Citrix Cloud Mcs
- Citrix Cloud - Unable to create MCS Machine catalogs, error “Failed to add any computer accounts”.
- NOTE: This article contains information about Catalog Creation ONLY.For information on UPDATING a Catalog see: CTX217456 Background. As part of the process of creating a machine catalog using MCS, the contents of the shared base disk are updated and manipulated in a process referred to as Image Preparation.Under some conditions, this Preparation step can fail completely without generating any.
Citrix combines virtualization, networking and cloud technologies with collaborative services into a full portfolio of products that enable mobile workstyles for users and virtual datacenters for IT. Our wide range of product editions, licensing models and maintenance plans ensures you can find the right purchase options for your organization. Customers using XenDesktop Machine Creation Service (MCS) with VMWare, Xenserver or Hyper-v as hypervisor may want to relocate the desktops to another datastore for various reasons such as datastore running out of space or datastore performance. This article tells why Citrix does not support the datastore migration of VMs.
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Intro
Considering recent published articles surrounding Citrix Cloud I think it is important to remind institutions out there of the benefits. I will highlight (very briefly) 13 advantages about the Citrix Cloud (There are many more) and provide a link to a great article by fellow CTP Nicolas Ignoto on feature requests that should be incorporated in to the solution.
SQL Backend
This is a big one. If you have multiple resource locations on premises traditionally you are wanting multiple SQL servers for your Xenapp Sites back end. Moving to Citrix Cloud eliminates this. You also now can use WEM as a fully integrated cloud service meaning you do not have to worry about costly SQL. Have you checked how much SQL costs in Azure?
High Availability
All infrastructure is HA (Highly Available). Your Desktop Delivery Controllers (Brokers), license Servers, Studio, Director, SQL. Think of the comparable cost with IAAS or on premises.
Automatic Patching
All infrastructure is automatically upgraded. Citrix takes care of this for you eliminating the need to plan patch management. Hotfixes and Security patches are not your worry when it comes to the infrastructure components.
Always Latest Software
The infrastructure components are automatically upgraded to latest Citrix versions. You are on latest technology that is thoroughly tested before deployment. You get latest features and improvements.
License Usage
With the Citrix Xenapp and Xendesktop Service you can easily control your license usage. The licences are user licenses as there is no concurrent unless you subscribe to the full Workspace services, however you do get 2 for 1 trade up deals and hybrid rights usage. This allows you to continue using your on premises solution whilst migrating (testing) the Citrix Cloud. At time of writing I believe you have a 3 year transition period. The other advantage is you are eligible to release licenses after 30 days compared to 90 days for on premises environments.
Unified Management
You can easily manage multiple resource locations from one single unified management plane. This reduces the need for costly infrastructure at multiple site locations.
Smart Scale
You have the ability of controlling costs by using Smart Scale. This helps reduce the cost of your workloads in Azure, AWS or Xenserver (on premises). Think of the way public clouds incur cost by billing per minute. You can now have workloads running only during core operational hours or reduce workloads as users reduce.
Hidden Costs
Hard one to prove but if you think that there is an additional cost with Cloud you should think of the hidden cost savings also. Reduced tin, reduced operational costs, freeing up time and resource to concentrate on other initiatives, not worrying about upgrade cycles, multiple infrastructure in resource locations, easy central management, easy image management, monitoring capability included.
WEM
This will be a fully integrated Cloud service allowing you to improve the workspace experience for your users. Improve logon times by moving GPP to this service. Apply CPU and memory optimisations. The SQL back-end is managed by Citrix.
Smart Check
This is an automatic health check for your site. No need to deploy agents if you have the Xenapp and Xendesktop Cloud Service. You will receive diagnostics on your sites health such as machines in maintenance mode, services that are stopped and any back-end communication issues.
Simple Image Management
You have the ability to use MCS and PVS (on premises) via the Citrix Cloud. (Granted you do have this ability on premises -So maybe this one does not count.)
Cloud Agnostic
You can choose your Cloud of choice. There is no Cloud lock in. Citrix Cloud is public Cloud agnostic. Managing multiple resource locations in different public Clouds is easy.
Easy On boarding and ability to make POC
The time it takes to request a trial is up for debate but when you compare this to the time it takes to get traditional POC concepts running it is not that bad. This will be improved but it is easy to transition a on premises deployment to a running Citrix Cloud Xenapp and Xendesktop Service. We are talking hours and not days here!
Workspace App
Finally, you are able to take advantage of the Workspace experience using the Workspace APP which is an all in one place to go to use multiple resources you need on a daily basis. Whether it is Sharefile apps, Saas Apps, Web Apps, Xenapp/ Xendesktop Apps, on- premises, Cloud etc, you can browse and search for your resource through one easy to use Workspace App experience when linked to the Workspace in the Xenapp and Xendesktop Service.
Conclusion
Citrix Cloud is evolving and is improving and does have its limitations. I feel it is important to highlight some advantages though in the wake of some recent Citrix Cloud bashing. My fellow CTP’s provide a constructive article on the limitations that are being worked upon that is worth a read. The aim for this article is to provide some Yin and Yang to the pro’s and cons of the solution.
When running Citrix Apps and Desktops, image management is a must. It will make it so much easier to upgrade and patch both the operating system and the applications that are installed on the workloads. Citrix offers two different image management technologies: Provisioning Services (PVS) and Machine Creation Service (MCS). Before we go into which technology to choose, let’s take a closer look at both of them.
Provisioning Services (PVS)
Provisioning Services is streaming a master image to the Workload VMs In PVS terms, and workloads are called target devices. The master image is located in a file share located on the PVS server. The Workloads PXE boots on the network and downloads a boot file from the PVS server. The workload starts to stream the master image from the PVS server across the network. A cache disk is attached to the workload VM to store parts of the master image and for writes. When the VM is rebooted, the cache disk will get wiped.
When a change is made to the master image, you just need to boot the workload VMs, and the updated image will get deployed.
With PVS, you need to have full control over your network. Each workload will PXE boot and pull the image across the network. If your network doesn’t perform, neither will your workloads. Everything has to go across the network. From my point of view, this is a solution for on-prem environments. PVS is not meant for environments running workloads in a public cloud. However, PVS can deploy to physical machines.
Licensing
PVS is available in the following editions of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.
- Virtual Apps Advanced *
- Virtual Apps Premium
- Virtual Desktop Standard **
- Virtual Apps and Desktop Advanced
- Virtual Apps and Desktop Premium
* Citrix Virtual Apps Advanced is available for VMHosted applications running on a desktop operating system only.
** Physical desktop support not available with the Citrix Virtual Desktops Standard Edition
Machine Creation Service (MCS) – Thin Provisioning
Machine Creation Service is a component that is part of the delivery controller in your Citrix Apps and Desktop environment. It communicates with the hypervisor or cloud vendor, where your workload VMs are located through APIs. MCS creates VMs and adds them to your Active Directory. Your live image is created from a snapshot of the master image that you have created with your master VM.
When you create new workloads, MCS builds a linked clone from the master image you have created. It will create a differencing disk for the changes that will take place when to machine is in use. At the same time, it will also create an identity disk for the VM.
It is very easy to get started with MCS because it is part of the Studio console. PVS has a separate console. MCS is meant for virtual hosts and cannot be used for physical machines.
MCS has support for the following virtualization platforms:
- Citrix Hypervisor
- Nutanix Acropolis
- VMware
- Microsoft Hyper-V
If you wish to deploy your workloads to a public cloud, MCS has support for:
- Microsoft Azure
- Amazon AWS
- Google Cloud Platform
You can read more about running your workloads on Google Cloud Platform in these two articles:
Machine Creation Services (MCS) – Full Clone
MCS also gives the option to create full clones. This means that each VM gets its own disk. With this option, you can spread out your load to different storage pools, which is a good idea if you have workloads that demand a lot of IOPS.
Licensing
MCS comes with every edition of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops.
Conclusion
The first thing you need to figure out is where you want to deploy your workloads. In the table below, you can see which technology you can use where.
Citrix Mcs Image Preparation
Each technology uses different resources. PVS stream your image across the network, so you need to make sure that there is enough capacity on your network, and you do have any latency.
Citrix Mcs Vmware
MCS uses storage, so here you need to pull enough IOPS from your storage solution. As mentioned earlier, if you have high demanding workloads, you can always create full clones that you can spread across different storage pools.