As April arrives here in North America, baseball fanatics like me get excited anticipating the start of the season with the dream of their favorite team winning the World Series. Well, here at Citrix, April also brings excitement and anticipation for Synergy! While we anticipate the speakers, sessions and announcements that Synergy will bring, I’ll step up to the plate and give you the latest updates from Citrix Workspace:

Citrix Ready Workspace Hub Tech Preview

Citrix Ready workspace hub now is in tech preview! At Citrix, we’re always working on innovative ways to help our customers with their digital transformation strategies. One way involved working closely with Citrix Ready partners, NComputing and ViewSonic, in transforming a Raspberry Pi device into an enterprise grade, low cost and powerful client for our Citrix customers. The end result of all this hard work is that the Citrix Ready workspace hub is a device that is more than just an end-point. It is a device that will simplify how end-users carry out day-to-day tasks so they can be more productive and effective in their jobs. While the hardware has been available through NComputing and ViewSonic since March 31st, advanced features such as Citrix Casting and Skype for Business RTME are now available as a technical preview. You can read more about the Citrix Ready workspace hub and how to access the tech preview from our dedicated announcement blog. If you’re attending Citrix Synergy 2018, be sure to register for “Discover Citrix Workspace Hub,” breakout session on May 9th, 11:30am PDT to get more details and have a hands-on experience with the Citrix Ready workspace hub.

Citrix Cloud Continues to Grow

To serve the growing demand and business requirements of the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region, Citrix Cloud management platform expanded to a new cloud services location in Microsoft Azure data centers in Australia. This expansion allows Citrix, our customers and partners to address data sovereignty and privacy regulations proliferating across the region. And talking about Microsoft Azure, the ability to use federated authentication to Azure Active Directory with the XenApp and XenDesktop service has now been declared production ready (this was introduced as a Tech Preview in February). This integration opens the door for multi-factor authentication and federation to different identity providers, just to mention a few of most requested features.

Staying in the Cloud, the Secure Browser service that we launched in March has also moved forward, Additions include customer definable timeouts and public REST APIs for launching a URL within the hosted environment without publishing a Secure Browser in the Citrix Cloud console. There is a lot more on the way, but for that, you’ll have to wait until Citrix Synergy. Join session SYN-232 to make sure you get all the latest on our web isolation solution!

The Citrix PVS Plug-in for Nutanix AHV Provides Greater Scalability and Choice

Last year, Nutanix released support for XenServer, as well as the first-ever Citrix Ready HCI Workspace Appliance to make it easier for customers to get up and running with the Citrix Cloud XenApp and XenDesktop Service. This year, we’ve further extended our partnership and integration as Nutanix recently released a fully supported plugin for provisioning virtual machines with Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) on Nutanix AHV. Citrix PVS reduces storage costs and improves manageability with the capability of deploying a single virtual image to tens of thousands of users in minutes. The scalability of Nutanix combined with the scalability of Citrix Provisioning Services delivers an optimal configuration. Leverage it for your enterprise VDI deployments. Check out this blog post from Nutanix for more information on the release of their PVS plug-in.

XenMotion Support for NVIDIA GPUs is Here

Citrix announced that vGPU XenMotion is now a fully supported feature. XenMotion support is unique to Citrix and NVIDIA; this further confirms XenServer’s position as the leading hypervisor for graphics virtualization. Only Citrix XenServer and NVIDIA virtual GPU solutions give you the ability to live migrate running GPU-enabled VMs between hosts — without any downtime — using vGPU XenMotion. This is the industry’s first live migration solution for vGPU-enabled VMs. It improves employees’ productivity and your IT staff’s agility in administering the environment. For more details, check out the announcement blog post

App Layering Receives an Update

On April 3rd we updated Citrix App Layering (version 4.10) with the following enhancements added to the release:

• Windows 10 version 1709 support — Windows 10 version 1709 is now supported when Store Apps are disabled.
• Improved support for PVS on Hyper-V and vSphere — this release includes performance improvements when using PVS to stream images to Hyper-V or vSphere systems.

For a complete list of what is included in this update, you can visit our App Layering product documentation page.

Cumulative Update announced for XenApp and XenDesktop 7.15 LTSR

On April 18th, Citrix made available a XenApp and XenDesktop Long Term Service Release (LTSR) cumulative update for XenApp and XenDesktop 7.15 LTSR. Customers with active Customer Success Services can access the Cumulative Updates via the Citrix.com download pages for XenApp and XenDesktop or XenServer. Once logged in, Citrix will check to determine if you have active Customer Success Services before displaying the Cumulative Updates on the associated LTSR downloads page. The cumulative update is available to download now.

XenApp and XenDesktop receive Common Criteria certification

In other XenApp and XenDesktop LTSR news, we are excited to report that both XenApp and XenDesktop 7.15 LTSR have achieved The Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation (Common Criteria or CC) certification. Specifically, both are ISO/IEC 15408 certified. Common Criteria is a 28-country agreement of “common” security expectations. The certification allows the security of products to be evaluated once in a Common Criteria-issuing country. Certification means that the products immediately are qualified to be for sale to the governments of all Common Criteria member countries.

Achieving Common Criteria certification is a significant statement about the security readiness of Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop. While it is a certification for governments, Common Criteria is also a commercial measure of security readiness. Often, it is referenced to support certification of customer data processing systems for standards including Payment Card Industry PCI DSS. Common Criteria also is a globally-recognized security standard in other industries, such as healthcare, in which the HIPAA Privacy Rule is crucial.

The security target and supporting documents are now available on the Common Criteria portal and supporting documents are on our website.

XenMobile is a Top Player in the Radicati Unified Endpoint Management Market Quadrant for 2018

Citrix has been named a “Top Player” in the Radicati Unified Endpoint Management — Market Quadrant Report. This recognition underscores the commitment Citrix has made to user and administrator experience. We simplify the access and management of apps, data, users and endpoints from a single pane.

Citrix Wins Cloud and Application Security Awards from Cyber Defense Magazine

Citrix is pleased to announce that we’ve been honored by Cyber Defense Magazine in its 2018 InfoSec Awards in two categories: innovation and impact in the never-ending effort to stop breaches and stay ahead of threats. Citrix Cloud is the winner of the 2018 InfoSec Awards Editor’s Choice for Cloud Security. Citrix NetScaler won the 2018 InfoSec Awards Leader in Application Security. You can read details about all of these wins in a recent Citrix blog post. Congratulations to the Citrix Cloud and Networking teams!

https://twitter.com/citrix/status/988054326164762626

Come find us at Synergy

Finally, as we sign off for this month we invite you to join us at Citrix Synergy 2018 in Anaheim, California. It’s not too late to register; you can find information at https://www.citrixsynergy.com/. Our team will lead several breakout sessions, so come find us. We’d love to meet you and, perhaps, share a beverage or two.

Thanks for reading this month’s blog and we’ll see you at Synergy!

Paul Carley
Follow me on Twitter: @PaulCarley15