Since the increase in cloud adoption to support and scale hybrid work, organizations have seen a measurable upturn in productivity and employee satisfaction. With more organizations choosing to adopt Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service for deploying workloads to Google Cloud with Machine Creation Services (MCS), Citrix has continued its focus on various performance characteristics of the MCS Google Cloud Plugin.

After announcing support for 1,000 VDAs in a single Google Cloud Project earlier this year, Citrix engineering is setting a new target to increase that figure and improve the performance around activities involving large machine catalogs.

Citrix is excited to announce support for catalogs containing up to 2,000 VDAs in a single Google Cloud project. This update brings performance improvements to both provisioning and power management operations.

Reliable power management of machine catalogs is of the utmost importance. Prior to this update, power managing a 2,000 VDA catalog, the largest machine set to date, uncovered scale-related reliability issues. To address this, we have enhanced the MCS GCP Plugin with respect to how requests are sent and responses handled from Google Cloud. In addition to these improvements, we also implemented several optimizations around power-management activities.

Testing for power management performance of 2,000 VDAs was straightforward, as was the previous testing with 1,000 VDA based catalogs. We looked at:

  • How long it takes to power on 2,000 provisioned machines
  • How long it takes to power off those same 2,000 VDAs

For comparison purposes, the table below shows performance numbers for catalogs of 1,000 VDAs as well as data for a 2,000 VDA catalog, both generated with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service in June 2021.

Metric 1,000 VDA Catalog
Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops
June 2021
(minutes)
2,000 VDA Catalog
Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops
June 2021
Before, in minutes
2,000 VDA Catalog
Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops
Sept. 2021
After, in minutes
Power on 42 85 73
Power off 20 42 45

Power-on performance has been improved by 14 percent. These improvements will enable users to log in and log off more quickly, enabling better performance and improved employee satisfaction.

Powering off the machines in the September testing displayed a slight increase (compared to the June testing) in the time taken for the machine operating systems to completely shut down, impacting when Google Cloud could inform MCS the machines had powered off. The cumulative effect over 2,000 machines resulted in an overall time to power off all machines in the catalog being a bit longer than the earlier testing.

The performance results presented here were generated using the default configuration of Machine Creation Services Google Cloud plugin and are now available to all customers using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service. Because these improvements are realized with the default settings, you may experience these performance improvements when your cloud customer is upgraded to a release containing the changes, without having to perform any additional configuration steps.

Stay tuned for future blog posts on additional performance gains for specific situations when using Machine Creation Services machine catalogs hosted on Google Cloud. For more information on Citrix Machine Creation Services with Google Cloud virtualization environments, visit our documentation page and Citrix Tech Zone.