In this current economic environment, it is crucial to get the most out of existing investments. IT is asked to do more with less, without impacting the end user experience. The good news is that Citrix can help: 41% of IT teams reduced operational expenses with VDI and DaaS solutions, so you can do more with less without impacting the end user experience. The even better news is that we continue to develop tools and automation to help you save on infrastructure and other licensing costs to get the most ROI.
Over the past year, we introduced features such as Autoscale, vertical load balancing, and ITSM adaptor to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops to aid in your cost optimization journey. In 2024, we will drive further innovation to deliver value across our Citrix platform. We plan on adding more cost optimization tools, and we will also showcase those cost savings in real-time—to help you show how you’re saving money.
Read on to learn more about our roadmap for 2024 including our plans to update features you know and love, as well as the addition of some exciting new functionalities.
VDI
Historically, managing single session machines has been more costly and challenging than managing multi-session machines. Especially when single session machines are persistent, it can be a challenge to balance cost with the end user experience. That’s why we’re introducing new features to make your current VDI environment more cost effective.
Azure Hibernation with AutoScale (Tech Preview)
At the heart of an eco-friendly approach in Azure environments is using machine catalogs that support hibernation. By power managing Machine Creation Services provisioned and imported VMs, Citrix DaaS ensures organizations can offer an optimal user experience while achieving cost management and sustainability goals.
Let your end users resume from where they left off with faster logon performance, at no additional cost compared to stopped deallocated machines, using hibernation. Hibernation allows you to pause virtual machines (VMs) that aren’t being used and save on compute costs. The VM’s memory contents are stored on the OS disk. When the user logs back on, they resume from where they left off leading to a better end-user experience. By deploying Citrix Autoscale and Azure Hibernation, businesses can benefit from 36% faster start times and an uninterrupted user experience when users resume exactly where they left off. For getting started and more information please check out our blog.
@Citrix DaaS and Azure Hibernation – Overview and Benefits
The hibernation process is not only user-friendly but also economically and environmentally beneficial. By hibernating a VM, Azure saves the RAM contents to the OS disk and deallocates the VM, effectively pausing your billing for VM usage and only charging for storage resources.
Besides the monetary benefits, these technologies also make a notable environmental impact. By optimizing virtual machines, organizations reduce their energy consumption, thereby lowering their carbon footprint. It’s a significant step towards environmentally responsible computing, aligning with broader sustainability goals. We introduced this feature into Tech Preview late last year, and are looking forward to bringing it to General Availability.
@Citrix DaaS and Azure Hibernation – Configuration
VDI reclamation service (Tech Preview)
Persistent machines are expensive. While necessary for certain use cases, to optimize cost it is ideal to minimize the number of persistent machines in use. To help admins minimize the number of persistent VDIs in the environment, we are developing a VDI reclamation service.
The Auto tag logic with Citrix DaaS
This service uses our Auto tags feature to create custom queries to tag unused machines based on your criteria. If the machine is not used in the specified time frame, then the end user and the administrator will be notified. If the machine is still not used, then it will be tagged for deletion and reported to the administrator.
Business Continuity
Even when things outside your control go wrong, your users still need to be able to connect to company resources to get work done. Whether there’s a power outage or a hurricane, you need a plan to ensure that your business can continue to run. We’re here to help you keep the (Citrix) lights on.
Machine priority power on
When setting up your environment for success, it is important to keep business continuity and disaster recovery plans in mind. One major component of disaster recovery planning is prioritizing your resources. What should be brought back online first in the event of an outage? To help you automate your failover, we are working on building priority power-on into our capabilities.
With this feature, you will be able to set your resource prioritization within our Web Studio console. That way, upon failover, Citrix will automatically power on your resources in that order with no manual process required. This gives your administrators more time back to troubleshoot and find the root cause of the issue instead of spending time turning backup machines on.
Provisioning with Azure backup SKUs in Web Studio
Public clouds can sometimes run out of capacity for a specific VM size. Additionally, if you use Azure Spot VMs, then the VMs are evicted at any time based on Azure’s capacity needs. This means you can lose the capacity you need for your workloads. We previously introduced the ability to list backup VM sizes in PowerShell, and now we are working on bringing that functionality into the Web Studio Console.
In such a case of insufficient capacity on Azure or a Spot VM power-on failure, MCS will fall back on the backup VM sizes. You can provide a list of backup VM sizes using a custom property ‘BackupVmConfiguration’. MCS tries to fall back on the backup VM sizes in the order that is provided by you in the list. In case, Machine Creation Services (MCS) fails to fall back on all backup VM sizes provided, you get an error message. This feature will only be supported for a catalog that uses a machine profile, and will support both persistent and non-persistent MCS machine catalogs. This feature is currently supported only for Azure environments.
Visualization
Business moves fast, and you have to keep up with it. You need to make data-driven decisions, but you may not always have the time to commit to analysis. That’s where visualization comes into play. We want to make it easy for Citrix administrators to make decisions in real time for the best resource utilization..
Autoscale Insights (Tech Preview)
One of our biggest requests from customers is the ability to make data-driven decisions with Autoscale. Admins want to understand whether their configured Autoscale settings align with the actual capacity usage and if they are delivering both positive end user experiences and cost optimized environments.. This is where Autoscale Insights comes in.
Autoscale Insights showing Autoscale settings as ‘Not cost effective’
Autoscale Insights is visible at a delivery group level and every 30 minutes compares historical usage data with the Autoscale powered-on count. With this data, it provides 3 rankings of your settings:
- Not cost effective. The historical usage is less than 90% of the Autoscale settings. This means your settings are powering on too many machines compared to the user count.
- Poor user experience. The historical usage is more than 110% of the Autoscale settings. As a result, users are experiencing longer wait times for the machines to power on.
- Good balance between user experience and cost. The difference between the historical usage and the Autoscale settings is less than 10%. The Autoscale settings are aligned with the historical usage.
Check out our product documentation to learn more.
Provisioning Cost Modeling (Azure)
Cost optimization in public clouds can be nuanced. Small differences in instance types, storage, and disks can significantly impact the costs you pay. That is why we are working on integrating cost modeling into the Citrix provisioning console for both MCS and PVS. With the information on the instance sizes, daily power on times, and workdays the console will forecast the monthly cost of your Citrix provisioned virtual machines.
Cost estimations based on workload and instance type
Not only can the console predict your cost, it can compare the cost savings you would get by either enabling Storage cost saving or non-persistent write-back cache disks. This allows administrators to compare costs up front, saving both time and money.
Cost savings based on storage optimizations
Predictive capacity features
We’ve heard you, you want to be able to make data-driven decisions around your Autoscale settings. But what if we could predictively make those decisions for you, by making suggestions on how to optimize your Autoscale settings? We are working on bringing intelligence to Autoscale, by a data-driven approach with Citrix Director to suggest changes to the schedule policies based on utilization data. Our goal is to help you run your environment as efficiently as possible, and achieve the best user experience with the least spend on compute.
DaaS Monitor – Cost Optimization & Savings Reporting (Tech Preview)
To keep with the theme of cost prediction and savings, we are also adding the comprehensive observability that customers are looking for. The newly introduced cost optimization dashboard gives you a clear view of where you can cut costs across your delivery groups and machine catalogs, no matter which cloud providers you’re using or looking to use in the future.
With filter capabilities like Tags and Cloud Providers customers can customize their reports and views to accommodate internal chargeback reporting use cases.
Cost Optimization Dashboard
With Autoscale and the latest improvements in mind, we have designed this dashboard to visualize machine adoption patterns along with actual costs and estimated savings.
This dashboard doesn’t just show you numbers; it shows you patterns – how your machines are being used, where you’re spending too much, and where you can save. We’ve found that, on average, about 10 percent of running machines are either sitting idle in maintenance, unregistered, or just not being adopted at all.
Detailed cost savings estimates
Now, you can spot these underutilized machines and make informed and data-driven decisions to optimize your setup. Plus, you can share these insights with your team or integrate them into your PowerBI or Tableau dashboards for even more detailed operations reporting, thanks to RestAPI (OData) interfaces provided with Director, DaaS Monitor, and Citrix Analytics.
Automating Application Delivery Infrastructure Management
NetScaler reduces operational overhead through simplified and automated application delivery infrastructure management. NetScaler provides centralized Gateway and ADC management using the NetScaler Console to provide monitoring that simplifies operations by giving you visibility into all your ADCs deployed across multi-cloud and by automating management jobs that need to be run across multiple ADCs. From a single unified console, you can manage, monitor, and troubleshoot your application delivery infrastructure. For 2024 some key areas of improvement will be:
- Administration
- Reducing the time to upgrade large numbers of NetScaler’s
- Enabling on-premise NetScaler Console deployments to leverage NetScaler Console Service capabilities using Console Connect for configuration, platform, upgrade advisories and file integrity monitoring.
- Comprehensive Technical Support
- Simplified way to generate support bundle that includes log collection and pcap files.
- Reduced response time for NetScaler informational or support queries and helping customers take associated actions
- Simplified License management
- Making it easier to manage licenses based on role based access and transitioning from old to new licenses without the need to upgrade.
- Capacity management recommendation engine enables easy capacity to license allocation management.
Learn More
We are looking forward to bringing you these exciting developments throughout 2024. Stay up to date with our latest releases via updates.cloud.com – which now tracks on-premises releases as well! As always, you can learn more about our existing features on product documentation.
To learn more about the Citrix platform, visit our website.
Disclaimer: This publication may include references to the planned testing, release and/or availability of Cloud Software Group, Inc. products and services. The information provided in this publication is for informational purposes only, its contents are subject to change without notice, and it should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision. The information is not a commitment, promise or legal obligation to deliver any material, code, or functionality. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for products remains at the sole discretion of Cloud Software Group, Inc.
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