Hi everyone, I hope you’re doing well. I’ve been trying to calculate the costs of two different environments so that I can justify why we should keep our current Citrix VDI setup rather than move over to Azure AVD. At the moment, we’re running a Citrix persistent 1:1 VDI environment in a hybrid model — VDIs are hosted on VMware, while the Citrix infrastructure is in Citrix Cloud. What I’d like to figure out is a realistic monthly cost per VDI compared to an AVD. Keep in mind that we currently don’t have any AVD expertise in the company. That adds another cost which is difficult to quantify — both in terms of the hours needed for administration and the time required to learn, configure, and integrate AVD by 3rd-party consultants. Have any of you been in a similar situation? My goal is to present this to the company in a way that shows the real cost difference. A Citrix license combined with VMware is significantly cheaper than Azure — especially since the same Citrix license allows us to build a multi-session farm without additional licensing costs. In Azure, doing the same comes with an extremely high extra cost. I know Citrix on-premises is generally much cheaper, but I’m unsure how best to structure this and present the numbers clearly. Let's say that we have around 100-150 VDIs.

Don't forget AVD doesn't have any native front-end management console. You'd have to fork out for Nerdio or Hydra or something on top (unless you love PowerShell)

We did a similar study recently. Use a per year approach: Citrix cost = (Citrix licenses + VMware licenses + Hardware for hypervisors + support cost for hypervisors + Microsoft CALs for Windows 10 + Microsodft RDS CALs if you use) / number of users. You would have how much the solution cost per user per year. AVD = use https://azure.microsoft.com/fr-fr/pricing/calculator/ to estimate the cost per user per year. And then add estimated hidden cost (Training of users and administrators, Architecture of the new platform, Test and Validation period, Prod migration period, Project Management, Adapting your tools to the new platform, potential tools to replace as James said , maybe consultancy/recruitment to cover the new area + time to dedicated to this staffing). You can highlight the train will continue to move while you're conducting the migration, so it will take A LOT of time and effort and overhead on internal teams. Of course, the Cloud is "unlimited" (I have examples to counter that argument), but so does the billing :D

If your end users are remote you also lose the ICA protocol that right now provides the best performance over high latency connections. So there can be a loss of user productivity switching to RDP.

and more DLP on Citrix side too

👀

The biggest issue with these kinds of comparisons is you can always tweak them to suit whatever you ultimately want to do. Are you including the costs for power, space, cooling, networking, labor and real estate in your onprem estimate? Unless you go fully to the cloud, some of those costs will remain. I also thought the big benefit of AVD was the use of Win10/11 multi-session which made things cheaper than single session vdi. I wasn't aware there was a higher cost vs onprem for that. Your example may also be skewed by the low quantity vs scaling. Citrix license renewals have been jumping quite a bit in price as of late, and while they lowered from the 250 user quantity, I think the numbers would vary a large amount when looking at 150 vs 10,000 vs 50,000 VDIs. Also, CAPEX vs OPEX can come into play here as well. In the cloud, everything is OPEX. Some business es like that, my previous co did not. They HATED it, but that's because they made a pledge to remove 10B in opex. What's the best way to do that? Switch it to CAPEX! Buy onprem hardware with perpetual licensing (hard to do now).

Thank you so much for all the awesome replies — this is exactly what I will explain to the company. I just find it difficult to fully express myself since this is my first greenfield VDI project(which worked out surprisingly well), and there are so many things to consider. I’m also the only Citrix guy in the company, so it can be tough to convince them — especially when upper management really dislikes Citrix… for reasons that honestly don’t make much sense. Once again, thank you so much for all the replies so far, happy to have you guys back me up!

I don't follow with this part - "especially since the same Citrix license allows us to build a multi-session farm without additional licensing costs. In Azure, doing the same comes with an extremely high extra cost." What's the cost difference, if you don't mind me asking

Citrix has Image Portability Service that allows you to send on-prem images to Azure, AWS, other hypervisors etc. Azure images only run in Azure. Citrix has analytics and reporting built-in. Azure requires buying a 3rd party. Citrix has the ability to run images anywhere. Azure is only in Azure, you need to use a different tech to run images anywhere else. Citrix can run with on-premise resources that as capital expenditures can be purchased and deprecated over longer periods. Azure is Subscription only. Citrix has a connection to physical vms, servers, or virtual machines. Citrix supports connections to Linux and MacOS operating systems. When you start looking into what you give up, or need to replace with other technology then you see that AVD is not an apples to apples to comparision. It's apples to a grainy picture to an apple. Did Citrix jack their prices? Yes. Was it pretty scummy? Oh yeah. But they have bulked up what you get with that license with actual good technology. Want to save money while using Citrix? Move your VDAs to xenserver off of vmware. Don't renew your F5s or Kemp gear, replace it with NetScalers. Don't purchase other real time security software, use Device Trust. Don't renew VPN licenses. Setup SPA. Don't purchase Google Chrome Enterprise for DLP, use SPA with free Chrome Enterprise. Instead of buying Windows 11 or IGEL software, use Unicon Elux.

I'd love to see a cost breakdown of that @Jeff Riechers 🙂

Thank you so much for the thorough explanation and suggestions, Jeff. I’ve noted everything down and will deep dive into each part before presenting. I really appreciate it. Always very interesting as well. I hadn’t considered many of these points. @Aaron Parker What I’m trying to convey is this: If the managers and owners of a company complain about the costs of a Citrix license and believe Azure will be better and cheaper, consider this example. A Citrix license for, say, 500 users at $200,000 over a three year contract allows you to use that same license across two different farms. For example, a multi-session farm with 300 users and a separate VDI farm with 200 users for DevOps and infrastructure admins. With Azure, however, you’d likely need to provision a total of around 250 VMs with their disks, networking, and all associated costs, including snapshots, etc. When people compare the “expensive” Citrix license to an Azure setup, they often forget that those 250 VMs incur monthly costs. So the real question is: are those 250 VMs in Azure cheaper than buying a $200,000 Citrix license for three years and running the machines on-prem hardware? Not only are we talking about 250 VMs, but they’re also quite powerful: around 100 VMs with 32 GB RAM and 8 vCPUs, another 100 VMs with 16 GB RAM and 4 vCPUs, and maybe 30–50 multi-session VMs with 32 GB RAM and 8 vCPUs or more. Another important point is productivity. The DevOps team is very happy with the current VDI environment I built because they can lock their PC, come back, and continue working seamlessly. They can even open their VDI from home and pick up right where they left off yesterday or work during weekends. In Azure, however, VMs must be shut down overnight, which directly affects productivity. Users have to start everything up again every morning. There is so much more I would guess. Example, how are the apps going to be updated and deployed? How much is the traffic that goes between Azure and onprem going to cost while managing the VMs through SCCM or other tools. How much does the time cost which the users might lose because of latency issues and troubleshooting. How much does the support cost which is provided for an Azure environment. hope this doesn’t come across as cocky, because the whole point of raising this question was to learn and get input from you guys, who are the experts. If it can be shown that AVD is cheaper and better than VDIs, that’s perfectly fine with me. But when managers and owners work against Citrix simply because they don’t understand the technical aspects, that feels like a whole different issue to me. One that seems more rooted in a dislike of Citrix than in objective reasoning.

Something I ran into with Azure and looking at vertical loadbalancing is what happens when azure runs out of skus for that particular machine type? I just had to go through a DR redesign for a customer that was using pay as you go for their DR, and when they tried to boot them their Azure site was out of capacity for that sku. Even with paying for reserved, that doesn't guarantee the resources will be there. Instead you have to pay for reserved capacity. That is the only way to guarantee you can boot those machines in Azure.

True, or use the backup-SKU list feature to start another instance type as a replacement

Yup, that is part of our re-design. Cloud is not as infinite resources as some people think.

@Artiom Kocharov https://jkindon.com/finding-the-value-in-your-citrix-investment-2025/

Another item to make sure is compared directly - power on time. With onprem, keeping machines powered on is a negligible increase in energy use. The cloud, you have to power manage the crap out of machines to get the savings (unless you pay a flat monthly fee for the machines). I've NEVER seen the estimates used come out correctly for power on time. 40hrs a week? Meh, that's how long a person might use it, but then you have to account for patching etc. I did a project where we put 5,000 developer VDIs into AWS. The bill was so large (over 500K a month initially!) we repatriated it all onto Nutanix. Cost was a fifth the cost of AWS over 5 years.

100-150 VDI, No need for Nerdio or thirdparty tool, make some own Powershell tools, if someone know Citrix they will learn AVD pretty fast. Enable PowerOnConnect, have Azure automation run check every hour against the VM, if user are idleing, disconnect them, if they are disconnected logged them off, and shutdown the VM. It will be lower cost than buying reserveration, You need to have the server running more than 300hours per month to save on reserveration, not many people work that much. VMware and Citrix is expensive now days, with AVD you will only have 160-200h per month on each VM, and after that Premium storage for FSXprofile. I dont think its will be any cheaper with onprem hardware, Windows Server licenses, switches, SAN, VMware licenses than running AVD.

i disagree that there's no need for Nerdio or other GUI tools, particularly if the administrators are coming from a Citrix background and are used to using the Citrix console. Some people are way more au fe with PowerShell as a front-end to their infra than others.

I can understand 3rd party in larger org, but not for that size, that is waste of money if you want to cut cost.

It's hardly costly, even for a small org

Maybe they changed than, before it was like 10usd per user, which was almost the same as Citrix, think it was 12usd per user via CSP, and with Citrix you got HDX instead of rdp, and you got everything around, Nerdio is admin interface. User see zero difference between a Nerdio setup or a native AVD setup.