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Citrix Cloud on the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Platform Delivers Choice, Simplicity and Performance

Run Virtual Apps and Desktops Where You Need Them

October 8, 2020 | min

2020 has transformed how the world thinks about remote work. More than ever before, organizations are leveraging virtual workspaces to keep their employees safe and productive. The moment demands agility, and hybrid cloud is fast becoming the leading solution for enterprises seeking operational choice, scalability, and flexibility. To stay competitive, organizations must move fast, which requires simultaneously removing any friction from desktop and application delivery, even while maintaining compliance and security at all times.

Even before the pandemic, Vanson Bourne found that most organizations planned on launching substantial hybrid deployments over the next five years, with 85% naming hybrid cloud as their ideal IT operating model. Leading analysts expect as many as 90 percent of organizations to have deployed a multicloud or hybrid cloud model to meet their IT needs over the next 12 months.

There are a host of advantages to running your Citrix workloads on a true hybrid and multicloud solution, such as Nutanix Clusters on the Nutanix Cloud Platform. Clusters enables organizations to not only avoid workload rearchitecting, but cloud lock-in as well. A Citrix Cloud on Nutanix Cloud Platform solution can also help enterprises meet data sovereignty and compliance obligations, while providing coverage, redundancy, and on-demand incremental capacity.

Nutanix and Citrix have partnered for years to provide powerful and reliable virtual application and desktop solutions. Their recent cloud offerings, Nutanix Clusters and Citrix Cloud, provide enterprises the operational flexibility they need across private or public infrastructure to support a distributed workforce, delivering secure and responsive access to applications, desktops, and data on any device, anywhere, and at any scale.

We are proud to announce that Citrix Ready has now validated Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Nutanix Clusters on AWS, another major milestone in the Citrix and Nutanix partnership.

With Citrix on Nutanix, you get true multicloud flexibility to choose the environment that works for you--on prem, public cloud, or both.

Same Citrix experience, on-prem or in the cloud

The many advantages of running Citrix on Nutanix are well established, including:

Superior user experience

Per user VDI infrastructure pricing

Flexibility around infrastructure choice

Administrative simplicity (no more storage networks and forklift upgrades!)

Predictable performance at scale

Same golden images used across platforms

Increased resiliency

Lower TCO

With the arrival of Nutanix Clusters, Citrix cloud architects have the same operational ease of use and efficiency they enjoyed with Nutanix on prem, but in the cloud. Clusters runs the Nutanix Cloud OS, AOS, on bare metal public cloud servers, while using the same management plane, thereby providing an identical management experience.

Nutanix Clusters also uses the same Nutanix AHV plugins for Citrix that are used for on-premises Nutanix deployments. These time-proven and well-tested plugins allow you to easily deploy Citrix workloads using Machine Creation Services and Provisioning, integrate with Director, and leverage Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Service and Citrix Cloud.

Nutanix Clusters lets customers quickly and efficiently move workloads over to AWS (and, before too long, Microsoft Azure as well) without refactoring the applications, changing security policies, or other operational procedures. In fact, you can burst 2,000 Citrix desktops to AWS in under 2 hours.

When you combine Citrix and Nutanix, all infrastructure and application delivery operations are consolidated into just two tools: Nutanix Prism and Citrix Studio. Nutanix Prism provides a unified console for administrators to search all VMs across all sites, and even across different hypervisors. Citrix Studio manages environments on top, including apps, desktops, data, and files, while Nutanix provides a single, fully integrated platform below, including on prem, AWS, and, once it’s available, Azure.

All of this translates to greater choice for Citrix cloud architects: put your apps, desktops, and end user data on-prem, in the cloud, or both--whichever suits your business needs. And the solution also includes operations portability and flexibility so that you can react quickly if your needs change.

Why Citrix Cloud on Nutanix Clusters?

  • On-Demand Elasticity: Quickly scale Citrix workload capacity for temporary or seasonal demands or expand into different geographical regions in minutes by bursting Citrix workloads into public clouds.
  • Business Continuity: Leverage public clouds for high availability and disaster recovery of Citrix Cloud workloads without the complexity of managing a secondary datacenter or a stand-alone recovery solution sitting idle the majority of the time.
  • Accelerate Journey to Digital Transformation: Seamlessly lift and shift desirable environments to embrace cloud operations and OpEx cost models.
  • Location Independence: Easily migrate workloads between on-premises Nutanix infrastructure and Nutanix Clusters to suit business needs, capacity constraints, and non-disruptive upgrades of Citrix Cloud infrastructure. This flexibility also addresses challenges around data sovereignty, compliance, and regional certifications (such as GDPR, CPAA, HIPAA, and SOX)
  • Test/Dev in the Cloud: Reduce infrastructure costs by moving Test/Dev to an on-demand operations and OpEx model. Maximize results by performing tests at production scale instead of using costly, dedicated resources on-premises. 
  • Lower Total Operating Costs: With Citrix Cloud on Nutanix Clusters, pay only for what you use, when you need it. Run your workload in the right cloud at the right time. No need for overprovisioning on prem or in the cloud. Get cloud elasticity when you need it, and on-prem economics for predictable use cases.

Visit the Nutanix Clusters page to read about how customers are already using Nutanix Clusters on AWS to seamlessly burst VDI workloads to address spikes in demand, with no refactoring.

Citrix Cloud on Nutanix Clusters delivers greater choice and efficiencies

Citrix Cloud on Clusters enables true multicloud optionality and location independence. Nutanix Clusters grants per-user infrastructure pricing and license portability--these features enable the license to follow the workload into the cloud as business needs adapt, shifting to a cloud operations model over time. The Citrix on Nutanix solution allows migration to cloud at a pace that’s right for your business.

Additionally, Nutanix Clusters on AWS gives customers the choice to either reuse existing on-premises hardware, or operate in the cloud using AWS credits to build out a hybrid environment. Customers can choose to bring on-premises licenses or select a pay-as-you-go model.

Nutanix coined the term “micro-waste” to describe how Clusters slashes public cloud spend (including the cost of Clusters). Public clouds offer “t-shirt” instance sizes, which prohibits customers from purchasing the exact compute, memory, and storage resources they need. The excess resources, or micro-waste, cannot be shared with other VMs, resulting in over allocation expenses. In a large environment, these costs add up significantly.

Citrix Cloud with Nutanix Clusters intelligently optimizes operations and public cloud per usage costs. You can hibernate workload instances when they’re not in use, resuming again as needed, enabling a more streamlined, pay-as-you-consume model.

The combination of Citrix Cloud and Nutanix Clusters unlocks legacy cost and operations models to allow greater choice, efficiency, and simplicity, on-prem and in the cloud.

Experience Nutanix Cloud Platform Simplicity

It’s time to take your Citrix Cloud to the next level. Digital Workspace infrastructure no longer needs to be confined to on-premises deployments. Enable the expansion, migration, and creation of Citrix Cloud environments, whether in private or public clouds, on-demand. Come take a test drive today to see just how easy it is to set up and operate a Nutanix hybrid cloud. Please visit the Nutanix Clusters page to learn more about true hybrid cloud, and visit the Citrix and Nutanix solutions page for technical resources, customer testimonials, and more.

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