With COVID-19, offices around the globe became ghost towns and businesses had to scramble to implement secure virtual desktop solutions and deliver a positive end-user experience to remote workers. But how do you manage a (hopefully) temporary surge in employees working in ways most of us never thought about with Citrix temporarily without buying more perpetual licenses you don’t need in normal conditions?
Citrix has three newer licensing options available through select partners.
1. Use Whitehat’s Citrix licenses temporarily to scale up users and desktops as needed without having to buy new perpetual licenses. To stay in line with Citrix’s licensing agreement, we simply spin down the existing on-premises License Server temporarily. Existing perpetual licenses go on-ice until the temporary surge in usage abates.
Whitehat’s licenses carry 100% of the needed capacity until the spike in usage is gone. At that point, Whitehat licenses are backed out with the reactivation of the on-premises Citrix license server. Life goes back to normal.
In short, stop using your own on-premises licenses temporarily, use Whitehat’s in whatever quantity makes sense, as long as needed, then go back to using on-premises licenses once life settles down again.
Pros: For several Citrix customers, it has been less expensive to add licenses for a few months than to add on to their perpetual license counts. No hardware to purchase, get as many apps and desktops as needed, temporarily.
Cons: Existing client-owned Citrix licensing is not used, all Citrix licensing comes from Whitehat and would have a cost associated with their usage, if only temporarily. Would need to weigh the cost of new perpetual licenses and the annual renewal vs a few months of subscription licensing to determine which path makes sense.
2. Use Whitehat’s Citrix licenses temporarily for the new work-from-home users; use existing on-premises licensing for existing employees. Scale up capacity as needed without making a new capex license purchase, as long as there is some customer site host-server capacity available for Whitehat to be able to spin up a second site with new Delivery Controllers and a new License Server within the existing customer environment.
There is no change to the way employees access the environment, so no additional training is needed, or support calls expected.
Pros: No new Citrix or Microsoft licensing to purchase, existing perpetual on-premise Citrix licensing can be leveraged, reducing the number of temporary licenses needed. Spin up as many apps and desktops as needed without ever needing to buy additional permanent perpetual licenses or pay more annual support to Citrix as long as there is some host-server capacity to allow some new servers to be spun up.
Cons: Some additional on-premises server capacity needed to spin up some new servers to stay in line with Citrix’s licensing terms.
3. Use Whitehat’s Citrix licenses temporarily with Citrix Cloud. Site Aggregation in Citrix Cloud can be added to present a common login experience for the new and existing users. Does require cloud connector servers. Aggregation CAN be on prem, does not have to go to Citrix cloud.
Pros: Largely the same as the previous option. No new Citrix or Microsoft licensing to purchase, existing perpetual on-premise Citrix licensing can be leveraged to reduce the number of temporary licenses needed. Capacity issues go away as new apps and desktops can be spun up as need to meet demand.
Cons: Citrix Cloud adds some additional variables in the short term.
While current circumstances have certainly created a lot of uncertainty related to how our businesses get work done and create revenue, hopefully these three strategies will provide viable options to keep employees productive, working from home, and continuing to do business.
These are not the only options, there are some additional creative solutions that only work in more niche use cases.
If you need help figuring out how to best squeeze more employees in your Citrix environment at minimal cost, we will help you work out your options.
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