In the first blog post of this three-part series on leading practices for Citrix Cloud on AWS, I focused on helping companies to adopt cloud in an efficient and profitable way.
In the short time since the first post, Citrix Cloud has already transformed and expanded. Enhancements of authentication methods and integration with other technologies are just some of the recent changes we’ve made to improve the user experience.
Keeping in line with my previous blog, I’ll focus on some of the best practices, alternatives, and recommendations for configuring Citrix Cloud on AWS that I’ve collected while working with customers.
Get a Quick Start (and a Proper Workbench)
In this post, I invite you to test the power of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on AWS in the simplest way I can think of — a Quick Start developed by Citrix in collaboration with AWS. If you’re considering accelerating your production deployment and/or want guidance on customization, this solution provides instructions, costs, licenses, diagrams, explanations, and everything else you’ll need for a successful configuration.
Here are two anecdotes that’ll help illustrate this. When I was a teenager, I spent all my afternoons working in an automotive mechanic’s workshop. Rain or shine, I always hoped a car with a more complicated problem than the previous one would arrive. Because we had a strong and safe workbench to work on, I felt confident that I could disassemble any engine (or add more space to the workbench if needed). Conversely, on the eve of the birth of my first child last year, I decided to build his crib. Unfortunately, the crib has many flaws. In my defense, I don’t think the problem was with my skills or the tools or materials I used. The problem? I didn’t have a good workbench.
What is the relationship between these two stories and the AWS EC2 service? To put it simply, EC2 has the qualities of the workbench from that mechanic’s workshop. It’s a service that provides scalable computing capacity and enables you to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. Do yourself a favor — start your Citrix Cloud project with a proper workbench like EC2.
Want to Implement on Your Own?
If you prefer to start the implementation on your own, here are some additional recommendations:
- Cloud Connectors are a key piece of a Citrix Cloud environment. They are secure communication channels between the customer environment (Resource Location) and the Citrix Cloud platform. Due to the nature of this component, there are several details you need to consider: instance type, security groups, antivirus, Windows version, and security.
- For production environments, I recommend instance type m5.large. However, you could also use other instances including the t2 family (t2.large) and (perhaps with a different balance between compute and memory) m4.
- For security groups, it is important to know that Cloud Connectors will have communication with VDAs and Active Directory internally (and in some other cases, Storefront and ADCs). Externally they will only have outbound traffic via port 443.
- Cloud Connectors should be in dedicated subnets within the private subnet, preferably in different Availability Zones. NAT Gateway will filter the communication to the published subnet for internet access by default route.
- Finally, I recommend disabling auto-assign public IP during the creation of machines. It is not necessary for them to have a public IP, and it is enough that they can go out to the internet.
Check out Citrix Tech Zone for more information on Citrix Cloud and Cloud Connectors services. I also encourage you to explore the Citrix Cloud Success Center for a deeper dive into everything I covered in this post. There, you’ll find installation guides, success plan templates, pre-requisites checklists and links to the most important support articles.
— Faubricio Gutierrez, Customer Success Engineer
