Recently Google Cloud announced the general availability of Google Cloud VMware Engine. It’s a service that delivers a fully managed VMware Cloud Foundation stack — VMware vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T, and HCX for cloud migration — in a dedicated environment on Google Cloud’s highly performant and reliable infrastructure to support enterprise production workloads, like Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. Furthermore, on this service you can migrate or extend your on-premises workloads to Google Cloud by connecting to a dedicated VMware™ environment directly through the Google Cloud Console.
Google Cloud VMware Engine is built on Google Cloud’s highly performant, scalable infrastructure with fully redundant and dedicated 100Gbps networking, providing 99.99 percent availability to meet the needs of your most demanding enterprise workloads. It is designed to minimize your operational burden, so you can focus on your business. Google Cloud takes care of the lifecycle of the VMware software stack and manages all the related infrastructure and upgrades.
Google Cloud is partnering closely with leading storage, backup, and disaster recovery providers to ensure support for third-party solutions to ease the migration journey and enable business continuity. Together, we are extending our joint offerings to help Citrix customers whose Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops workloads are hosted on-premises using VMware vSphere to migrate to Google Cloud and Citrix Cloud to deliver superior user experience, enhanced security, and the freedom of choice in an app-centric, mobile-first, multi and hybrid-cloud world.
Google Cloud VMware Engine Is Now Citrix Ready
Citrix and Google Cloud have completed the rigorous Citrix Ready validation of Google Cloud VMware Engine compatibility with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop service on Citrix Cloud, and Machine Creation Service and Citrix Provisioning under the provisioning model. So, you can choose the method that best fits your environment.
In the successful validation, the Google Cloud VMware Engine service was used as a resource location hosting the Citrix VDA workload, and established the connection to Citrix Cloud via the dedicated connectors running on the VMware vSphere hypervisor. While Citrix Cloud was used for hosting and managing all the core infrastructure machines like Delivery Controllers, Workspace, Director, Licensing, and SQL database, the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service on Citrix Cloud was used to build the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops environment.
Customers running their Citrix VDA workloads on VMware vSphere can now migrate or extend their VDA workload to Google Cloud without having to refactor their applications.
Also, customers running an on-premises Citrix environment can choose and decide to move completely to the cloud by using Citrix Cloud – Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service
Customers can benefit from increased scale and agility while continuing to leverage the value of their existing VMware and Citrix investments. At the same time, customers can maintain continuity with their existing tools, policies, and unify management across environments.
Migrating your on-premises Citrix environment or Citrix VDA workloads to the cloud enables you to quickly meet your business needs by providing employees access to enterprise desktops and apps no matter where they are. The cloud enables low latency access, unlimited scalability, and the ability to rapidly increase capacity during spikes in demand to meet the needs of users around the world. As a result, IT can free up time to develop next-generation hybrid apps and services while reducing the operational burden. Enterprises can increase business agility by unlocking intelligent insights with Google Cloud services via artificial intelligence and machine learning and with Citrix Analytics to analyze the data in real time and better connect with their users.
The Citrix Cloud and Google Cloud VMware Engine Advantages
- Consistency: Run Citrix VDA workloads on a native VMware software stack, without changing your tools or processes when you operate in the cloud. Because it is a native VMware environment, you simply migrate your on-prem Citrix application to the new environment in the cloud. This gets you up and running fast and efficiently.
- Operational Continuity: Your admins run the same tools on Citrix Cloud to manage Citrix environment as they do on-premises. There’s no training required and no interruption to service.
- Scalability: Meet the dynamic needs of your organization with on-demand scalability and save storage cost by taking advantage of the same storage apps that you use on-premise on Google Cloud.
What’s Next?
If you are a customer using VMware vSphere hypervisor for your Citrix workloads and you want to take advantage of the move to cloud, now you can accelerate your cloud journey with Google Cloud and Citrix. With Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service, you can now move your on-premises Citrix core infrastructure to Citrix Cloud.
Learn more about Citrix Cloud and the services available here. Learn more Citrix Ready validated Google Cloud VMware Engine here.
And, of course, if you have any questions, reach out to us at citrixready@citrix.com.
