COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation around the world, and at Citrix, we’re constantly developing innovative technologies to help our customers on their journey to the cloud and to help them address key challenges around on-prem workloads.

With the new Linux VDA 2103 version, we have added several key features to empower IT admins, as well as enhancements that enable both cloud and on-prem customers to deliver to employees a great user experience and secure access to company resources.

  • We’ve introduced single image for domain-joined and non-domain-joined use cases and provided Citrix managed Ubuntu images on Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Standard for Azure.
  • To enhance security, we delivered the display rollover feature to make managing firewalls easier.
  • To improve the user experience for IT admins and end users, we brought visibility into CPU, RAM usage, and session idle time to Citrix Director and allowed the session timer setting to be configured through policies.
  • We improved download/upload speed of using File Transfer.

In this blog post, I’ll cover key features in Linux VDA 2103.

Single Image for Domain-Joined, Non-Domain-Joined Images

We have provided support for non-domain joined VDI mode beginning with the Linux VDA 2009 release. However, customers had to decide on and configure the mode before creating the service, which required them to maintain two different images for the same workload — one for the domain-joined use case and one for the non-domain-joined use case.

To simplify the image preparation process for IT admins and to better support creating images from the cloud, in this release, the domain mode can be configured in later stage. That means IT admins don’t need to decide the domain mode during image creation and don’t need to maintain two separate images just for different domain modes.

What does that mean for the end user?

Citrix-managed Ubuntu images, with the latest Linux VDA installed, now come with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Standard for Azure. IT admins can build a vanilla, VDA-ready Ubuntu image using Image Builder, customize, save, and use it to create a catalog, all without any manual installation and configuration to make the VDA and dependencies run. Whether machines are domain-joined or non-domain-joined can be configured later, along with various authentication methods. Ubuntu 18.04 with Linux VDA 2103 is prepared by Citrix and ready to be customized. The screenshots below show two new Citrix-managed images available to select in Create Catalog:

New Metrics Monitoring for Citrix Director

IT admins are always thinking about end-to-end monitoring of resource usage. Measuring user experience in a Linux virtual app or desktop session has become a routine task. A VM’s CPU and memory usage are often good indicators of the user experience in virtual sessions.

With Citrix Director, admins have deep visibility into resource utilization of VMs with an intuitive user interface. In this release, CPU, memory usage, and session idle time from Linux VDA sessions are available in Director, as shown here (click images to view larger):

Session idle item metrics, shown below, can help admins to improve VM resource usage.

Timer Policy Update Through DDC

Previously, when customers wanted to configure an ICA session using timer (timeouts), they had to use the steps outlined in this Citrix Knowledge Base article, which provides timer configuration methods available through CLI. However, this approach to timer configuration in Linux VDA had some limitations:

  • The timer could only be configured through CLI /opt/Citrix/VDA/bin/ctxcfg. That meant customers had to configure the timer on each VDA. That effort adds up when you manage hundreds or thousands VMs.
  • The timer configuration through CLI was targeted to the VDA, not the session. Additionally, configuring different timers for sessions launched by one same VDA was impossible.

With our latest release, the VDA can update the timer configuration through a DDC policy, eliminating these limitations. The screenshots below show how customers can set time policy through Citrix Studio:

File Transfer Enhancement

The File Transfer feature is available when the client device runs a web browser that supports the HTML5 sandbox attribute (this includes popular browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Edge). Within published app and desktop sessions, File Transfer enables file uploads and downloads between the Linux VDA and the client device.

With more Linux customers accessing virtualized apps and desktops through HTML5 clients, upload/download speeds become crucial for productivity. To enhance the user experience, we’ve refactored and optimized File Transfer feature for improving speed of both uploads and downloads. Learn more about the File Transfer feature.

X-Display Port Rollover

To secure their environments, many organizations segment their networks to separate engineering functions from business and even compartmentalize engineering groups. Firewalls play an important role here.

Linux VDA is based on Xorg, or X, which is a display server. X uses a client-server mode — the X server communicates with various clients and uses TCP as its transport protocol. The Linux VDA needs to use the TCP ports within a range of 6000 to 65535, no matter how many sessions are running, which introduces complexity to make firewall rules.

Now, with our latest release, the TCP ports are ranged from 6000 to 6000+ as the maximum number of running sessions, which significantly reduces the port numbers as a result of a much smaller range of ports opened through the firewall.

Support for Debian 10 and Ubuntu 20.04

Ubuntu is the world’s most popular open source OS for both development and deployment, from the datacenter to the cloud. Previously, we supported Ubuntu 20.04 as an experimental feature. Now it is officially supported.

Additionally, we also now support Debian 10 with the Linux VDA 2103 version. In this release, Linux VDA targets to Debian 10.7. Check out the System Requirements for more details.

Finally, in this release, we’ve provided a number of other enhancements such as SSSD support on SUSE, giving SUSE customers another choice for integrating Linux machines with Microsoft Active Directory; addressed several critical, customer-reported issues, including the USB MTP function for developers; and USB redirection stability and stability on cloud deployment.

Learn More

Try out these awesome new features by upgrading Linux VDA 2103 and let us know what you think of the latest Linux VDA enhancements. For more information, check out our What’s New page.