Getting Started With Citrix Workspace Cloud

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Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

Steve Jobs

I’m very lucky to be part of the Citrix Technology Professionals (CTP) program which gives me a lot of insight and access to early releases. Even better, since I’m doing this for a living, vendors gives me access to Alpha and Beta releases, like the Nutanix Community Edition. I spend my day in the lab playing around with the latest and greatest, that’s why I love my job.

Citrix Workspace Cloud (CWC) if one of those, and when it gets released you’re going to love all the features and the prices, say no more!

In this post I’m going to show you how to get started and integrate it with Citrix Netscaler for Remote Access, let’s get started.

 

Getting Started with Citrix Workspace Cloud 01

The first thing you need to do is to install the Citrix Workspace Cloud Connector, think of it as your Citrix XenApp / XenDesktop Delivery Controller. It’s a proxy that handles all the communication between your Data Center and the Control Plane in the Cloud.

Getting Started with Citrix Workspace Cloud 02

The Control Plane contains services like Delivery Controllers, Databases, Licensing, Storefront, Studio, Director and more. So when you sign up for this services you don’t need to worry about all those, patching, load balancing etc. Even Citrix user licenses are provided.

Take care of your workloads and applications running in your Data Center.

Instead of pointing the VDA to your Delivery Controllers, you point it to your Cloud Connectors. This is how to do a unattended installation, I’m using an environment variable %CTX-XA-DC-CWC% that contains the FQDN of my Cloud Connector Servers.

Inside Citrix Studio you define your Hosting, Machine Catalogs and Delivery Groups as your normally would do.

Getting Started with Citrix Workspace Cloud 04

Head over to https://username.xendesktop.net and you’ll be redirected to your Cloud Hosted Storefront.

Getting Started with Citrix Workspace Cloud 06

At the moment it’s not possible to customize the Cloud Hosted Storefront. If that’s your thing, simply setup Storefront in your Data Center and use your Cloud Connectors. Please note that the XML traffic only supports HTTP.

Getting Started with Citrix Workspace Cloud 07

That being said, what’s uber cool about CWC is how fast it rolls out new features, so by the time you read this, it could be there already.

Head over to your Netscaler Gateway and configure it as you normally would with the Storefront information. LDAP and XenApp / XenDesktop Farm information is not needed because the authentication takes places at Storefront.

Getting Started with Citrix Workspace Cloud 08

Within CWC Apps and Desktops set your Netscaler Gateway address and enable it.

Getting Started with Citrix Workspace Cloud 09

That’s it. How simple and awesome isn’t Citrix Workspace Cloud?

There are many ways to verify your SSL connection. Here are 3 of them.

Connection Center

Getting Started with Citrix Workspace Cloud 10

Citrix Studio

Getting Started with Citrix Workspace Cloud 11

Citrix Director

Getting Started with Citrix Workspace Cloud 12

Even the connection through IOS works very smoothly. Here’s my Apple iPad Air 2 with ClamCase Pro and the Citrix X1 Mouse.

Getting Started with Citrix Workspace Cloud 13

I’m very impressed by Harsh and his team. The Citrix Workspace Cloud is very powerful and easy to use. I understand that enterprises have problems with putting all their stuff in the Cloud, but this is only the Control Plane. If you want to put the workloads in the Cloud or keep them in your Data Center is up to you.

This is only the beginning, I just covered the normal stuff, be we also have XenMobile, ShareFile and Lifecicle Management too. Stay tuned!

 

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