Citrix’s Session Recording provides employee activity-recording capabilities within your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployments. Used by organizations worldwide to monitor and troubleshoot user sessions, this capability enables screen capturing and event recording with minimal system resource footprint.

As you migrate your virtual apps and desktops workloads into Citrix Cloud, it’s important to consider your requirements around compliance monitoring and troubleshooting. Remaining secure and compliant is less complicated than you might think, and incorporating a capability like Session Recording will streamline your IT tasks and offer you a robust security solution for your managed workloads.

That’s why we are excited to announce that with the Session Recording 2103 release, you can leverage Session Recording capabilities in the cloud. Now, you can place all the necessary components to make Session Recording work and store files within Azure, and you can also leverage AWS RDS Databases to deploy the Session Recording server.

Let’s take a closer look at how you can now place the management components and store recorded files in the cloud for seamless Session Recording management.

With this release, we started by simplifying the Session Recording database infrastructure, which is a critical component to any deployment. To create an environment with highly available architecture to scale on demand as your workforce grows, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops admins must set up and plan the Microsoft SQL server instance, as well as the underlying operation system. In the Session Recording 2012 release, we added support for the Microsoft Azure SQL database. With our latest release, you can use the Azure SQL database directly when you deploy your Session Recording servers to the cloud.

Session Recording Server Setup Property

In the 2103 release, we have also included support for AWS RDS databases for organizations that leverage AWS in hybrid scenarios, as shown on the reference architecture below. Our constant evolution allows us to work toward more cloud options for Session Recording coming soon.

To allow for Session Recording to not only be hosted in Azure, but for the recorded files to be stored there, we simplified the storage infrastructure. In the Session Recording 2103 release, we now support  Azure Files for storage. We’ve created a simple, six-step guide to help you configure a load balancing Session Recording deployment in Azure.

Session Recording is a storage-heavy solution. It needs a high-performance back end to ensure all your recording files are saved correctly to the storage location. We recommend that you plan your Azure Files share type based on your average recording file size and recorded session quantity.

The degree of end-user activity determines the recorded file size. For example, if the end user runs graphic heavy applications, like a training video played inside VDI without client redirection, the recording file might be large. This sizing recommendation resource can help you plan your storage type.

With Session Recording 2103, you can deploy the Session Recording servers into Azure Cloud using the following new reference architecture (click image to view larger):

Session Recording Cloud Deployment Overview

We are continuously evolving Session Recording to make it more streamlined for organizations. If you are ready to take the next step with Session Recording, download Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and the necessary Session Recording components today. And keep an eye out for new exciting features we have coming soon.


Disclaimer: The development, release and timing of any features or functionality described for our products remains at our sole discretion and are 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.