Advantages of Running Citrix on Nutanix
Advantages of Running Citrix on Nutanix
At Infozone, we are strong advocates for delivering the digital workplace with the help of Citrix, so why not do it on one of the leading providers of hyperconverged infrastructure—Nutanix?In today’s blog, we will go through how you can combine solutions from two of our partners and some of the benefits of running Citrix on Nutanix. Let’s get started right away.
Improved Performance
Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure significantly enhances performance in Citrix environments. Various scenarios clearly demonstrate dramatic improvements in application responsiveness and user experience. Due to the fundamental architecture of Nutanix’s platform, Citrix desktops gain access to local disks on the same physical host, minimizing latency while significantly increasing performance. This eliminates the need to read and write (I/O) to externally available storage (SAN), reducing network traffic and alleviating the load on underlying storage, as each physical host has its own virtual storage controller managing local I/O.
An additional effect of this is that image management via Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS) is optimized. Each provisioned desktop can be recreated during an image update from a cached version (a so-called shadow clone) of the original image, making the process of creating or updating desktops significantly faster while avoiding storage load. Since each host has local disks from which Citrix desktops can read, many customers running Citrix on Nutanix have transitioned from Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) to Citrix MCS, further reducing infrastructure complexity in their Citrix environment.
Furthermore, built-in Citrix profile management ensures user data is distributed across the cluster, allowing local backups of user profiles to prevent data corruption or inaccessibility. This increases overall availability. All of this is, of course, complemented by built-in redundancy between hosts and a high level of automation to simplify management for administrators.
Simplified Management
Managing Citrix on Nutanix is now easier than ever. The unified management console enables IT administrators to seamlessly monitor and administer the entire virtual desktop environment, reducing complexity and operational workload.
Whether managing images, subnets, templates, user profiles, micro-segmentation rules, or infrastructure automation, everything is handled from a single interface, making navigation straightforward. Additionally, Nutanix includes a high degree of built-in automation, minimizing the need for specialized expertise and allowing generalists to manage most tasks.
With Nutanix, infrastructure can also extend to public clouds, creating a true multi-hybrid cloud environment. This allows desktops to be seamlessly moved between on-premises and public clouds—or between different public clouds—using the same tools and processes regardless of location.
Nutanix also collaborates closely with Citrix to develop software integrations, such as Citrix Director integration, which provides hypervisor-level insights directly within Citrix Director. This eliminates the need to source information from multiple tools, making troubleshooting and monitoring more efficient.
Additionally, Nutanix and Citrix jointly develop validated design documents, reference architectures, and shared expertise. Nutanix has dedicated teams focused solely on Citrix on Nutanix, with five of the world’s 60 Citrix Technology Professionals (CTPs) working at Nutanix on this specific area.
Cost-Effective IT Operations
One of the key benefits highlighted at last year’s .NEXT conference was the cost savings associated with running Citrix on Nutanix. The combination of reduced hardware requirements and efficient resource utilization leads to lower total ownership costs and a higher return on investment.
Nutanix consolidates storage, compute, and networking into a single x86-based server (host), eliminating the need to manage separate hardware silos. This reduces hardware requirements as well as the need for expertise across multiple platforms and tools. With a smaller data center footprint, organizations also benefit from lower power consumption.
Nutanix ties everything together with a unified management tool that enables lifecycle management for the entire stack—including hardware firmware updates and software management—within the same interface used for the rest of the environment.
Another core architectural feature is data replication across all hosts in a cluster. This architecture ensures that virtual machines (VMs) are automatically migrated to other hosts during maintenance or hardware failures, with automated self-healing once the issue is resolved.
A classic example of cost and time savings enabled by this architecture is the ability to perform platform maintenance entirely during business hours. When new firmware updates become available, Nutanix’s built-in tools allow updates to be applied without user disruption. The platform automatically puts the host in maintenance mode, migrates VMs to another host, restores local disk access on the new host, applies the update, and then redistributes the workload once maintenance is complete. This process repeats across the cluster until all hosts are updated.
These foundational advantages explain why Citrix was one of the most popular applications to run on Nutanix when the platform launched in 2012. That said, there are even more strategic and technical benefits to this combination that haven’t been covered in this blog post—this was just a selection of key highlights. If you’re considering running Citrix on Nutanix, expect even more benefits beyond what we’ve shared here!