Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 1912 Long-Term Service Release Is Available
by Daniel Ruiz
Senior Solutions Architect
After much anticipation, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 1912 Long-Term Service Release (LTSR) is now available! The new release contains more than 2 years’ worth of functionality and feature enhancements previously only available to customers running the Current Release (CR). As published by Citrix, below are the top 10 reasons why an organization should be upgrade to the latest LTSR version.
Not listed below, but extremely important to NVIDIA vGPU enabled desktops, is HDX support for hardware encoding together with selective H.264 video compression. This provides the best balance of video performance, static image fidelity, and network compression for knowledge workers such as attorneys and legal staff who work extensively with text, tables, and interactive media.
- Thin Provisioning of Block Storage: Added official support for thin provisioning of block storage like FC and iSCSI with the latest release of XenServer.
- Linux: Added features like fast smart card support, Director integration, and much more.
- Director Enhancements: Deep dive analysis of user logon, and Interactive Sessions including Citrix UPM Load Duration (1903) and Desktop Probing (1906).
- User Personalization: When you install or upgrade a single-session VDA, you can include “User Personalization.” This feature is powered by Citrix App Layering (but doesn’t require separate infrastructure) and enables you to preserve users’ data and locally installed apps across sessions. This functionality now totally replaces PvD and AppDisks.
- MCS I/O: MCS Write-back Cache v2 which includes improved storage performance by leveraging memory first and gracefully falling back to disk when necessary.
- PVS Asynchronous I/O: Send and process RAM cache, VHDX file and network streaming asynchronously, which reduces latency and greatly improves performance.
- HDX Insight 2.0 (NSAP): Re-architected how HDX Insight works. Introduced a 28th virtual channel, called “NSAP,” which provides a dedicated, uncompressed path for Insight data. This can easily double the scalability of Insight/AppFlow, not to mention improve the reliability and stability of your NetScaler ADC appliances.
- Microsoft Outlook, Skype, and Teams: The Outlook Search Redirection feature that originally shipped in 7.18 solves how to deploy Outlook in a non-persistent fashion.
- Key UX Enhancements: Adaptive Throughput makes the protocol better; and includes legacy features such as Local Text Echo.
- Cloud Integration: The 1912 VDA will support bypassing the Cloud Connector (so the VDA connects directly to the cloud-hosted Gateway Service), and HDX/ICA Proxy becomes much more scalable.
The full feature summary is detailed here:
If you would like more information or assistance from our industry-leading team of Citrix experts to plan and execute your upgrade, please contact us at service@helient.com.