The Citrix App Layering team has been busy over the past several months, adding new capabilities to the product and working on future plans. With our 2102 release, we have some exciting new features to share, as well as some big things in store.

Google Cloud Support

We have officially released support for Google Cloud! This support is the culmination of months of engineering effort and will be the sixth platform that Citrix App Layering natively supports. Google Cloud support comes with a full complement of features to extend Citrix App Layering into Google Cloud. Our customers will now be able to consolidate and simplify app and image management in Google Cloud, just as they have in Azure, VMware, Hyper-V, Citrix Hypervisor, and Nutanix AHV.

Benefits and Use Cases

Citrix App Layering now supports the following for Google Cloud:

  • The App Layering Management Appliance (ELM) is now deployable within Google Cloud.
  • A new platform connector has been added to enable the ELM to connect to Google Cloud.
  • App/platform/OS layers and image templates can now be created, managed, and published natively within Google Cloud.
  • Elastic and user layers can be deployed and managed.
  • The Google Cloud platform connector has full support for offload compositing. You can learn more about this feature from our earlier blog post on Citrix App Layering performance and scalability enhancements.
  • Layer export/import is now supported for Google Cloud. You can export layers from an ELM on a different platform and import them into your ELM in Google Cloud.
  • You can now publish layered images on Google Cloud or to machine creation running on Google Cloud.

Deployment and Configuration

Follow these steps to deploy Citrix App Layering for Google Cloud:

  1. Configure a Google Cloud project and configure it for use with Citrix App Layering.
  2. Create a virtual machine in your Google Cloud project that will be installed as the Citrix App Layering Appliance (ELM).
  3. Download the appliance (ELM) installation package.
  4. Upload the ELM system disk to Google Cloud.
  5. Create an image from the system disk.
  6. Create a VM instance from your image.

After you complete the steps above, you can begin to create and manage OS, platform and app layers, as well as create and deploy image templates.

Refer to the Citrix App Layering documentation for more detailed deployment instructions for Google Cloud.

What You Need to Know About Using Citrix App Layering in Google Cloud

Please note the following requirements/recommendations for using Citrix App Layering in Google Cloud:

  • Citrix recommends that you deploy an ELM into Google Cloudto manage layers and publish image templates. Creating a Google Cloud platform connector on an ELM that is not running in Google Cloud is not a tested configuration. Due to the connectivity and throughput requirements, your experience may be poor if you apply this configuration from a non-Google Cloud environment.
  • When importing layers from another platform, you must add a version to the OS layer and switch to using the new layer version from then on. Otherwise, the packaging machines and published images are likely to fail with a blue screen.

General Availability

Citrix App Layering 2102 is available for download today! Upgrade your appliance now to get our latest fixes and enhancements, and if you have been waiting to bring App Layering into your Google Cloud environment, wait no longer.

Top Priorities for 2021

Moving forward this year, we will focus on key enhancements to Citrix App Layering, with significant improvements to management, performance, and functionality!

Bid Silverlight Farewell

You read that right, the app layering management console is moving to a more modern platform. Today our management console relies on Microsoft Silverlight, and this application framework has announced end-of-life on October 12, 2021. For this and other reasons, we are moving our UI away from this technology.

To tackle this large-scale effort and ensure we can deliver new capabilities quickly, we will break this project into several phases:

Phase 1: Templates and Layers

We will focus first on implementing new UI elements to manage image templates and layers. These two components constitute the majority of day-to-day management of Citrix App Layering. Prioritizing these features ahead of other UI elements (users/roles, system, etc.) will give admins an improved interface for much of their daily administrative tasks.

For administrative tasks outside image templates and layers, admins will switch back to the current Silverlight console to handle these tasks. The ELM will continue to host both the Silverlight and the replacement interface, and switching between them will simply require using a different URL in your web browser. Our hope is that admins will not need to switch between the old and new UI frequently, and we intend for this to be temporary.

Phase 2: Completion of New UI and Removal of Silverlight

Once we have shipped the new layering UI with support for managing Image Templates and Layers, we will move immediately to build out the rest of the UI components. Once we have fully implemented the new UI, we will then remove the legacy UI along with all the underlying Silverlight components it has been relying on.

What if I am not allowed to run Silverlight in my environment at all after October 2021?
Security is a top concern for most customers, and the secure management and delivery of workspaces is our top priority at Citrix. Given that Silverlight will no longer be maintained by Microsoft after October 2021, Citrix will recommend that customers who wish to isolate the legacy Silverlight framework implement Citrix Secure Browser to access the legacy layering configuration. With Citrix Secure Browser, users can have a seamless web-based app experience where the legacy Citrix App Layering console will simply appear within the user’s preferred local browser.

User Layer and UPL Performance Improvements

For much of 2020, we focused on qualifying our User Layer and User Personalization Layer features in an effort to improve performance and user experience, particularly around Windows logon time. We did exhaustive benchmarking to gain a deeper understanding of the interdependencies that are introduced with user layers, and we came away with more specific best practice guidance:

  1. App Layering User Layers and User Personalization Layers are only designed to work with non-persistent Windows machines. It is very important to recognize that there is overhead to simply delivering a non-persistent desktop to your users. In our benchmark findings, on average, up to 40 percent of the additional logon time introduced to Windows comes solely from moving from a persistent to a non-persistent workspace. This is very important to understand for any customer who is implementing Citrix App Layering with Elastic and User Layers, or UPL. Non-persistent machine environments change the way Windows performs in some specific areas, such as with a user’s first logon. It is important to understand this impact and size an environment accordingly to realize the best performance-to-cost benefits from implementing non-persistent workspace solutions.
  2. Once User Layers are enabled on an image, you must log in to that image more than once before the first-time logon and user setup processes “settle.” After the initial login that displays the Windows “Hello” setup screen, Microsoft requires a second Windows logon from the user before all these first-time setup processes are completed. Once this initial setup is finished, we found that logon times are reduced dramatically.
  3. The number of vCPUs allocated to your non-persistent images plays a critical role as it relates to logon times. For on-prem environments, we found that four or more vCPUs provided the optimal experience. In Azure, two vCPUs will provide the best price-to-performance ratio (again, specific to logon performance). Additional vCPUs allocated to Azure images will yield better logon performance, but at additional costs.
  4. If a machine was used/recycled quickly, there was a notable impact on login times. We recommend tuning the settlement period for your desktop group to determine the right amount of time a desktop should wait after booting/rebooting, before allowing users to log in. Refer to our developer documentation for more information about setting BrokerDesktopgroup policies.

We hope these recommendations will help you to design and optimize your Citrix App Layering solutions to provide the best experience possible for your users (while gaining the time and cost savings that our technology can bring).

Lastly, in our research we identified some specific areas of improvement for User Layers and UPL, as well. We are now focusing on product enhancements that will aim to further increase performance and improve the overall experience with Citrix App Layering across 2021.

Conclusion

We hope you are as excited as we are about our latest product release, and we cannot wait to hear from customers who will be expanding their Citrix App Layering solutions into Google Cloud! We’re also making real improvements to administration with our move from Silverlight and staying focused on putting user experience first to ensure that you’re delivering the best desktop solution for your users.

We have some preview technologies coming in the second half of this year, as well. Please reach out to me if you’re interested in staying on the cutting edge of layering tech.


Disclaimer: The development, release and timing of any features or functionality described for our products remains at our sole discretion and are subject to change without notice or consultation. The information provided is for informational purposes only and is not a commitment, promise or legal obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions or incorporated into any contract.