With the release of Linux VDA 2109, we’re rolling out new features to help customers solve business challenges around using Linux VDA to replace workstations and to provide a unified user experience for employees accessing business-critical resources from anywhere.
Let’s look at some highlights of what’s new in the Linux VDA 2109 release.
Support for HDX Screen Sharing (Experimental)
It’s common today for users to share their screens in meetings and when collaborating one on one, and many users share screens from a Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops session using popular collaboration tools. But the performance wasn’t always great, especially if the collaboration tool didn’t have an optimization pack. On top of that, there might be security and bandwidth concerns for some organizations.
Customers wanted to use HDX for screen sharing to achieve better visual quality and meet their organizational security requirements. In the Linux VDA 2109 release, Citrix provides an experimental feature that enables users to share their screen with multiple users via an HDX session.
It’s easy to start screen sharing from a virtual desktop, as shown in the image above. Here’s how:
- User1 starts to share screen from the virtual desktop, and a random connection code is generated.
- User1 shares the connection code to target viewers via any chat/email channel.
- Target viewers start to view user1’s screen and copy/paste the connection code to continue.
- User1 gets a prompt and accepts the viewer’s request.
- HDX screen sharing session is built, and viewers can click the mouse icon to request control user1’s screen.
See our HDX screen sharing documentation for more information.
Citrix Virtual Channel SDK for the Linux VDA (Experimental)
The Citrix Virtual Channel Software Development Kit (SDK) provides support for writing server-side apps and client-side drivers for additional virtual channels using the ICA protocol. The typical scenario is multimedia application optimization.
Delivering multimedia apps without optimization can lead to high server bandwidth utilization, expensive cloud bills (if not hosted on-prem), and poor end-user experience, which has an impact on productivity. So Citrix provided the VCSDK feature over the Windows server-side and several client-side OSs, which enabled optimization for applications.
With the Linux VDA 2109 release, the VCSDK server-side feature is supported on the Linux platform, as well. You can download the package here.
See our Citrix Virtual Channel SDK for the Linux VDA developer guide for more information.
Keyboard Layout Synchronization Support for MATE Desktop
The MATE Desktop Environment provides an intuitive and attractive desktop environment with fewer GPU requirements and is a continuation of GNOME 2.
Citrix added support for the lightweight MATE desktop on CentOS, RHEL, Ubuntu, and Debian with the 2104 release, enabling you to specify either MATE or GNOME desktop through a variable.
The dynamic keyboard layout synchronization feature automatically enables synchronization of the VDA keyboard layout with the keyboard layout of the client device.
With the Linux VDA release 2109, the dynamic keyboard layout synchronization feature has been extended to MATE desktop. With this feature enabled, when the keyboard layout changes on the client device during a session, the keyboard layout of the session in VDA changes accordingly.
See our dynamic keyboard layout synchronization document for more information.
Linux streaming support for RHEL 7.9 and SUSE 12.5
Citrix Provisioning Service enables computers to be provisioned and re-provisioned in real time from a single shared-disk image. It provides an efficient, centralized management solution and lower costs by reducing the number of disk images that need to be managed.
To provide benefits for Linux VDA, we added Linux streaming support on Ubuntu, RHEL, and SUSE Linux distributions. For the Linux VDA 2109 release, Citrix Provisioning Service is supported on below Linux distributions.
- Ubuntu 16.04
- Ubuntu 18.04
- Ubuntu 20.04
- RHEL 7.9
- RHEL 8.3
- SUSE 12.5
See our Streaming Linux target devices for more information.
New Linux session metrics are available
IT admins are always thinking about end-to-end monitoring of resource usage. Measuring the user experience in a Linux virtual app or desktop session has become a routine task.
In the Linux VDA 2103 release, Citrix provided measurements on CPU, memory usage, and session idle time from Linux VDA sessions, all available in Citrix Director.
With the Linux VDA 2109 release, Citrix has added two more metrics: logon duration and session auto reconnect count.
The logon duration metric is a measure of the logon process from the time a user connects from the Citrix Workspace app to the time when a session is ready to use. You can query both average and individual logon durations. This offers a significant service quality metric for the admin to help them understand and optimize service quality.
The auto reconnect feature enables users to resume working if they were interrupted when a connection was broken. However frequent connection-broken events might indicate some problems in your network, which result in a bad user experience. Now with the auto reconnect count metric, you can monitor your Linux virtual desktop environment service quality from a new angle.
See our Monitor Linux VMs and Linux sessions for more information.
Odds and Ends
In this release, we also added support for FAS integration with PBIS and the ability to query session CQI data on Linux VDA by running a utility (ctxsdcutil).
See our product documentation for more information on what’s new in Linux VDA 2109.
Finally, we will be providing a Long-Term Service Release for Linux VDA. The support list for LTSR will be based on our Current Release (CR) and the deprecation information. Please review and plan your upgrade accordingly.
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.
