Cloud Guidepost: Leading practices for Citrix Cloud on AWS – Part 3
This is the final installment in our three-part series on leading practices to consider when deploying Citrix Cloud on AWS (check out Part 1 and Part 2). This blog post will share the benefits of leveraging the AWS service for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and is based on the Cloud Success team’s experience.
Profiles and Citrix
User profiles are the combination of files and registries that, together, enable a consistent user experience and portability. When considering Citrix sessions, the common factor is users accessing or publishing applications and/or desktops from Windows machines. Citrix can work with different types of profiles and different creation methods. The top common solutions for Citrix Cloud customers are Windows profiles, Citrix User Profile Management, and FSLogix.
Another common factor when talking about profiles applied to Citrix sessions is the user store — a network folder where profiles are stored centrally. A related question that I hear from my clients the most is, “Where can I save my user profiles in the cloud?” You have two options:
- A traditional, old-school file server (in this scenario, Amazon EC2)
- An AWS file system service like Amazon FSx
You can find both Amazon EC2 and Amazon FSx in the Citrix Ready Marketplace. Keep reading to learn more about the advantages of and prerequisites for including Amazon FSx for Windows File Server in your plan to store user profiles.
What Are the Advantages?
- Compatibility: It’s a Windows Server file system with full support for SMB and NTFS.
- Integration: The service communicates with your Active Directory solution (AWS AD or customer managed EC2 AD).
- Consolidation: DFS is a well-known feature that allows a single point of access on the network with a namespace.
- Performance: It uses SSD storage to provide fast performance, high levels of throughput, and great IOPS.
- Management: Because it’s a fully managed service offered by AWS, you don’t need to think about management, updates, configurations, or backup.
- Cost: You pay only for the resources you use, and you can specify how much you need of each parameter.
What Do I Need to Do to Make It Work?
- A Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployment. I highly recommend considering a greenfield scenario by leveraging Citrix Cloud resources like the infrastructure components relevant in the control and access layer.
- An AWS account with the permissions to configure on FSx and EC2.
- Microsoft Active Directory for user access control and authentication. (Don’t forget to allow network traffic between the VDA EC2 instances and the Amazon FSx file system.)
Fortunately, if you just want to redirect profiles to FSx, the configuration is relatively simple and should take 30 minutes or less to complete. If you’re in the earlier stages of your configuration, this process can take longer when you factor in configuring your user profile solution and testing.
Takeaways
- You have different options when thinking about creating user profiles for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.
- Amazon FSx can help you save some money and time.
- Amazon FSx is Citrix Ready-verified solution and is available now in the Citrix Ready Marketplace.
- It’s easy to configure so you can focus your efforts on the user-profile setup.
— Faubricio Gutierrez, Customer Success Engineer
