Citrix UPM and FSLogix Containers

Too. Many. Times. That's how I am starting this article. And because I love bullets, here is some clarity on that statement: Too many times I have seen environments fall on their heads due to bad profile management decisionsToo many times have situations arisen that simply did not need to happenToo many times has the...

Enhancing Citrix MCS and Microsoft Azure – Part 3: Managed Identities

This is the third part of an ongoing series around enhancing Citrix MCS within Azure. Part one focused on optimizing identity disk costs via PowerShell and Azure Automation which is somewhat redundant now given that MCS does this natively (though this can still be handy to bring an environment back into line). The second tackled...

Citrix Session Management Policies

Session management and timeout policies in Citrix platforms are often a point of confusion and head scratching. This has extended out slightly to Azure Virtual Desktop with the introduction of Windows 10 multi-session. This is a quick post around the options and configuration points for the different OS types. As a rule of thumb, when...

Citrix MCS and Azure Ephemeral Disks

I wrote previously about Citrix MCS and Shared Image Galleries, with a focus being on the enablement of Ephemeral Disks in Microsoft Azure. Ephemeral disks are a massive addition to the MCS toolkit, potentially having some major impacts on Azure consumption and performance. What is an Ephemeral Disk For the most part, most machines in...

Citrix MCS and Azure Shared Image Gallery

Citrix MCS is growing constantly in the Azure space, one of the new features made available quietly of late, is the ability to consume the Azure Shared Image Gallery for storing images. The Azure Shared Image Gallery, or SIG for short offers several advantages associated with versioning and image replication, allowing you to version control...

The Evolution of Citrix Machine Creation Services with Microsoft Azure

There is a lot of constant improvement being executed by the MCS team at Citrix, the release cadence is impressive and the feature enhancements significant. I spend a lot of time in Microsoft Azure with Citrix Cloud with a lot of happy customers. I thought it would be worth to keep a rolling tally of...

Conquering Per User Firewall Rules with Citrix WEM Privilege Elevation

I recently worked with a customer who tested deployment of Microsoft Teams on Citrix without any form of optimization. The optimization packs were hindering user acceptance and not providing adequate stability. This post is not about the why of Teams optimization or not, but rather than tactics used to tackle a side requirement – per...

Deploying Citrix ADC’s in Microsoft Azure – ADC HA Availability Set

ADC HA Availability Set Template This post will focus on deploying Citrix Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) in Microsoft Azure using the pre-defined Availability Set deployment using a 3 Network Interface (NIC), 3 IP model. To address a load of frowning ADC people before they get grumpy, I do not for a second claim to be...

Enhancing Citrix MCS and Microsoft Azure – Part 2: Accelerated Networking

This is the second part of an ongoing series around enhancing Citrix MCS within Azure. The first post focused on optimizing identity disk costs via PowerShell and Azure Automation. This is post will tackle one of the biggest impacting performance optimizations you can make to machines within Azure: Accelerated Networking. Accelerated Networking is defined by...

Enhancing Citrix MCS and Microsoft Azure – Part 1: Identity Disk Cost Optimization

Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS) is commonly utilised to deploy non-persistent workloads into Microsoft Azure, providing image management and provisioning at scale. MCS in Azure uses on-demand provisioning which means for pooled or newly provisioned workloads (in the case of dedicated) that when the machine is not powered on, it simply does not exist. The...