Citrix Autoscale was introduced in 2019, and ever since it has been one of our most adopted features. It’s easy to see why: with its ability to reduce your cloud spend while still maintaining an exceptional employee experience, using Autoscale is a no-brainer. Earlier this year we introduced this capability to our on-premises control plane in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 2305, bringing the power of Autoscale to all our administrators.
IT teams and administrators are being asked to do more with less. Businesses need to cut costs, and IT teams need to deliver. We are here to help you deliver on your business goals with a suite of newly released Autoscale features designed to help you save on costs. Let’s take a look at some of our newest features.
Hibernation with Azure VMs
Let your end users resume from where they left off with faster logon performance — at no additional cost — using hibernation.
Hibernation allows you to pause VMs that are idle and save on compute costs. The VM’s memory contents are stored on the OS disk. When the user logs back on, they resume from where they left off leading to a better end user experience. Users will also experience faster launch times than with stopped deallocated machines.
Customers do not pay any extra costs compared to powered-off machines and are also more sustainable. This feature is primarily intended for single session assigned machines, but it can also be used for pooled machines. For pooled machines, admins can set up more aggressive timeouts for cost optimization while maintaining a good user experience – as users will still pick up exactly where they left off with hibernation. For getting started and more information, please check out our blog and end-to-end setup video.
Power Settings for End User PTO
Turn off assigned machines when the end user is on vacation.
Your end users aren’t always at work every single weekday. Whether it’s PTO or a public holiday there are going to be days when they don’t log in. You need the capability to power manage those machines on those off days to save on compute and costs. To address this use case, we’ve introduced a policy that allows you to power off or hibernate a machine if the user does not logon within a set time.
For more information, see Single-session OS random delivery groups and Single-session OS static delivery groups.
Autoscale Insights
Analyze the effectiveness of your Autoscale settings using data-driven Autoscale Insights.
We’ve heard your feedback: administrators want to make data-driven decisions to understand if their Autoscale settings are effective. Admins want to ensure they align with the actual end-user usage, while maintaining a balance of cost savings with end-user experience.
That’s where Autoscale Insights comes in. Insights are visible at a delivery group level and compare every 30 mins of historical usage with the Autoscale powered-on count. Autoscale Insights uses this data to grade your settings in one of three ways: poor end user experience, not cost effective, or a good balance between cost and end-user experience.
Get started with AutoScale Insights by enabling the toggle on the home page:
- Go to Manage > Home Page > Preview features widget > Autoscale Insights and enable.
- Then go to the Delivery Groups node –> select a Delivery Group –> check Autoscale Insights at the bottom.
- Note: It might take 15 mins for Autoscale Insights to show up after enabling the toggle.
Check out our documentation for more information.
Vertical Load Balancing
Pack sessions vertically instead of having a session sprawl by using vertical load balancing at delivery group level.
Vertical load balancing is incredibly useful for controlling costs in public clouds. By stacking user sessions onto machines that are already in use, you reduce sprawl and reduce costs. Previously, vertical load balancing was set at a Citrix site level, which meant you had to use vertical load balancing across all your Delivery Groups, even if they were in on-premises data centers. This restricted admins ability to implement this feature.
Now, we have brought this setting to the Delivery Group level. You can individually set vertical load balancing just to the Delivery Groups that are hosted in the cloud, allowing you to optimize costs while maintaining performance for on-premises Delivery Groups. While creating a delivery group you can now choose vertical load balancing for incoming sessions so that they are distributed vertically by packing each machine to its fullest capacity. You can also change the setting for existing Delivery Groups.
Note: Since the sessions will be packed on the machines, it’s recommended to manage end user experience with policies such as max sessions per machine and concurrent logon tolerance, as shown above.
Check out our documentation for more information.
Learn More
Help us define the roadmap of Autoscale!
We are actively innovating to help you save costs. We would love to hear from you so please provide feedback on these features or new feature ideas. Be sure to check out our product documentation, TechZone articles, and past blogs on our Autoscale innovations.
