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Bursting 2,000 Citrix Desktops to AWS in Under 2 Hours with Nutanix Clusters

By Jarian Gibson

With today’s distributed workforce it’s imperative that you have the ability to quickly enable your workforce to be productive working from anywhere, with secure remote access to applications, desktops, and data. Over the last several months the increased remote work requirements have put a focus on IT to rapidly support distributed workforce needs. To allow IT to rapidly provision infrastructure for increased distributed workforce needs, organizations have increased their adoption of public clouds like AWS, Azure, GCP, and others. IT is looking for a hybrid and multicloud solution to meet the needs of their distributed workforce. Nutanix Clusters runs the Nutanix Cloud OS, AOS, on public cloud servers, and uses the same management plane, to enable seamless hybrid cloud deployments that are natively integrated into public clouds. 

Nutanix enables customer choice and hybrid cloud deployments to run Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Nutanix Clusters allows IT to rapidly support distributed workforce needs for Citrix workloads. The joint solution allows for customers to have the same capabilities in the cloud as they would in their own datacenters.

  • Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Nutanix Clusters offers the same familiar administration user interface for existing Nutanix customers. Managing Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Nutanix Clusters is identical to managing on-premises Nutanix infrastructure. In fact, the same Prism Central interface used to manage Nutanix on-premises can be used to manage Nutanix Clusters.
  • Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Nutanix Clusters enables customers to quickly scale their on-premises Citrix workloads into the cloud. Using Nutanix built-in protection and replication capabilities, you can easily move your Citrix workloads from on-premises Nutanix infrastructure to Nutanix Clusters.
  • Nutanix Clusters allows customers running Citrix workloads to add additional nodes so they can grow their Citrix deployment on Nutanix infrastructure to support thousands of Citrix users with no up-front hardware investment. Nutanix Clusters can be deployed with a minimum of three nodes in the cluster, easily expand to up to sixteen nodes in the cluster, and then easily scale the cluster back down to whatever number of nodes fits the requirements. 
  • Admins can easily hibernate and resume Nutanix Clusters to allow customers running Citrix workloads to save costs on cloud infrastructure. Users can hibernate the cluster running the Citrix workload when the capacity is not needed, and then simply resume the cluster when the capacity is needed again. 
  • Nutanix Clusters use the exact same Nutanix AHV plugins for Citrix that are used for on-premises Nutanix deployments. Leverage the existing Nutanix AHV plugins to deploy Citrix workloads using Machine Creation Services and Provisioning, integrate with Director, and leverage Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Service and Citrix Cloud.

 

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Nutanix Clusters in AWS

This blog, along with the associated video and Test Drive, shows how easy and fast it is to get Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops running on Nutanix Clusters. Nutanix and Citrix technologies enable you to deploy 2,000 new Citrix virtual desktops in an existing site in under two hours on new hardware running in AWS. If you need to expand your existing Citrix deployment quickly, Nutanix Clusters will allow you to do so.

When expanding a Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops site, there are two options:

  1. Procure and add new hardware on-premises to expand your existing Citrix machine catalogs.
  2. Create a new Nutanix cluster leveraging Nutanix Clusters and add it to an existing Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops site.

This 3-minute video details the process for deploying Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Nutanix Clusters in AWS. The video shows the speed of deploying a cluster and the ease of Nutanix integrated replication to move an existing gold image from an on-premises cluster to a cluster running in AWS. Citrix workloads are deployed using Machine Creation Services. 

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Nutanix Clusters Use Cases

  • On-Demand Elasticity: Quickly scale Citrix workload capacity, or expand different geographical regions, in minutes by bursting Citrix workloads into public clouds to support seasonal demands.

  • Business Continuity: Leverage public clouds for high availability and disaster recovery of Citrix infrastructure and workloads without the complexity of managing a secondary datacenter or a stand-alone recovery solution.

  • Lift and Shift: Move Citrix infrastructure and workloads to the cloud or consolidate your datacenters. No need to rearchitect Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployments. Simply “lift and shift” Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployments without any change, saving significant costs and time to deploy.

  • Migration: Leverage public clouds for migrating Citrix workloads to AHV when on-premises Nutanix infrastructure does not have the capacity. Migrate Citrix workloads to Nutanix Clusters, deploy AHV on on-premises Nutanix infrastructure, and migrate workloads back from Nutanix Clusters to Nutanix infrastructure on-premises. 

Getting Started with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Nutanix Clusters

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops running on Nutanix Clusters can enable the distributed workforce to work efficiently from anywhere, making them more reliable and more productive, reducing the risk of data and intellectual property loss, and making IT operations more efficient. IT can rapidly deploy additional infrastructure for Citrix workloads to meet needs for on-demand elasticity, business continuity, lift and shift, and migrations. 

If you are looking to quickly deploy infrastructure for Citrix workloads in the cloud, now’s the time to get started with Nutanix Clusters. Visit the Nutanix Clusters website to learn more and choose your next steps:

  • Test Drive: provides a self-guided tour of Nutanix Clusters on AWS, including how to use Clusters, as well as how to establish hybrid connectivity and easily migrate Citrix workloads across clouds.
  • Free 30-day trial: use your existing AWS accounts with access to EC2 bare metal instances and establish hybrid connectivity between Nutanix clusters on-premises and Nutanix Clusters on AWS.

(Note - The free trial applies to the Nutanix software. Users are responsible for costs of AWS bare metal instances.)

To learn more about running Citrix solutions on Nutanix, visit the Citrix on Nutanix website, or read the best practice guide: Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Nutanix.

With Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Nutanix Clusters, you can now greatly accelerate Citrix deployments in the cloud.

Take a Free Test Drive!

Burst Citrix Desktops to AWS With Nutanix Cloud Clusters - See how easy and fast it is with the Citrix on Nutanix joint solution. 

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