The Citrix Optimization Pack for Azure Virtual Desktop is a new Citrix offering for optimizing native Azure Virtual Desktop workloads. It includes Workspace Environment Management (WEM) service within Citrix Cloud as the primary offering, which you can use to better manage, optimize, and secure your native Azure Virtual Desktop environments. The result? An enhanced user experience and reduced costs.

With the Citrix Optimization Pack, organizations of all types can realize benefits including:

  • Faster logon times
  • Reduced resource consumption
  • Controllable desktop behavior
  • Enhanced security and control

For information about other benefits of the Citrix Optimization Pack, check out our product documentation and learn how you can save money with Workspace Environment Management. You can subscribe today to Citrix Optimization Pack for Azure Virtual Desktop and use our Get Started guidance to set up your Citrix Optimization Pack deployment. We’ve designed the onboarding process to be quick and intuitive.

In this blog post, I’ll look at how to use the Citrix Optimization Pack for Azure Virtual Desktop to optimize the user experience and cover examples of WEM use cases. You can implement each use case individually or in conjunction with the other use cases I’ll cover here, supercharging your Azure Virtual Desktop deployment.

System Optimization

A key feature for enhancing the user experience, System Optimization relieves the burden on your Azure VDI hosts by analyzing user and app behavior in real time. It helps to intelligently adjust RAM, CPU, and I/O in your environment to create a better user experience and to free up resources for other apps. The features are user-centric, machine-based settings that are applied to all user sessions and designed to reduce overall resource usage. When used correctly, they can increase user density on deployments, saving money on infrastructure costs. They can also mitigate the impact of so-called “noisy neighbors” — where one user is running intensive processes on a multi-user host, potentially affecting the performance of other users on that host.

Get an in-depth look at how to configure key System Optimization features, including CPU Spike Protection, Memory Management, and Fast Logoff, in the videos below.

Logon Optimization

Another benefit of the Citrix Optimization Pack? It can help to improve logon times. Long logon times are among the most common complaints to help desk staff and IT teams and can negatively affect the overall user experience.

The Citrix Optimization Pack for Azure Virtual Desktop streamlines the configuration process through easy-to-use actions, including managing apps, printers, network drives, external tasks, registry keys, and more. You can use assignments to make actions available to users, and it also provides you with filters to contextualize your assignments.

These configurations are often applied as Group Policy Objects (GPOs) and Group Policy Preferences (GPPs) during the logon process. The actions are applied by the agent and act as a replacement for those GPOs and GPPs, which results in faster logon speeds. The admin can manage multiple settings with the Citrix Optimization Pack. Like actions, security settings can be applied by the agent, resulting in improved logon times compared to a GPO deployment.

These videos provide an in-depth look at how to improve logon times with multiple configurations.

App Security

The Citrix Optimization Pack streamlines the ability to manage AppLocker and can control the apps users are permitted to run by defining rules. When using Citrix Optimization Pack to manage Windows AppLocker rules, the admin can set rules without GPO rights. The multiple AppLocker policies can be created and edited by an admin at the same time.

Privilege Elevation

Admins can use the privilege elevation feature to elevate the privileges of non-admin users to an admin level necessary for some executables (this is particularly common with legacy and homegrown apps). The Elevation Control feature now provides the flexibility to allow matching processes to be elevated with the target binaries and the command line parameters. With this enhancement, IT admins can simply use a rule to allow users to run specified scripts, but not the script shell itself. This empowers end users with standard user rights to execute approved scripts. As a result, users can start those executables as if they are members of the administrators group for achieving their business objectives, while at the same time preserving the organization’s security posture.

This blog post on enhancing workspace security with the Elevation Control feature shares detailed information for elevation control features.

Self-Elevation

With the privilege elevation feature, admins configure rules for identifying the target applications. Unfortunately, defining all the target applications with rules can be a laborious and time-consuming process. It’s just not practical in all situations.

To accommodate a wider range of apps and executables, we introduced a feature called Self-Elevation that gives IT admins a simple solution to automate privilege elevation for certain users without the need to provide the exact executables beforehand. Those users can request self-elevation for any applicable file simply by right clicking the file and then selecting “Run with administrator privileges” in the context menu. After that, a prompt appears, requesting that they provide a reason for the elevation. The reason for the elevation is saved to the database for auditing purposes. If the criteria are met, the elevation is applied, and the files run successfully with administrator privileges.

Get the details on the Self-Elevation control features in our blog post on using Self-Elevation to simplify elevation rule provisioning.

Scripted Tasks

The Scripted Tasks feature allows admins to extend the functionality of the Citrix Optimization Pack to include anything that can be written in a PowerShell script. The scripts can be run on the target Azure Virtual Desktop host VM. Any admin can create Scripted Tasks and share it with the rest of their organization. Admins can write whatever code they like, as long as it will run successfully on the target OS platform. The script output is automatically collected, so the admins can quickly determine the outcome of the task’s execution on multiple target machines, which can be a laborious task with scripts.

Learn more about Scripted Tasks in our blog post on simplifying IT administration with Workspace Environment Management.

Get Started Today!

Now that you’ve seen the significant value the Citrix Optimization Pack can bring to Azure Virtual Desktop, it’s time to start using it for yourself. We have a comprehensive reference architecture on the Workspace Environment Management service on Citrix Tech Zone where you can learn more, and you can talk to your local Citrix rep, trusted Citrix partner, or find the offering in the Azure Marketplace.