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First thing’s first, if you’re not clear on the different options for CVAD in public cloud it’s worth checking out this session . If you’re already familiar with the differences between CVAD extend vs Citrix Managed Desktops vs Citrix Cloud, perfect, always like to level set just to make sure.

Ok ill watch this.

Glad to help! If you want to build out an on-prem style deployment in Azure without leveraging Citrix Cloud for the control plane, keep in mind that means you’re going to be dropping all of the infrastructure pieces up there and they’ll have to be running 24/7 such as delivery controllers, storefront, SQL, director, licensing, etc - you can stack some of those roles on the same VMs but then you’ve got to keep in mind maintenance/blast radius/machine types getting larger.

Hmmmm good point. So might be cheaper to leverage there cloud. To save money

It’s definitely a point to consider. If you happen to have a crazy good deal with Azure that might not matter as much but most of my customers opt for the citrix cloud model for public cloud workloads because they can replace all that stuff with a couple cloud connectors instead. That assumes that the cloud control plane checks all the boxes you want which that session should help guide you through.

I guess the cost of the 24/7 infrastructure will pay for the citrix cloud piece over and over.

That’s one of those things that requires a bit of napkin math and forecasting from a deployment size perspective. I’m on the networking side so I don’t have much insight into virtualization pricing, but I do know customers who have started out non-cloud and changed to cloud mainly over price.

We are considering the extending to Azure path. Dipping our toe and running some VDAs on someone else's compute. I think CVAD as a service would be the better option but it would require us to completely change our licensing model

Yeah, I do know there’s a conversion process from traditional to cloud. Couple things to note there is that I believe you should still get hybrid rights to use traditional on-prem style licensing for a period of time, but the other thing is that if you’ve established underlying connectivity through a tunnel/Expressroute/etc already then you may be able to get away with pointing cloud based VDAs back to an existing on-prem controller instead of having to do that conversion. kind of a blended model. Of course that means your cloud workloads now have a dependency on on-prem resources, so again keep blast radius in mind.

Hmmm interesting. Good information

Sending everything across the S2S vpn makes me nervous about performance. Is it correct that the ideal set up would be Storefronts, Controllers, Domain Controllers, and Netscalers all in Azure? What I have a hard time wrapping my head around is how a user connecting through the on premises gateway gets routed through the gateway in Azure and to the VDA. Im guessing some form of GSLB and optimal gateway routing?

For best performance, yeah having everything it needs out there would be optimal. OGR is usually how I see customers steer traffic as needed. GSLB is great for adding fault tolerance but not necessarily required for operation.

Netscalers are active active and Zones are utilized on the CVAD side? As Ray's original question indicates, there is not a lot of information on these types of setups. Not that I have found anyway.

Remember that the actual ICA traffic is a separate connection (except for HTML5 which may use storefront as a proxy, I haven’t dug into that too much). That means we can balance that differently which is the core idea behind OGR.

Good reminder about OGR

Cool, glad to help!

@Adam I noted your query about cloud licensing model and @CTXMike's response about Hybrid Rights. This blog may help. Might be worth a chat with your account manager to discuss options if you are thinking of going that route as there are option to support customers on this path. https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2019/08/12/citrix-tips-putting-hybrid-rights-to-work-for-you/