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Murty MFlag for India

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What are the price differences between on-Prem and Citrix Cloud licenses?

Benefits of Citrix Cloud as control layer:
https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/29147246/Citrix-SMEs-for-Citrix-Cloud-Decisions-advice-please.html
Thanks "Tony Johncock" for giving some advantages and disadvantages.
Now we have FSLogix, WVDI, O365 and Citrix cloud with resource locations like "Azure, AWS and GCP Anlong with On-Prem"
To reduce cost, what combination will be the best at cloud resource (Resource Layer)?
Like FSLogix profile container and O365 Container, Azure / AWS / GCP and On-Prem work loads.
Which Cloud provider giving best price? I know, it's based on the Enterprise agreements. But at MRP side, for Citrix VDI / SBC work loads, cost side which provider is best?
What are the price differences between on-Prem and Citrix Cloud licenses?
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Coralon
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Citrix Cloud service is a licensed service for managing XenApp/XenDesktop. What this means in practical terms:
1. You don't pay for SQL licensing
2. You don't pay for the Delivery Controllers
3. You don't necessarily pay for gateways (I believe.. not 100% sure on this)
4. You don't pay for StoreFront (Again, I believe, but not 100% sure)

What you do pay for is your user licenses, and you can run your XA/XD workloads on premises or in the cloud. The XA servers and/or VDI machines you have to pay for.  Your costing for the cloud services has a a large number of factors... it's impossible to say what's going to be the best deal for you.  

One nice advantage - if you have the right level of Citrix licensing, you can get ShareFile licensing, and tie your OneDrive for Business storage into your XenApp servers.  

Ultimately, you have to do a lot of looking at what you want, what you plan to use, where your data is, etc..

Coralon
Your decision, or options, hinge on the answer to one question:  Where does your data reside?

Citrix is a conduit for the business application in that conceptual design requirement is the data and the application reside in the same physical location.  In other words, the front-end application hosted on XenApp and the data (databases, flat files, so forth) reside on the same physical LAN.  Then, regardless of where the user is located they can access the application from any location or device assuming they have WAN connectivity, SDWAN, Internet, Satellite, down to analog modems (they still exist).

Same principle applies for XenDesktop whether you provide an empty OS shell and publish the applications from XenApp to XenDesktop or install all the applications in a single image.

FSLogix is a given in either scenario if you wish to reduce the # of tickets relative to any type of profile issues where in a lot of cases moving to Office 365, in my experience, includes a strategic plan to either migrate every end-user device Office version to 365 where in most cases an inventory report is going to show Office 2010, 2013, 2016 and so forth at various patch levels.  Potential cost saves here are on licensing where perhaps some users can use portal.office.com exclusive and leverage E1 license versus E3.  How many mailboxes converted to shared mailbox reduces the # of licenses required.   FSLogix solves many of the issues had for more than 10 years just related to profiles and now, no surprise, owned by Microsoft.

When done right, a major cost save is Citrix Provisioning Services where you have the ability to host multiple LOB applications in a single image and flip a switch to spin up Read Only XenApp servers and using a dynamic capacity on demand methodology maximize your ROI on that local physical hardware.   The cost savings exponentially greater the more remote sites and users combined with shift differentials and several other factors I discuss in the article mentioned below.

I delve into this and other cost save measures in this article:

Maximize Citrix Concurrent Licensing To Reduce Cost – Session Timeouts - 3 Millon Dollar Cost Save
https://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/25022/Maximize-Citrix-Concurrent-Licensing-To-Reduce-Cost-Session-Timeouts-3-Millon-Dollar-Cost-Save.html

Next, Citrix Cloud or aka Workspace is actually hosted on Microsoft Azure.  You have different options here relative to hosting of XenApp and XenDesktop.  You can take advantage of the hosted VDI option which is XenDestop on Azure and this might make sense if you want to provide a Windows 10 Desktop running Office 365 applications and leverage Azure Express.  

Most larger organizations, however, if moving to Office 365 would still exist in a Hybrid Mode scenario.   Your greatest benefit relative to Office 365 hosted in XenDesktop VDI in Citrix Cloud combined with Secure Browser and Secure Mail combined with ShareFile (also in Azure).

This scenario works great if all your LOB applications exist in Azure as well such as SaaS applications, SQL instances and forth.

If the majority of your data resides on-prem and Active Directory and Exchange and so forth - then you are looking at the Cloud Connectors for Citrix to the cloud connectivity (not VPN) and combination of Site2Site VPN (assuming you will want to extend AD as VM's to Azure), AD Connect (assumes hybrid mode 365), ADFS and MFA (if you want SSO and 2 factor nowadays should be a given; learn from others where not having MFA translates to "might as well give your password away....just ask Citrix and about the "password that got away".    

Keeping in mind too that Cloud is greenfield and Current Release where you might be using LTSR on-prem but either way your looking at different sites relative to Citrix design (versus zones).

I mean, what is the ultimate goal?  Last time I checked, our customer is the end user - they are the consumer of what we design, build, maintain, and provide support.

If your looking at strategic direction then consider where both Citrix and Microsoft are headed versus this convoluted interim options.

Citrix Workspace is the suite of products combined and hosted in Azure but with a distinct difference being the Micro-Apps engine combined with the Workspace intelligence and their new development tool which requires no actual coding experience.

It already provides you the ability to tap in to 1000's of SaaS based applications already cloud hosted and interface with API's for you on-prem hosted solutions to create an intelligent workflow that is integrated with the Workspace App and Web Portal.  So, instead of a portal that aggregates "Published Applications" think of it as a custom dashboard where each LOB contributes to the workflow and instead of click on and launching applications you are integrating specific functionality that would otherwise require launching the application is now an "Approve" button on the right hand side of you dashboard and completely automated. Not by IT, by designed business owners that understand who needs to do what in the application and now in the driver seat versus waiting on a cab.

So, instead of publishing the application (the full thick client) it gives you the ability to take that entire process of
1. Login to Citrix
2. Launch the application
3. Login to application (assuming SSO not configured)
4. Click here, click there, click here, approve this, approve that.....

Instead of all that we can now turn that work flow into a simple container that shows up when they login to Workspace along with their VDI, Secure Browser, ShareFile and so forth and does not require a developer but instead would come from the business side where individuals most familiar with how to use the application and those business processes have the ability to essentially automate all those steps above so that when User A logs in they would only see what is relevant to them whether approving time sheets, PTO, business expenses from what could be 10 or 1000 different back end sources and regardless of cloud hosted, SaaS, or on-prem the point being the end user doesn't see or need to login to the business application.  In other words, Published Apps as a concept is outdated.  Legacy, archaic, on the way out.

Not going to happen overnight but that is the direction and where the R&D dollars are being spent.

If you can tap in to this concept of Micro-Apps, business intelligence and targeted workflows, Citrix Federated Services, and Azure Tenant model with Federated Services....now - You will reduce costs while at the same time the potential to drastically improve the end user experience.

This is where you will find that balance of "cost saves" versus "end user experience and satisfaction".  If you save money and user get a worse experience doesn't count and if the experience is bad enough it's a major loss where the complaints will work their way up the food chain at your expense.  

With that said, there are ways to cut costs but need to be clear where strategies like PVS to the Licensing and dynamic capacity on demand strategy mentioned in my article are a combination of capital expense, operational expenses, and you cannot measure end-user happiness relative to cost.  

In summary, probably a lot of things you can do now to save money just make sure it is not at the expense of you only real customer (the end user) and the big win is on future strategy which is take published applications and where the data is located out of the equation by creating an intelligent workflow feeding to a single Workspace such as Citrix Workspace.

Not to mention, these are only a few of the benefits.  I've not discussed WEM which can have an immediate operational cost reduction for on-prem hosted solutions that improve performance, logon times, consolidate GPO, Citrix Policies, security controls and many other distributed administration overhead.  

Or, APPDNA where you can import your existing images, operating systems, and future go-to operating systems, MSI package installs to one centralized SQL database which will analyze not only all your applications but produce a report that you can hand to the development team or third party outlining exactly how to streamline their application to run more efficient on a multi-user (RDS) server operating system where most applications in production today were coded and compiled and designed to run on a single user distributed OS model.

In addition, once APPDNA is setup correctly it can be used to create a road map for migrating those applications from say 2008R2 OS running RDS  to 2016 OS running RDS then 2016 RDS to 2019 Server OS running RDS.

It will also, to lesser degree, do what Wyse Package Studio did before Dell bought and destroyed it..... It looks at the OS, patch levels, and all applications and provides tools to install or have more applications per virtual disk.  In other words, the more applications you can get to run in a single image - reduces operational expense of maintaining those images.

For example, running multiple versions of the Oracle Client, JRE, or concepts of merge modules relative to MSI (Windows Installer Service) to avoid DLL overwrites where installing AppA breaks AppB.  It can tell you this before it happens and there are ways of moving same named dll files but different versions of such to their perspective install directories versus System32.  

Rather than 10 images to accommodate 30 applications (not counting Dev, Model, Prod) - you have two.  - Cost save.

Next, the potential benefits of SDWAN for this specific use case alone where across the globe you have a limited number of least hop low latency scenarios relative to Office 365 and the ability to control that packet flow and QOS of FMA/ICA traffic.  Reduction in hops equates to less latency to the 365 hosted back-end and less packet loss and dropped sessions with Citrix sessions equals translates to better uptime for the end user.  When those drops or latency result in loss of income - cost save.

This is just a small # of examples.  The list goes on and on and simply too much to write in one sitting but my goal here was to provide some perspective.  Hopefully, I've done that.
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Brian Murphy
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Thank you.