Anyone actually have Citrix running on AWS? Curious as to how it compares to Azure. Talking VDAs here, mainly.

Did it in a previous role. Worked fine, but at the time we were using Server 2016 in /SERVERVDI mode as Windows 10 wasn't feasible. But performance wise they were absolutely fine

We have our entire workload running in AWS, what do you want to know?

Was really just wondering how managing CVAD in AWS compared to Azure. I have zero insight into AWS, and haven't read up on any of it (I know, I'm putting the cart before the horse here).

It's just a resource location, there's nothing unique to it

Is there local console access, though? Azure lacks that, and it's a big one for us.

Yes, there is local console access. There is a small difference with Azure I'd say: most of the "new fancy" features are coming to Azure first. AWS is the latest to get those. Performance wise, it's similar though.

The licensing faff was the only thing that bothered us. All of our Packer and Terraform code worked equally well in either.

Did it a few years ago. Cloud team wouldn't allow us to have the keys for creating host connections, so no power management in Citrix. But they want the VDIs power managed to an inch of their lives because money. Made it a fun time having to have a xenapp server always on that users had access to a published app called "power on VM" that they had to do, then wait for VM to register, then connect. It was a treat.

In the past I've seen a slower first logon to an AWS VDA as the disk hadn't fully hydrated (following MCS powerup), not sure if it's something you guys noticed?

Interesting feedback Paul. We noticed such behavior, but always linked that to "usually poor first logon on Windows". We'll have look about that hydration, do you know how to check that?

It's hard to get metrics.. the MCS clones are created from the snapshot each day (after reboot). Restoring of the snapshot is done partially on demand but the speed of restore is not consistent in AWS.. If you soft reboot a VDA (doesn't get recreated) and check the first logon against a VDA that gets a hard reboot (recreated from snapshot) it can give an indication of any first logon time increase.