Citrix PVS on Azure Part – 1

Hello everyone, This is a blog post on Citrix PVS and it’s divided into three parts.

1^st part of this blog series can be found here.

2^nd part of this blog series can be found here.

3rd  part of this blog series can be found here.

Citrix PVS on Azure TP (Technical Preview) Program has been extended till 31^st of Oct. 2021, and we know that many Citrix enthusiasts like us are spending a lot of time in testing this one of the most beautiful products of the Citrix stack. Citrix Product team has released a very good document to kick start you in Azure but that is generally targeted to the users who are already experienced in PVS, if you are new to Citrix PVS technology, this document is going to help you greatly to understand what is the PVS service is and how it works in Azure.

Citrix Provisioning supports a connector for Citrix Cloud integration. It enables provisioned VDAs to be used in Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service). This connector provides the same functionality used in on-premises deployments.

Before we start let’s see a few faqs on provisioning services (PVS).

What are the provisioning services (PVS)?

It’s a Citrix image provisioning technology. It’s used to provision images to multiple machines from a centrally managed image.
It has a world-class streaming technology that allows computers to be provisioned and re-provisioned in real time from a single shared-disk image.

Is PVS part of Citrix Cloud?

No, PVS is a completely separate entity, it’s altogether a different software, and it requires independent resources, configurations, maintenance, and setup.

What are the benefits of provisioning services?

• It simplifies the management of enterprise images.
• PVS is demonstratively faster at deploying and rolling back image updates than Citrix MCS.
• It ensures a consistent and secure user experience. VDA’s provisioned using a PVS image, all boot from the same image, which ensures users are getting the same experience from any machine.
• Boot times of PVS streamed VM’s are around 40 secs in Azure.
• Rollback and revert fast: Here the versioning & rollback are instantaneous. Any issues that occur during the run time such as actions of a single user, or malicious attack on an operating system, can easily be rolled back by rebooting the machine which will then reboot from the centrally shared image and revert the user experience before that incident occurs.
• Reduce the storage footprint of your deployment in Azure, Storage requirements are reduced due to several factors as stated below:
  • A single copy of the Image.
  • Target VM has a cached disk that is around 25-35% size of the image depending on the workload.
• Better performance compared with On-Premises because Azure networking is better/newer/faster than any typical on-prem network
• PVS is better at streaming disk contents than storage

That’s all about today, in the next part of the blog I will show you how you can install the Citrix Provisioning Service in Azure. I have done this exercise in my lab where we have used the Citrix Cloud as the control plane and Azure region in East US as the resource layer for Citrix. Please click on this link to go to the second part of this blog series.