One of my favorite things about being on the product marketing team is getting to tell the Citrix story, which is always evolving. With the steady stream of innovations, new features, and improved processes, it’s a pleasure to tell organizations about the latest and greatest in all things VDI and DaaS and how they help solve real-world challenges.
These past few months have not disappointed when it comes to new features and improvements. From the release of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 2109, to updates to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service, there is plenty to talk about. Let’s take a closer look at everything that’s new in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.
Introducing the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 2109 Current Release
Every quarter, we provide current releases to help keep your on-prem environments fully updated with the latest features. With the release of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 2109, we introduced new server OS support, HDX improvements, expanded session recording capabilities, and more.
And in addition to new feature support, we are excited to announce that Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is offering Day 1 support for Microsoft Windows Server 2022! With a security focus and streamlined management, the Citrix VDAs and infrastructure components running on top of Microsoft Server 2022 allow customers to leverage this latest platform. Learn more in this blog post.
Our HDX features also continue to drive our industry-leading user experience for VDI and DaaS, which can boost employee satisfaction and retention. Here are just a few of the features in this release:
- HDX Adaptive Audio: Adaptive Audio is a new capability for improved audio redirection and playback. A new basis for improved audio quality within sessions, this capability consists of a new audio codec and an auto configuration logic to allow real-time quality sampling adjustment based on customer network condition.
- Drag and drop support in Outlook messages: This capability improves user experience by offering the native-like ability to drag and drop files into an Outlook email, like native Outlook.
- Virtual Channel allow list security enhancements: To improve security, we have changed the default setting from “enabled” to “disabled” for any custom/third-party virtual channels to be loaded in any session.
- EDT MTU discovery on Mac and Android: Enlightened Data Transport (EDT) Maximum Transport Unit (MTU) discovery is now available on Mac and Android. This feature is a favorite among organizations that leverage EDT to improve user experience over long-haul connections in their environments. With MTU discovery, EDT automatically determines the MTU when establishing a session to prevent packet fragmentation and failed sessions.
For our Linux users, we are always working to add new features and functionality to our Linux VDA for improved performance and ease of use. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new over the past few months:
- RHEL 8.4 and CentOS 8 (2015) support: We have added RHEL 8.4 and CentOS 8 (2105) as supported distributions for the Linux VDA.
- Smart Card Support for Debian: Organizations leveraging Smart Cards for authentication and enhanced security can now leverage them to connect to the client device to authenticate when logging on to a Linux virtual desktop session.
- Virtual Display layout: We now offer virtual display layout to improve user experience on large monitors.
- Connection Quality Indicator (CQI): Now Linux VDA users can query session CQI data on Linux VDA by running a utility (ctxsdcutil).
- HDX Session Screen Sharing: This enhances the user experience by giving them the ability to share their screen using existing HDX graphics technology from within their desktop.
We’ve also rolled out improvements to session recording, both in admin experience and enhancing playback functionalities. With new Event Triggered Dynamic Recording, session recording starts only when a specific event within the session is triggered, to simplify playback and decrease recording size. We have also improved how admins can view data with new graphical representations of screen time, file activity, commands, and events within user sessions. This makes user activity easier to understand and helps admins monitor and troubleshoot. Take a closer look at all of the functionalities we have added to the Session Recording web player on Citrix Docs.
The image below shows an example of the data presented graphically around events within a session:
More to Love in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Service
It’s no secret that more organizations than ever before are on their cloud journey. According to our DaaS Pulse Survey, 99 percent of IT executives surveyed were moving some or all their systems to the cloud, with the vast majority operating in a hybrid environment. With this shift to cloud, making cloud work on your terms is what really matters. We’re continuing to add capabilities to the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service, delivering maximum value for hybrid-cloud deployments.
To improve cloud resiliency and availability, we introduced service continuity earlier this year. This capability enables users to connect to virtual app and desktop resources during Citrix Workspace and/or cloud delivery controller outages. Since its initial release, we have continued to expand the scope of this functionality. With its previous availability on Windows and Mac endpoints, we are excited to announce that service continuity is now available on Linux endpoints and on Chrome and Edge browsers within Windows using a browser extension and Citrix Workspace app 2109 or later!
Take a look at Citrix’s service continuity support for browsers in this demo.
To enable more comprehensive monitoring capabilities, we are also introducing increased data retention inside of Director Premium edition. Within the “Monitor” tab of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Premium service, admins can now view historical trends for the past 365 days. This is increased from the previous 90-day retention.
We also continue to add additional features throughout our Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops cloud service to add value to your deployments. Some of these new capabilities include:
- Automated Configuration Tool Updates: Our recent update now enables customers to migrate dedicated MCS catalogs from on-prem to the cloud, reducing time to migrate.
- Restart Scheduling in Studio: This capability reduces management time for machine maintenance with custom restart scheduling. Now IT admins can set custom times/dates for machine maintenance and restart within Studio.
- Azure AD Admin Group Support (Tech Preview): This feature enables AAD groups to be directly onboarded to Citrix Cloud allowing customers to manage access to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service based on AAD group membership, with no separate management needed in Citrix Cloud.
New Citrix Capabilities on Azure
As we continue our longstanding partnership with Microsoft, Citrix and Azure are bringing more benefits than ever to your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployments. We recently introduced two new previews to accelerate cloud transitions. First, we announced a preview of Citrix Provisioning Service (PVS) on Azure. Our flagship PVS technology now allows Azure-hosted VMs to be rapidly provisioned and re-provisioned on the fly and streamed over the Azure network backbone on demand. Next, we have also launched our preview for Image Portability service on Azure. Image Portability Service enables administrators to manage a single Windows image, which is optimized for multiple resource locations, for increased admin efficiency in migration workflows or hybrid deployments.
We have also introduced full support for the Azure VMWare solution (AVS) on Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service. This is exciting news for individuals leveraging Citrix in tandem with VMWare on Azure because it allows for streamlined management, workload deployment, and monitoring of Citrix Workloads running on Azure via AVS.
New Citrix Capabilities on Google Cloud
We are also continuing to grow our partnership with Google and expand our capabilities on Google Cloud. Over the past few months, we have added several new features for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service with resource locations in Google Cloud. Let’s take a closer look at some of the new features:
- Support for Google Cloud Customer Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK): Citrix supports Google’s CMEK with MCS catalogs to provide greater control over keys used to encrypt data within a Google Cloud project.
- App Layering support: The App Layering Appliance (or ELM) is now deployable in Google Cloud, and this supports elastic and user layers.
- Shielded virtual machines support: Admins can now provision shielded virtual machines on Google Cloud. This offers a higher level of security against remote attacks, privilege escalation and malicious insiders.
- MCS Support for suspending and resuming VMs: Admins now have the capability to suspend and resume VMs in Google Cloud by leveraging MCS. This capability helps organizations reduce costs without sacrificing user experience.
Workspace Environment Management Enhancements
Workspace Environment Management (WEM) capabilities deliver a great deal of value, especially when it comes to decreasing logon times, streamlining workspace scalability, and optimizing costs. For example, when leveraging WEM on Azure multi-session instances, organizations can increase user density by 15 percent or more, which means either a 15 percent cloud compute savings or 15 percent more users for the same amount of money. We are excited to keep innovating on this functionality and adding value. Here are two enhancements that we released this quarter:
- Faster Cloud Onboarding: WEM and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service are two different cloud services with several steps required to initially setup a basic WEM environment for optimization and control. This new feature provides a WEM wizard workflow within the Quick Deploy UI of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service for faster WEM onboarding.
- FIPS Compliance: We have a number of U.S. government agencies (and commercial customers, as well) looking to leverage WEM, However, they are not able to install it due to its lack of FIPS support. This update ensures all WEM components are FIPS compliant.
With these new features in the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops product family, we are continuing to enhance security, streamline management, and deliver a great user experience to your distributed workforce. You can download the latest release of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops now or contact Citrix Sales to find out how you can get even more out of the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service.
For Citrix Investors
This release contains forward-looking statements which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The forward-looking statements in this release do not constitute guarantees of future performance. Those statements involve a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, including risks associated with the impact of the global economy and uncertainty in the IT spending environment, revenue growth and recognition of revenue, products and services, their development and distribution, product demand and pipeline, economic and competitive factors, the Company’s key strategic relationships, acquisition and related integration risks as well as other risks detailed in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Citrix assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking information contained in this press release or with respect to the announcements described herein. The development, release and timing of any features or functionality described for our products remains at our sole discretion and is subject to change without notice or consultation. The information provided is for informational purposes only and is not a commitment, promise or legal obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions or incorporated into any contract.
