand that transitioning or deploying an entirely new environment takes a lot of careful planning and considerations. That’s why we’ve developed an entirely new solution-based set of documents and guides on how to deploy Citrix DaaS on Google Cloud to make the process even easier! Check out this new Google Cloud Solution Hub for reference architectures, design guidance, and much more.
4) Significant savings on cloud expenses
The ability to suspend and resume virtual machines (VMs) — a highly-anticipated feature currently only available with Google Cloud — is now generally available with Citrix DaaS! With this capability, IT admins can configure Citrix DaaS to automatically suspend and resume virtual machine instances to disk when not in use, preserving the memory, device state, and application state, while reducing the Google Cloud instance costs and leveraging more affordable storage rates — an estimated cloud cost savings of up to 66 percent*! When it’s time to ramp up, Citrix’s Autoscale uses dynamic power management to proactively scale virtual machines based on an admin-defined schedule or levels of demand.
Adding to the cost savings is Google Cloud’s transparent and innovative approach to pricing, with project-level, per-second billing to understand the ROI of your Citrix DaaS deployment and Active Assist, which proactively identifies opportunities to improve cloud performance and lower costs. Combined, these features can significantly reduce customer cloud consumption costs without any extra burden on IT.
5) Google Cloud provisioning for Hybrid Rights customers
While this post is focused on all of the Citrix DaaS services and capabilities with Google Cloud, that’s not the only way you can take advantage of Citrix solutions with Google Cloud. Citrix recognizes that there are other factors that impact an organization’s ability to move to the cloud — such as the geographical location of the Citrix DaaS service. So for those of you in this situation — don’t worry, we have an answer!
In an effort to further simplify your migration to cloud, Citrix has just announced support for provisioning public cloud workloads on Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. This capability is specifically for hybrid rights customers on Current Releases (CR) or Long Term Service Releases (LTSR), starting with the 2203 release in March 2022. When you transition to Citrix DaaS solutions on Google Cloud, we include Hybrid Rights in your initial term, with the option to renew in terms thereafter. These Hybrid Rights give you the flexibility to install the Citrix solution on any Google Cloud instance worldwide. Learn more here.
Ready to make the transition?
Citrix and Google Cloud are committed to continued development and innovation for customers — from tools to networking to DaaS solutions for every user. Contact us today to chat about how Citrix and Google Cloud technologies can help enable hybrid work easier and faster than ever.
More About Wipro
Wipro is a Google Cloud Partner with 5 Google Cloud Specializations in Application Development, Security, Cloud Migration, Work Transformation Enterprise & Infrastructure, which indicates Wipro’s industry-leading capabilities and proven customer success stories.
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* Estimated calculation, using a common VDI instance type in GCP (E2-Standard-2 instance type, Server OS, 2vCPU with 8GB RAM). Leveraging https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator, E2-Standard-2 running 24/7 (730h per month) @ $48.92 + Windows OS for the VM runtime @ 67.16 + 128GB standard disk @ $5.12 = $121.20. With Supsend/Resume, E2-Standard-2 running 10 per day on 5 days a week (220h per month) @ $14.56 + Windows OS for the VM runtime @ 19.99 + 128GB standard disk @ $5.12 = $39.67. Assuming a 32GB standard disk of $1.28 per month, $1.28 + $39.67 = $40.95. Based upon this calculation, when suspending the VM while not in use, a customer can save ~66%.
