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Citrix SMEs for Citrix Cloud Decisions advice please

Hello,

We have Citrix XA/XD 7.15 on premise. Long term strategy is to move most Citrix VDI to a cloud Desktop as a Service (DaaS).

The questions I need to help with are:
- Should we adopt Citrix cloud for mgmt plain as an intermediate step before full DaaS adoption? Or move straight to DaaS?
- Pros/Cons for moving Mgmt plain to cloud? What are the uses cases?
- Realistic timeline/pathway from moving from on prem to DaaS?

I appreciate the advice from anyone who has experience with Citrix cloud
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Tony J
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Aside from the control plane being hosted by Citrix, having Citrix maintain your NetScaler (Citrix ADC) functionality is a huge benefit.  As much as I love ADC, if you don't live and breathe it and just use it for HDX proxy, having Citrix maintain it is a huge benefit, i.e., no cert to maintain, no updates, no worrying if a new config is right, GSLB setup, etc.

In terms of pathway, most enterprises start with using the Cloud for bursting and disaster recovery.  Your specific path depends on your requirements.  Based on what you've stated above, you may wish to maintain your VDAs on-prem while letting Citrix host the infrastructure in Citrix Cloud.
I'd agree not having to maintain and setup your own NS is a definite advantage but I'm not sure it's worth the cost.

You can get a contractor/third party in to do your initial setup and still save compared to the cloud licensing alone.

I'm not saying cost is everything, but there is a massive uptick moving to them from peperetual licenses.
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Thank you all for the valuable info. As we consider moving Citrix mgmt plane to Citrix cloud, what are the design consideration,  risks and dependencies we need to be aware of?

Thank you for your help.

J
You want to have two cloud connector servers at each location you wish to manage from the Cloud Mangement Plane.

This has some links/PDF's to help get you started at a high level:

https://www.citrix.com/en-gb/products/citrix-virtual-apps-and-desktops/transition.html
Thank you Tony for the link. I have learned a lot about Citrix Cloud. I also learned about a possible game breaker!

I am referring to  no support for PVS. We currently have PVS in environment and my understanding is only MCS is supported in Citrix Cloud? What does that mean for customers who have PVS on prem and planning on moving only their mgmt plane to Citrix cloud?

We are just about to purchase hardware that was sized based on PVS delivery mechanism. Does that mean sizing needs to be done again due to MCS being more storage intensive?
A PVS infrastructure isn't supported on any major cloud vendor due to its reliance on PXE.

However, bear in mind that you can use on-premise PVS and manage the infrastructure with the Citrix Cloud Management Plane:

https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/provisioning/current-release/configure/cloud-connector.html

In terms of MCS there are a number of myths and misunderstandings in place that are legacy - it isn't scalable, it requires greater IOPS for example.

It is just as scalable these days and in fact about the only thing it misses is the versioning in PVS.

In terms of IOPS, look at using MCSIO - this uses some of the RAM as a disk. You need to be careful that you add an MCSIO cache overflow disk as otherwise once all the RAM cache is used, the server will BSoD.

https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX218082

One thing though, if you're uncertain about the sizing, don't want to use complex forumulae, and have the free disk space, you could just set the MCSIO cache to be the same size as the drive in the MCS machine. It's wasteful, for sure, but you're guaranteed never to run into issues.
Thank you all for your help. This gives me enough to know where to look deeper.