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Citrix Cloud MCS Connection to Azure Unable to See Image or Template vhd files

Situation

The Citrix cloud MCS connection to Microsoft Azure is unable to provision any Machien Catalog as its unable to find any images, disks, vhds or servers to base its Machine Catalog on.

  1. Citrix Cloud setup with Hosting connected direct to Microsoft Azure RM (and working as it can connect and see resources etc)
  2. 1 x DC, 2 x Citrix Cloud Connectors and 1 Windows server template with VDA installed as ‘master image’
  3. All Windows 2016
  4. All servers built with Azure managed disks (where the servers are not placed into any storage account)

Hosting Connection

Machine Catalog Creation

CC sees the Resource Group and storage, but its basically looking in the wrong areas and not finding the image or VHD files.

A)

B)

C)

Solution

The VDA template must be created within a storage account and not built with azure managed disks.

 change to 

 

Azure Managed disks is now available in preview (apparently) but only if you are deploying machines via your Machine Catalog. It seems you still need to have a vhd and storage account for your base image / template when you are creating your Machine Catalog, but can then enable azure managed disks for your new MCS managed VMs (see below screenshot during Machine Catalog creation)

 

Deploying to AWS with Citrix Smart Deploy – no NAT instance was detected

Situation:

During the deployment of a blueprint via Citrix Smart Tools > Smart Deploy we came across the following error when attempting to deploy to our AWS Resource Location

The following problems were detected with your configuration
Please re-configure as no NAT instance was detected in this AWS Resource location

Solution:

The blueprint / Citrix tools don’t seem to (yet) support AWS NAT Gateways. This also certainly wont work with the default VPC. To solve this we spun up a new NAT Instance in our own VPC with the servers in separate private subnets in order for the wizard to proceed / succeed. Also note If you deploy to the public subnet you need to provide an elastic IP address.

Citrix Cloud – Secure Browser Service

Summary

Citrix Have a cloud based secure browser service unsurprisingly called ‘Secure Browser Service‘. Here is a quick summary of the features / notes taken during a PoC for a customer.

Review

Basically this is an Azure hosted cloud delivery of URLS you specify to publish to users (either anonymously or via your own authentication methods) combined with a browser that is ‘locked down’. You can have Firefox, Chrome, IE11 or IE11 (64bit). Even for a quick test. It’s awesome. Quick, Simple and reliable.

Flash and Video support (youtube) are native, albeit it noticeably slow (but still worked even for a UK based user while the resources were Azure West US region!) Signing up for trial was simple and very quick via my mycitrix.com account (5 minutes after requesting the, trial was ready to go)

From a customisation perspective there is little that is changeable – and possibly will stay this way to keep the service offering simple – you can always deploy your own secure browser service via XA/XD for further customisations. Well done Citrix.

 

Initial Overview Page

Clicking Get started

Enter a Name, URL and select the browser and region

Browser and Region Options

 

I selected IE11 and West US as the region

Clicking Launch Application launched very quickly, but because its published initially in Kiosk mode my native response was to click ‘refresh’ which reloaded the entire published app – not the webpage (including back buttons etc)
Secure Browser service supports on prem apps / backends
Change Settings

Manage >

Enable non-kiosk mode

Launching with non-kiosk

Other sites were accessible

(But I didn’t push my luck)
youtube.com was noticeably slow but still worked, sound and all! Pretty good by default.
Where is it hosted and did it match the region published in – YES

 
Flash is available and the Internet speed was very fast

Flash quality was low and jittery – but was absolutely usable even with approx 150ms from my device to West US Azure

Statistics on usage
Summary Even for a PoC / Demo this is fantastic. Quick and simple and no obvious major issues. Well Done Citrix!