The pandemic has helped speed digital transformation for many organizations, resulting in growth in public cloud adoption. Organizations that aren’t yet in the cloud are quickly moving toward a hybrid-cloud solution, enabling secure remote access for their global workforce to solve short-term challenges and to be better positioned for the future.
We see many Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service customers adopting Google Cloud to quickly scale up workloads using Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS) and deliver apps and desktops to their users. This growth is due partially to newly added support for shared virtual private clouds (VPCs) and the use of sole-tenant nodes for network access control policy, security, and regulation/privacy requirements such as HIPAA.
With more avenues available to deploy workloads to Google Cloud with Citrix Machine Creation Services, IT admins can bump up against the currently supported maximum usage limit for MCS of 500 VDAs per Google Cloud project. Additionally, the time required to administer and power manage hundreds of VDAs becomes a necessary consideration.
Citrix recently tested the MCS Google Cloud plugin and introduced several updates to improve VDA power management performance and increase the maximum number of VDAs supported in each Google Cloud project to 1,000. We performed our tests using 1,000 pooled VDAs in a single Google Cloud project. Let’s look at our results.
While the current stated limit is 500 VDAs per Google Cloud project, to provide truly comparable before-and-after numbers to showcase the performance impact of the changes, we purposefully used a non-production test environment and catalog that goes beyond that stated limit. Any deployed production environments should continue to adhere to the stated maximum number of VDAs per Google Cloud project.
The table below compares a few key metrics related to power management of 1,000 machines before the updates were made and with the updates in place. The numbers include:
- How long it takes for 1,000 already provisioned machines to all be powered on
- How long it takes for those 1,000 VDAs to become fully registered with the DDC
- How long it takes for those 1,000 VDAs to be powered off
| Metric | Old Time (minutes) | New Time (minutes) |
| Power on | 125 | 42 |
| All VDAs registered | 130 | 42 |
| Power off | 168 | 20 |
These performance improvements are now reflected in the default configuration of Machine Creation Services Google Cloud plugin and are now available to all customers using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service. Because these improvements are realized with the default settings, customers may experience these performance improvements when their cloud customer is upgraded to a release containing the changes, without having to perform any additional configuration steps.
Stay tuned for future blog posts on additional performance gains for specific situations when using MCS machine catalogs hosted on Google Cloud. For more information on Citrix MCS with Google Cloud virtualization environments, visit our documentation page and Citrix Tech Zone.
