Find the notes from the latest Citrix Tech Talks:
Under the hood of Citrix Cloud
Citrix Cloud: new consoles and plans to bring them to on-prem
WEM: optimizations development still in progress
Session Recording: new agent for compliance recording and troubleshooting, available in the ISO.
App Layering: with new UI experience, release of 2112 version of App Layering, better performances, optimized workflows/ App Layering as a service is in development and will be integrated in Citrix Cloud in a near future, probably with different services as standalone, not all in one block.
Image Portability Service: Disk image conversion, (MCS/PVS conversion, on-prem or in the cloud, good case for DR), Azure and Google Cloud supported, AWS in the future, and more on-prem hypervisors.
Workspace App: Full workspace experience cross-platform. Authentication improvements. Inactivity Timeout. StoreFront to Workspace migration made easier. Config service in the cloud, help you to configure the endpoint. Autodiscover based on Email ID. Custom portals can now be embedded in Workspace App, to replace the browser. Better support for App Protection in this case and working with custom portals integration. Citrix Files accessibility from Teams, variations between CWA LTSR and CWA CU – recommended to try CU for new features if possible. Each CU is supported for 18 months. Different update channels. New embedded browser inside Workspace App. App Protection on MacOS and Linux.
Performances: Dual monitors and 4K now exponentially used by the end users. Leverage GPU abilities to improve performances on the display protocol. VDA side optimizations, and also client side side optimizations (to cope with how much data is sent). Not just typical Windows workstations. Session screen sharing screen (in Zoom meetings, etc) can impact performance, doubling the bandwidth on the VDA (duplicating the stream), but is somewhat negligible after testing in terms of impact. Encoding and decoding twice, but still has a minimal cost. Trying to find a way to eliminate the double hop scenario. For GPU, Nvidia, AMD, Intel supported (so no change).
Citrix Cloud: service availability, feature name is Service Continuity, guarantee minimum impact on outage (IDP, Azure, Workspace, Citrix Cloud, many components), new architecture design for failures, to apprehend what happens when the Cloud is down. Connection Lease: sync files in the AppData folder, valid for 1 week, then invoke the files if the authentication components are not online (IDP) and even brokering. Introduced in Q2 last year, will be introduced for browsers (requires an extension), supported in native CWA. The idea if to replace the LHC experience when the Access Layer is on-prem. With service continuity, if the VDA are on-prem and the infrastructure layers in the Cloud, if the Cloud is down and not available, users can still login to the VDA. Connection lease is refreshed every time the user connects to Citrix Cloud. Service Continuity companion guide to test every single possible type of outage, simulate outages.
New LTSR-CWA-Teams: Should I stay on 1912? The discussion is driven by the feature sets. Teams optimization requires a CWA upgrade. The Workspace App is the heart of the operation. The CWA has the media engine, connection is made via virtual channels to the VDA, and the VDA opens a web socket connection to the Teams App, then it has an end to end path for Teams to communicate with the media engine on the endpoint. Inside team there is a Citrix API, directly handed over to Microsoft, released transparently. Citrix introduce updates or fixes to the Citrix API for Teams, handed over directly to Microsoft and loaded into Teams transparently without requiring any upgrade. Sometimes an upgrade is needed when there is new features introduced, like multi-windows, and will need an MSI upgrade for Teams. The Citrix API for Teams usually doesn’t require any specific MSI version of Teams, it is downloaded into teams and is the brain of the operation. The Citrix API will connect to the media engine on the endpoint, and the media engine performs the off-load. And that’s on the CWA that new features are introduced (see the timeline above, in the screenshot), like multi-window for multi-monitors to split (detach/decouple) Teams on different monitors. App Sharing will require both VDA and CWA upgrades. Usually an older VDA would work, but exceptionally Multimonitor, App Sharing and MultiWindow requires a VDA upgrade. So staying on 1912 LTSR will not allow to access these features. CVAD 2203 is the recommended version to have all the features. For the CWA, again there is a recommendation made to be on CU for new features. CTX253754 is where you find the most up to date information about Teams integration and issues (Troubleshooting HDX Optimization for Microsoft Teams (citrix.com)).