Citrix DaaS

Features in Technical Preview

Features in Technical Preview are available to use in non-production or limited production environments, and to give customers an opportunity to share feedback. Citrix does not accept support cases for features in technical preview but welcomes feedback for improving them. Citrix might act on feedback based on its severity, criticality, and importance.

List of features in Technical Preview

The following table lists the features in the technical preview.

Title Enablement form (Click the icon) Feedback form (Click the icon)
Citrix integration with Nutanix Prism Central on AHV NA Enablement form
Enrollment of Hybrid Entra ID joined non-persistent VMs into Microsoft Intune Enablement form NA
VUS Multi Release Support NA NA
Image management Enablement form NA
Cost savings NA NA
Infrastructure monitoring NA NA
Infrastructure policy NA NA
Diagnose ended user sessions NA NA
Monitor multiple Citrix DaaS instances NA NA

Citrix integration with Nutanix Prism Central on AHV

This preview feature enables Citrix integration with Nutanix AHV Prism Central (PC) through a Citrix-managed Prism Central host connection.

It allows you to connect Citrix DaaS to Nutanix PC-managed multi-cluster environments in hybrid cloud setups, create machine catalogs, and perform power management, provisioning, and lifecycle management for VMs within those catalogs. For more information, see Citrix integration with Nutanix Prism Central on AHV (Preview).

Enrollment of Hybrid Entra ID joined non-persistent VMs into Microsoft Intune

With this preview, you can now enroll Hybrid Entra ID joined non-persistent VMs into Microsoft Intune (with Configuration Manager) for co-management. This feature applies to single and multi-session non-persistent VMs and on all hypervisors and cloud services, ensuring uniform device management across your infrastructure. To avail the feature, the VDA version must be 2407 or later. For more information, see Enrollment of Hybrid Entra ID joined non-persistent VMs into Microsoft Intune.

VUS Multi Release Support (Tech Preview)

Previously VUS only allowed upgrades to the most recent version of the VDA released in each of the Upgrade Track. This new tech preview feature enables you to upgrade to new as well as previously released versions of the VDA. This feature is supported for catalog level Upgrades and individual machine Level VDA upgrades. For more information, see VUS Multi Release Support.

Managing prepared images with the Images node

An Images node is now available in Studio that lets you prepare an MCS image (prepared image) from a single source image and deploy it across various MCS machine catalogs. This node facilitates complete image lifecycle management, enabling you to create image definitions, versions, and catalogs.

Images prepared using this node can only be used in Azure and VMware environments. For detailed information on image management, see Image management.

Cost savings

The Cost savings page provides a visual representation of infrastructure savings accrued over a selected period and forecasts expected savings for the remaining days. By analyzing machine usage and sessions, this page helps you to identify achieved savings and opportunities for cost reduction. This page offers:

  • Insight into the optimization of infrastructure costs
  • The amount saved
  • Information on a range of scenarios that might result in exceeding projected costs
  • Potential opportunities for identification and strategic planning to realize infrastructure cost savings

The machine usage typically increases during peak hours, demanding increased resources. The Autoscale feature helps you to reduce cost by automatically powering off unused machines during the low demand period. The projected savings depend on this usage pattern. However, costs might exceed expectations under specific circumstances, such as when unused machines are present or when there are failures in Autoscale power actions. Identifying the reasons behind these occurrences was previously challenging.

For more information, see the Cost savings page.

Infrastructure monitoring

Citrix Monitor now offers visibility into the operational health of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops components. This feature helps you to easily identify, troubleshoot, and resolve issues related to your infrastructure. Currently, the health of the Citrix Provisioning (PVS) and StoreFront components are monitored.

To support this feature, a new Windows executable named Citrix Infrastructure Monitor is introduced for Citrix components. This helps with the collection and transmission of relevant health metrics from PVS or StoreFront servers to Monitor.

This feature helps you to get critical monitoring data sets and proactive alerts regarding the PVS and StoreFront server’s system metrics on a single console in Monitor. Data is collected every five minutes from the monitoring components to ensure the latest information.

This feature aims to enhance operational efficiency by offering proactive monitoring, detailed metrics, and automated alerts, ensuring your Citrix infrastructure runs smoothly and efficiently.

Note:

Infrastructure monitoring will be available for Director in the upcoming on-premises release.

For more information, see Infrastructure monitoring.

Infrastructure policy

This policy is introduced to create alerts related to the health of supported Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops components.

Once the Infrastructure monitoring setup is completed, you can use the health data available in Monitor to configure alerts for any required component. Admins can set conditions, scopes, and notification mediums to receive important alerts through emails or a json payload through webhooks. The alerts raised are also available in the Citrix Alerts section for analysis and management.

As part if this policy, the following four new categories are introduced:

  • Reachability
  • Dependent services
  • Impact
  • Resource utilization

You can set different conditions and can modify the severity of the preceding categories as required in the Critical and Warning section. You can also schedule re-alert intervals for these alerts.

Conditions within each category can be set with the severity of Critical and Warning based on your organizational priorities. You can also schedule re-alert intervals for these alerts.

For more information, see Infrastructure policies (Preview).

Diagnose ended user sessions

Citrix Monitor now displays the details of sessions in active, disconnected, or in terminated state. Previously, you could see the details of active sessions only. With this feature, helpdesk admins can troubleshoot issues with a session that was ended or in a terminated state. The session details are available for last 24 hours and last 2 days. You can view the following details of an ended or terminated session:

  • Machine Details panel - Displays the available details of the machine where the selected session was launched.
  • Session Details panel - Displays the available details of the selected session.
  • Session logon duration - Displays the information on the logon duration taken for the selected session. You can view the chart on time taken for brokering, machine start-up, HDX connection, authentication, GPOs, logon scripts, profile load on disk, and interactive session.

For more information, see Diagnose historical user sessions.

Monitor multiple Citrix DaaS instances

You can now use Citrix Monitor to monitor and troubleshoot issues across multiple Citrix DaaS instances. Citrix DaaS allows customers to aggregate multiple service instances using a hub and spoke model. With this configuration, administrators can perform helpdesk search on all configured DaaS instances from a single Monitor console. For more information regarding the configuration required to aggregate the spoke service instances to a hub, see Aggregate multiple Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service instances. Monitor supports the aggregation of up to four DaaS tenants (spokes) under a single DaaS tenant (hub). To have unified monitoring across all DaaS tenants, use bi-directional enumeration of the hub and spoke instances.

For more information, see Aggregated Search across multiple DaaS instances (Preview).

Technical Preview to General Availability (GA)

Features in Technical Preview