Citrix MCS and Nutanix AHV

[Christopher Yue]

We are planning to move away from VMware over to a Nutanix Hyper Converged solution.

 

In addition, we will be moving over the Acropolis Hypervisor.

 

Just wanted to know if anyone has had any experience in using the above in conjunction with Citrix Machine Creation Services.

 

This in terms of ease of deployment and use.

 

 

[Rene Bigler]

Hi Christopher

 

Yes you simply have to install a plugin on your DDCs and you then will be able to select Nutanix AHV as your hosting ressources in Citrix Studio. On your master image you only as with other hypervisors you only have to install the VirtIO drivers. The provisioning and update process of the machine catalog is hell (maybe about max. 5 minutes for 100 VMs) and since the Nutanix cloning mechanism it's very storage efficient. See http://blog.myvirtualvision.com/2016/08/26/citrix-mcs-on-nutanix-ahv-unleashing-power/ for details about this.

 

René

[Rene Bigler]

it an awesome combination: simple and high performance

[Christopher Yue]

Hi Rene,

 

I guess from your comments, compatibilty is very good and the configuration is straightforward?

 

Could you possibly elaborate?

[Rene Bigler]

btw. here is a video 

 that might give you some impressions

[Christopher Yue]

Thanks Rene'

 

This is a big help.

 

I see the video makes reference to the XenDesktop plugin for MCS which I presume will work on XenApp 7.9 and higher?

 

Hope you dont mind, just another question.

 

I presume there are no issues running Netscaler VPX on AHV as well?

[Rene Bigler]

No problem, you are welcome!

 

NetScaler VPX also works on AHV, you can use the KVM Build - I did a blog post about running NetScaler on Nutanix AHV (https://dreadysblog.wordpress.com/2017/05/07/deploying-citrix-netscaler-on-nutanix-ahv/)

[Christopher Yue]

Brilliant!

 

I will also be following your blog as well.

[poomz]

Follow your video link at below that it's easy to use MCS but I would like to ask some question. If Acropolis updated new version in future that it will effect with using MCS or not?

I meaning in case if I still  not change Virtual App version.

 

On 5/30/2017 at 5:02 PM, Rene Bigler said:

btw. here is a video 

 that might give you some impressions

 

 

[Rene Bigler]

AHV/AOS upgrades usually have no impact on the Citrix Workloads running on the cluster. However, as a best practice you always should check the release notes for compatibility before upgrading.