Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops

Standalone Citrix Secure Ticketing Authority (STA) service (Preview)

The standalone Citrix Secure Ticketing Authority (STA) service enables you to have more control over the delivery of STA tickets in your environment.

The standalone Citrix STA service is installed on every Cloud Connector in a Resource Location by default. This service shifts STA ticketing from the Citrix Cloud ticketing service to the Cloud Connectors and standardizes ticketing operations across both normal and LHC modes. The standalone STA service reduces reliance on cloud services and improves the performance of the solution when entering LHC mode.

Standalone Citrix STA service scenarios

The table shows the various scenarios where Standalone STA service works.

StoreFront Gateway Environment Ticketing service in Normal mode Ticketing service in LHC mode
Citrix Workspace On-premises Citrix Gateway Cloud Standalone STA service Standalone STA service. See Service Continuity for more information on how Service Continuity functions if the STA service is unavailable.
Citrix Workspace
On-premises Citrix Gateway
On-premises
Standalone STA service
Note: Set the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Citrix\XaXdCloudProxyPersist\StandaloneStaServiceForced to 1.
Standalone STA service. See Service Continuity for more information on how Service Continuity functions if the STA service is unavailable.
On-premises StoreFront Citrix Gateway Service Cloud Standalone STA service Standalone STA service
On-premises StoreFront On-premises Citrix Gateway Cloud Standalone STA service Standalone STA service
On-premises StoreFront Citrix Gateway Service On-premises Standalone STA service Standalone STA service

System requirements

You need the following system requirements:

  • On-premises StoreFront: Version 2311 or later
  • Delivery Controller: Version 2503 or later

Configuration required in on-premises environment

If you’re in on-premises environment using the Citrix Gateway Service with on-premises StoreFront and want to take advantage of the standalone STA service, you must install Cloud Connectors.

Step 1: Create a resource location on Citrix Cloud

  1. Onboard to Citrix Cloud. For more information, see Create a Citrix Cloud account and Connect to Citrix Cloud.
  2. On Citrix Cloud, install Cloud Connectors and associate them with the resource location. For more information, see Cloud Connector Installation.

Step 2: Create a zone in your on-premises Delivery Controller

In your on-premises Delivery Controller, create a new zone and map it to the resource location created in Citrix Cloud.

Manually update the ZoneMapping.yml file to reflect the correct mapping of on-premises zones to cloud resource locations.

The ZoneMapping.yml file is in %HOMEPATH%\Documents\Citrix\AutoConfig. The content of the .yml file is a dictionary with the zone name as the key and the resource location name as the value.

For example, an on-premises Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops site with a primary zone called “Zone-1” and a secondary zone called “Zone-2” is mapped to a Citrix DaaS deployment with two newly created cloud resource locations called “Cloud-RL-1” and “Cloud-RL-2”. In this instance, the ZoneMapping.yml is configured as follows:

Zone-1: Cloud-RL-1

Zone-2: Cloud-RL-2

Note:

Add a space between the colon and resource location name. If you use spaces in the zone or resource location name, enclose the name with quotes.

StoreFront Configuration

Configure StoreFront to use the FQDN of Cloud Connectors as STA servers.

  1. Open the StoreFront management console.
  2. Navigate to Stores > Manage Citrix Gateways and click Add.
  3. Provide Display name for the routing gateway.
  4. Select Citrix Gateway Service for Gateway type.
  5. Click Next and go to the Cloud Connectors tab.
  6. Click Add to add the cloud connector URLs.
  7. Enable Load balance multiple servers and Enable session reliability if necessary.
  8. Click OK.
Standalone Citrix Secure Ticketing Authority (STA) service (Preview)