Citrix Cloud
If you’re still running XenApp v6.5, you know you need to develop a migration plan. XenApp v6.5 hits “End of Maintenance” – after which there will be no further code maintenance – at the end of calendar year 2017, and End of Life on June 30, 2018. So if you don’t have a migration plan in place, you don’t have a lot of time to develop one. Furthermore, if you’ve been tracking the evolution of the XenApp and XenDesktop products, you’ve probably noticed that new releases are coming more frequently these days as new and enhanced functionality is added to the products. That’s both good news and bad news: good news because the products are getting better and better, bad news because upgrading your Citrix infrastructure can involve a significant work effort. It is not unusual for a XenApp or XenDesktop infrastructure upgrade to take 100 to 120 hours of work effort on the part of your own IT team, if you have the skill set in-house to do it, or on the part of your Citrix consulting partner if you don’t.
But there is another choice – one that will mean you never have to upgrade your Citrix infrastructure again: the Citrix Cloud. The Citrix Cloud moves the entire Citrix control plane – all of the management server components – to a Cloud infrastructure that is “evergreen,” meaning that Citrix maintains it and upgrades it. All you still need to provide in your own infrastructure are the XenApp servers and XenDesktop hosts that will be delivering applications and desktops to your users. And those resources can be located anywhere: your on-premise data center, your own co-location facility, the public cloud of your choice (Azure, AWS, etc.), or some combination thereof. You still maintain complete control over where your data resides and where your applications are running – Citrix takes care of everything else. And that can cut the migration work effort from 120 hours to just two or three days, depending on the number of server and desktop images you need to build.
The Citrix Cloud services are annual subscription-based services, and are based on named users (not concurrent users). All Citrix Cloud services include 24x7x365 support directly from Citrix. If you take into account the cost savings from not having to upgrade your own control plane infrastructure every few years, and the ongoing cost savings from not having to manage that infrastructure and fix it when something goes wrong, it’s surprising how cost-effective the Citrix Cloud can be.
Take a look at the following video, and give us a call for more information…
