Customers today choose Citrix for its focus on flexibility, security, and user experience; and today Citrix extends that flexibility with support for Azure Active Directory and non-domain joined workloads. Now customers have the option to choose the machine identity platform they prefer — Active Directory (AD), Azure Active Directory (AAD), or none.

All this is possible with the latest release of Rendezvous protocol (V2), which is available now. Since its release in 2020, Rendezvous has helped customers optimize, simplify, and enhance the security of their Citrix DaaS deployments by allowing HDX session traffic to bypass Citrix Cloud Connectors, which helps in reducing the number of Cloud Connectors required to support their environments. New enhancements to our Rendezvous protocol allow all VDA traffic to bypass Cloud Connectors to connect directly and securely with the Citrix Cloud control plane. With this release, Citrix has further reduced the reliance on cloud connectors, simplifying infrastructure management and providing a more efficient solution.

Why Azure AD joined and domain-less machines?

Different organizations have different reasons for adopting Azure AD joined or non-domain-joined solutions. This could be to facilitate specific use cases such as temporary workforce, project-based contractors or vendors, M&A, and disaster recovery (DR) where workloads are used only for a part of the time then scaled down when no longer needed. Smaller organizations, which typically have limited resources, may see these options as simpler and more manageable alternatives. Others making their move to the cloud may be looking for complete separation between their on-prem and cloud environments for reduced exposure. Regardless of the motive, providing these options to our customers provides more value and choice when choosing to move and deploy workloads in the cloud.

Connector-less access to workloads? Yes, please!

With the rollout of this edition of Rendezvous (V2), admins leveraging Azure AD joined or non-domain joined workloads no longer have the requirement of deploying cloud connectors in these resource locations. This not only reduces the complexity of deployment setup, but also reduces the time it takes to set up and initially deploy workloads. This can potentially also improve rollout time for large scale deployments and reduce overall cloud consumption (which equals lower costs and less administrative burden).

Check out the new step-by-step guide created to help you get started with your Azure AD joined and non-domain-joined deployments today and stay tuned for additional enhancements coming soon.