The great thing about the latest LTSR is that it inherits all the feature updates from the prior Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops versions. In another post I outlined the Top 5 reasons to move to the latest LTSR. While I usually encourage a customer to move to the latest LTSR for the VDA, I will also often recommend them to move to the Citrix Cloud platform, too.

Citrix continues to develop and innovate in its cloud service and there are many advantages above operating a full virtualization stack. Let’s take a look at the Top 3 reasons why this is a good move:

  1. Cloud benefits: Citrix Cloud services, by design, are always up to date, are easier to manage, allow for faster onboarding, and offer flexible deployments. These are some of the core reasons why the “as-a-service” model works so well. Citrix Cloud handles the infrastructure control plane, which is automatically updated on your behalf, meaning a faster time to value and less operational overhead. Supportability will remain active, which means you don’t have to take that into consideration like you do with the five years of LTSR support or 18 months of CR support. Finally, Citrix Cloud includes many more services than just Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service, such as Workspace Environment Management, Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM), Citrix Secure Private Access, and Citrix Gateway service, which makes it easier for customers to deploy and manage the overall solution.
  2. LTSR Support for the Citrix Cloud + VDA: This is hugely underrepresented in my opinion. Customers on Citrix Cloud can still get the five years of supportability benefit when deploying a LTSR VDA! This provides the best of both worlds by allowing the control infrastructure to stay up to date with the latest versions while maintaining the predictability of the LTSR-based workload. Even better, when it comes time to upgrade to a Cumulative Update, only the LTSR VDAs need to be upgraded as opposed to the full stack (Controllers, DB, StoreFront, License, consoles, etc.). Finally, the cherry on top for flexibility is that Citrix Cloud is a single pane of management for multiple resource locations and delivery groups such that you can mix LTSR and CR versions in the same environment. That means some workloads (such as an Electronic Health Records app) can stay on a LTSR VDA version with five years of mainstream support while other use cases, such as Linux or offshore developers can be deployed on a Current Release train to take advantage of some feature released down the road.
  3. Future Innovation: Many of the big innovations are, and will be, only available with Citrix Cloud, sometimes because some of these functions will be dependent on a cloud-based service to work. It’s impossible to list just one item here, but the Citrix Workspace roadmap is a great resource to see other key features in the works. Here are a few of my favorites:
    1. Connector-less support with Rendezvous v2 to further minimize server infrastructure, currently in Tech Preview.
    2. Non-domain joined VDAs for Linux and Windows, or organizations looking towards pure native Azure AD.
    3. Image Portability, which helps manage consistent images between on-prem and public cloud
    4. VDA Upgrade Service, which will simplify the manageability for persistent virtual desktops by automatically updating the VDA, currently in preview.
    5. Public Cloud Enhancements. Scrolling through the What’s New for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service page, it’s quickly apparent that many enhancements involve public cloud integrations. Already between the last 1912 LTSR and the time of writing we have seen a 5x improvement in power-on times. I know I mentioned this already as one of the top five reasons to move to LTSR, but as Citrix cloud continues to evolve, I anticipate the trend of public cloud enhancement additions will continue to Citrix Cloud first.

Next Steps

The combination of the Citrix Cloud and the LTSR VDA often gives the best mix of user experience, supportability and flexibility to set organizations up for future success. Each organization is different so I would highly recommend speaking to a Citrix expert to help guide you on the most appropriate path. Check out my blog post on five reasons to upgrade to the LTSR and get started today.


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