Intro

In this blog post, I want to show you how to create Citrix images using Azure DevOps and publish them to Citrix Cloud via the RestAPI. I will show you that Citrix images can run both on-premises and in Azure (or any other cloud, but outside this scope). I am using Citrix Cloud, Azure DevOps, Azure IaaS, VMware ESXi, and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) for this blog post. Now I won’t get much into the MDT configuration and use, but I am using it in both the on-premises and Azure deployments. I will be using Azure DevOps Pipelines to execute my code to deploy new images without touching a GUI. Below I have shown the basic workflow for both on-premises and in Microsoft Azure.

In this post, I want to provide an overview of Citrix’s enhancements to their Virtual Apps and Desktops Cloud service (CVADS) through 2020 that I feel is significant.

Citrix introduced vertical load balancing in January, meaning that each Virtual Apps VM will be filled to max load before the next VM is used. This ensures that the cost customers might have in a public cloud can be reduced since fewer machines should be turned on. This feature, of course, is only for starting up. Shutting down VMs is still depending on users logging off, so the entire VM is empty. Another small feature from January was the restart delay timer. This feature is only useful if Citrix has an outage since the functionality is to retry restarting in a period if the control plane is down for some reason.