As organizations continue to embrace the cloud and hybrid work models, many have found that the native management of Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) can fall short of the operational agility required in today’s competitive landscape. Enter Citrix—a trusted partner for organizations that already own it and want to boost their virtual desktop infrastructure without reinventing the wheel. In this post, we explore how integrating Citrix with AVD offers a comprehensive, high-performance orchestration solution that outpaces native AVD management.
Why AVD Alone Isn’t Enough
While AVD provides a solid foundation for virtualization in the cloud, its management capabilities can be limiting when compared to the orchestration needs of a modern, dynamic IT environment. Organizations increasingly discover that without a robust third-party tool, they miss out on advanced features, seamless integrations, and a user experience that truly meets the demands of today’s workforce.
Leverage Your Existing Citrix Investment
Seamless Transition Without Endpoint Changes
For organizations already familiar with Citrix, the path to AVD integration is remarkably straightforward. By leveraging Citrix on top of AVD, there’s no need to modify endpoint configurations or retrain users. This seamless transition means that your teams can continue to work with familiar tools, reducing downtime and accelerating adoption. The existing Citrix environment acts as a bridge, ensuring continuity and operational stability during the migration process.
Boosting Density and Lowering Compute Costs with Citrix WEM
Cost efficiency is a critical factor for any organization moving to the cloud. Citrix Workspace Environment Management (WEM) plays a pivotal role in optimizing compute resources. By substantially increasing the density of sessions per server, Citrix WEM helps reduce overall compute costs—delivering a high-performance user experience without the need for additional infrastructure investments.
Unmatched Flexibility and Availability
Superior Workload Management Across Environments
Unlike many competitive products that focus solely on cloud environments, Citrix stands out by offering workload management both on-premises and across multiple cloud providers. This flexibility is crucial for organizations looking to adopt a hybrid model or maintain control over specific workloads in a private data center. With Citrix, you’re not locked into a single ecosystem, providing the freedom to balance workloads according to your strategic needs.
Natively High Availability
Citrix has been engineered with high availability at its core. This native resilience ensures that even if unexpected issues arise, your virtual desktop environment remains robust and continuously operational. Competitive solutions often struggle to match this level of built-in availability, leaving organizations vulnerable to downtime and service disruptions.
Accelerating Adoption with Hybrid Authentication
For organizations undergoing mergers and acquisitions, or simply transitioning to a new authentication system, Citrix offers a significant advantage. Its hybrid authentication capabilities accelerate the adoption of AVD, seamlessly integrating with existing identity providers. This minimizes friction during the transition and ensures that all users—regardless of their legacy systems—experience a smooth and secure login process.
The Citrix Experience: Best in Class
Ultimately, the Citrix experience continues to be recognized as best in class. End users often compare native AVD workloads to those managed with Citrix on the same image—and time and again, Citrix wins hands down. This superior user experience is not only about the familiar interface but also the robust performance, reliability, and comprehensive management features that Citrix brings to the table.
Time to Act: Windows 10 End-of-Life and Unicon Migration
With Windows 10 reaching its End-of-Life in October, now is the ideal time to accelerate your move to a modern virtual desktop environment. Many organizations face the challenge of incompatible Windows 10 desktops that simply can’t be upgraded. Citrix, integrated with AVD, offers a powerful solution: convert these incompatible desktops to Unicon at no additional cost, and simultaneously build a robust Windows 11 environment within AVD. Citrix’s recently announced acquisition of Unicon followed by the announcement that this product would be included into existing entitlements gives companies a no-cost option to continue using devices incompatible with Windows 11. This proactive transition not only mitigates the risk of running unsupported systems but also positions your organization at the forefront of technology innovation and security.
Conclusion
Organizations looking to accelerate their move to Microsoft AVD can greatly benefit from integrating Citrix into their strategy. By leveraging an existing Citrix investment, you avoid the pitfalls of retraining and complex endpoint reconfigurations while enjoying cost-effective compute management, flexible workload handling, and a best-in-class user experience. With the added urgency of Windows 10 End-of-Life, transitioning incompatible desktops to Unicon and building a modern Windows 11 environment in AVD becomes a strategic imperative. With Citrix, your move to AVD becomes not only smoother but also significantly more powerful and resilient—ensuring your organization stays ahead in the rapidly evolving digital workspace.
Embrace the future of virtualization today by integrating Citrix with Microsoft AVD, and witness the transformation in operational efficiency and user satisfaction.
Tags: Citrix , Technology