Someone remind me again because I've got a scrambled brain today - if you migrate your management plane from Citrix on-premises to Citrix Cloud, do you need to recreate anything specifically? You can obviously export and import the config, but what needs to be manually done? Is it the machine catalogs, as I remember? I've got a customer with an on-premises deployment that wants to continue being able to run this alongside some Azure-based desktops, so obviously they need to switch to DaaS licensing and get their site in the cloud, so I'm just thinking what the gotchas are.

You can connect to Azure resources from on-prem. Only if they want to use Windows 10/11 multi-session do you need to go DaaS.

So you can do it with on-prem licensing that;s not DaaS?

Old CVAD before a certain build did allow azure hosting. No more on that front. It was DaaS/Universal then to get that ability. Now anything new you have to be at UHMC. And yes recreate machines in the catalogs on the other side for the migration. (Assuming pooled)

Correct, depends on the license level. But I have a couple of clients doing it now. Bringing their server version to Azure and aggregating with on-prem for DR.

Yeah these guys want Windows 11 in Azure so they will need to go UHMC

Yup, Citrix Cloud it is unfortunately.

Back to the plot then - what would I need to recreate manually? There's a lot of configuration drift and bloat in their on-prem environment so I'm not entirely sure a straight migration would be the best idea anyway - but I'm just trying to remember the limitations

You can use the Automated Configuration Tool from Citrix. it generates a file at the export that you can manually review before importing it to Citrix Cloud. https://community.citrix.com/tech-zone/learn/poc-guides/citrix-automated-configuration/#_=_ Works great, used it multiple time without issue.

Yea, you can do bits and pieces with ACT tool as that is all we use. Many times policies are so dirty and old or in ADMX and we end up just reviewing and redoing to new structure in cloud. Big thing usually is applications to avoid recreating - admins, hosting connection (changes anyway), catalogs (non persistent recreated), etc. are either needed to be done outside of it in parallel or easy to do and change anyway for clean up as we go to the cloud tenant.

We use AutoConfig Tool to migrate from OnPrem to Cloud. This tool is able to migrate everything but we had a lot of errors when migrating policies so we recreate it manually on Daas. It works fine to migrate machine catalogs, delivery groups, application groups, published app, application folders etc Manually I used a script on our persistants WinSRV VDA to change ListofDDC et Wem Config to point to Cloud Connectors with restart of Citrix Desktop Service in production. Other thing, we use vda cleanup to update from 1912 to 2203 because without this process, vda upgrade agent wasn’t working.

So if you migrated a bunch of machines sitting on premises to cloud, you would still be able to launch apps from those machines through the cloud portal without any reconfiguration? And would you still be able to use the old NetScaler/Storefront to launch apps too, or would you need users to come in via Cloud?

We use the same netscaler and same Storefront to launch desktops from onprem farm and Daas farm because we would not change the connexion url for our customers. We don’t use Workspace url. Only thing is when you migrate delivery group and you have published desktop or apps, you have to disable it on Daas unless you changed listofddc on vda because without this, users will see duplicate desktops or apps.

Ok, gotcha. I feel so rusty but asking here is generally better than spending hours reading 😀

My process to migrate our on prem site to citrix cloud using Citrix Hypervisor and Citrix PVS for image management (access layer components NSGW/Storefront remained on prem) was pretty easy. You setup the on prem resource location with cloud connectors, run the Citrix Automated configuration tool on the on prem DDC's to export the config to the Citrix cloud site you will have to configure the created .yaml files (This took care of hosting connections, catalogs,DG's,tags,polices,apps ect) you will get errors during the import so have to check the log file as dependencies are sometimes missed but they are pretty easy to fix (there is a fixup file). You need to allocate a new special license if you have Xenserver /PVS in the on prem resource location as they have to be licensed with the on prem license server (Hypervisor and PVS for Apps and Desktops the license is called) you have to remove the powershell sdk's on the PVS servers and install the remote powershell sdk and set the PVS licensing to Cloud licening. During the cut over window you then add the Cloud connectors to the storefront Store and remove the on prem DDC's and same for the STA's on storefront and Netscaler you add the cloud connectors as STA's and remove the on prem DDC's as STA's. The final step of the cutover is to change the listofddc's registry key on the VDA's to point to the Cloud connectors instead of the on prem DDC this can be done via a PVS image update / GPP to change registry key or the Controllers policy once that is all done its fully migrated. The process was pretty easy and i didnt have hardly any issues i just arranged a 1-2 hour window where i could perform the image update to get the listofddcs pointed to the cloud connectors and perform the Storefront and Netscaler changes for controllers/STA's