Citrix recently announced several changes to their product line. Two of the marquee announcements were the reintroducing of support for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and Citrix DaaS. Changes to Citrix offerings have been rolling out fast since rebranding to Citrix DaaS, including developments in the partnership between Citrix and Google Cloud Platform. GCP customers can now utilize multiple editions of Citrix DaaS, as well as products such as Citrix Image Portability and PVS. The best-in-class Citrix product suite embracing multi-cloud deployments and providing a unified way to manage their estate across all major public clouds is exciting for IT Administrators.
While Citrix provides mechanisms for managing your virtual desktops and published application infrastructure, adding Cloudpager into the mix for dynamically managing the applications consumed by users via Citrix Virtual Desktops, Citrix Workspaces, and Storefront makes a good thing, even better.
Modernize Application Management for Citrix Desktops
Cloudpager brings application container management to Windows desktops. Providing IT the ability to quickly and seamlessly deliver applications and application updates to users. Managing application containers is a huge change from managing traditional application installs. You no longer have slow and intrusive application installations when deploying application containers. Containers also eliminate issues such as application conflicts, installation failures, install-related reboots, unclean uninstalls, and more.
The Power of Dynamic Application Delivery
By containerizing applications and delivering them with Cloudpager, the only container management platform for Windows desktops, you move away from old practices like installing applications directly into your Citrix MCS snapshots or PVS vDisks. When installing applications into your images, you can run into problems like corruptions and application conflicts. You’re also required to update your images when you want to deploy new applications, update existing applications or uninstall applications. This can be a slow process requiring IT to wait for an out-of-hours change window to manage your applications. This approach may also require users to log out and log back in again. In the case of PVS, there’s a good chance you have to completely reboot your machines.
All this changes when you start using Cloudpager. Instead, you can provision applications and application updates in real-time, including desktops in active user sessions without forcing logoffs, logouts, or reboots.
We are all human. Sometimes an application update passes User Acceptance Testing but users start reporting problems as soon as it gets to production. Perhaps an important workflow no longer functions, drastically impacting employee productivity. It can be a scramble trying to roll back the application to the previous version and establishing business continuity. You may have to roll back to a previous MCS Snapshot and get workers to log out and log in which can be hard to coordinate and frustrating in the middle of a workday. With Cloudpager, you can seamlessly roll back any application update within seconds.
Demo of Cloudpager for application management on Citrix Desktops
Assign Applications via Modern Identity Providers
Cloudpager integrates to Azure Active Directory, allowing administrators to assign applications to AAD users or groups. Whether your Windows devices are Azure Active Directory Joined, hybrid Azure Active Directory Joined, or on-premises Active Directory joined, you should be able to deploy applications in your Citrix environments using Cloudpager no matter what cloud or network the desktops use. Any Windows desktop, anywhere, including in any Cloud.
This enables you to manage all applications across Citrix desktops in your on-premises data centers and virtual desktops running in the cloud from a single pane of glass. If you are using HAADJ now with a plan to move fully to AADJ, Cloudpager can help keep your application management consistent while you make the transition. You can even manage applications on physical endpoints that run on any network, enabling you to extend your application management for hybrid use-cases.
No Need to Compromise Speed for Scale
By using Cloudpager to manage the applications in your Citrix environment, you benefit from the scale of the cloud while establishing incredibly fast application provisioning. Net-new application deployments and application updates can be deployed to any Azure AD group or user within seconds. Applications are also delivered within seconds of users logging in, which is crucial for non-persistent desktop users. Other cloud-native application management products simply fall short of requirements for speed when managing applications on Citrix Desktops. Applications appearing on the desktop more than five minutes after the user has logged in is unacceptable. To provide the best experience possible, you need a modern solution that can dynamically provision applications across your enterprise, which you get with Cloudpager.
Flat Predictable Pricing
Cloudpager is delivered as a fully managed software-as-a-service platform with predictable pricing. Built on our global cloud backbone, there is no need for you to build or maintain any additional cloud storage or services that often leads to unpredictable pricing. Upon login, Cloudpager includes everything you need to get started managing your applications in the cloud without any infrastructure to manage.
App-V Migration Solution
Some Citrix customers have been deploying App-V applications in their environments. They are now faced with the prospect of App-V going End-of-Life in just a few years. Citrix customers using App-V packages today can continue to not only get continuity from their existing App-V packages, but also breathe new life into them with the enhancements offered in Cloudpager. Workpods is a prime example. This feature within Cloudpager enables you to group applications together with dependencies and applications in other container formats, plus the ability to assign App-V packages to AAD groups and more!
For more on App-V and Cloudpager, read this article.
Cloudpager also supports deploying MSIX containers. We love Microsoft’s direction with containers for Windows desktops. At the moment, not all applications will work in MSIX containers. However, as more vendors start to embrace the format and deliver applications to customers in MSIX, Cloudpager can be used to manage these containers too.
Of course, we also have our patented Cloudpaging container technology. While biased, we do believe this is the best container format for Windows Desktops. Applications with drivers or other low-level system components that will not work in App-V or MSIX should work with Cloudpaging containers. Thanks to this unparalleled high level of compatibility, you can seamlessly provision your entire application estate to any modern Windows desktop.
Cloudpaging containers can also help modernize any legacy applications. For example, you may have applications that only work on Windows 7 or desktop applications that cannot run on multi-session Windows Operating systems. Cloudpaging virtualizes applications on a per-user basis with an incredibly granular level of control over how applications are isolated or integrated to other applications and the operating system. Whether you are running applications fully isolated or without any isolation, you maintain the ability to dynamically manage these applications.
Being able to containerize all your applications will not only make your IT operations more agile and deliver an excellent end user experience, it will help to reduce the number of desktops images IT has to maintain, reduce the size of those images, and greatly reduce the amount storage required which is crucial when operating across multiple public clouds. Ultimately, this yields significant time and cost savings for IT across your enterprise.
Conclusion
Citrix provides best-in-class products used by some of the largest companies in the world. By providing increased support for customers moving to modern multi-cloud approach for their virtual desktops, the utility of their portfolio continues to increase. Cloudpager serves as the perfect complement by enabling you to streamline and modernize application management on any Windows desktop. No matter where you are in your journey to the cloud, modernizing application provisioning capabilities enables you to quickly move users from one cloud to another and from physical endpoints to virtual. In doing so, IT is better equipped to deliver the best possible employee experience with friction-free application provisioning and management.