So I have an environment of trade floor users that use dedicated racked physical PCs with loadsa RAM and GPU, accessed from anywhere via Citrix RemotePC. However (you can probably guess where this is going), powers-that-be are making noises around getting rid of Citrix for cost saving purposes. sighs Now, the main requirements for this class of users are as such:- They need to be performant They need to connect to on-premises, bare metal systems They need to support a HUGE variety of USB peripherals They need to connect to powerful and varied GPUs and run complicated display and screen-dividing setups (usual setup 6x4K screens) They need to be able to use multiple audio devices simultaneously (2x headsets and a keyboard with audio output is usual) They need to be centrally brokered for security with MFA Policies need to be centrally managed (particularly for USB - none of this copying text files to machines to allow devices and the like) Monitoring and logging naturally needs to be dialled up and of a decent quality It needs to be easily scalable I'm pretty convinced that off the top of my head, only Citrix and (perhaps) Omnissa can provide these requirements. I have to rule out Windows365 because of the latency to the backend apps that would happen, AVD or even AVD Local (or whatever it is called) I don't think supports bare-metal PCs, it's just VMs on on-premises tin, Parallels is probably a bit feature-light (although I am willing to be corrected)... There are others out there, is Frame even still a thing? Just interested in what the community's opinions are around this kind of use case, and whether there is really any viable alternative to Citrix for the above set of requirements. All opinions and suggestions eagerly welcomed!

We have customers in same space (financial, traders) that use Omnissa Horizon for the same use case. It's worked fairly well

Does "fairly" in that instance mean "there's some things missing"? 🙂

@James Rankin, we've had really good success with the environments we manage and/or assist with. It's a common scenario/configuration that we regularly see.

Azure Local only supports AVD VM's. Best case there would be publishing direct RDP links via AVD to these machines (gross). Oh and then you're inviting the pain fun that is Azure Local and the deployment/update circus that comes with it. I have a client with some Omnissa Horizon admins who have asked to remove Citrix in favor of Omnissa. One thing your client may not have thought of when switching is the need to rock both the old Citrix & the new Omnissa infra at the same time as well as training for admins and users. Each have their uses, but you really need to hate one to force a move to the other.

You can register any random machine - physical or virtual with AVD - install the Arc agent and the AVD agents & register with a host pool. Make it a Personal host pool and assign the user - it will be brokered like any other connection. Grey area though, as I don't think MS have finalised licensing and support

Citrix is still going to be the best performance to be honest. I would setup side by side tests with RDP and Citrix. And make sure you are leveraging everything your license gets you. If people want to save money, and still have best performance, it is usually better to get into the ecosystem more, and retire competitive products.

Another thing I missed off is that these users need to use multiple audio devices (they often join simultaneous meetings, and their keyboards have audio outputs, etc.)

Our good friend Neil Spellings can speak to this directly. I know hw supports a simialr work on Citrix at one point, and may have moved them somewhere else? I have not been able to catch up with him in a while sicne ew don't have CTPs any longer.

Handily enough, I am meeting Neil tomorrow in Leeds 🙂

Tell him I said Hi!