Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

People often ask me which version I should choose when Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop products are updated so quickly. Before answering this question, we have to start with Citrix's current product release and update strategy.

Students who use Citrix products earlier must know that as an IT software company with a considerable history, its products were basically updated once a year in the past, and a notice was made through the technical conference in May every year, and the local products were officially released around September. And few of the released products are intergenerational, usually SP (service pack) or FP (Feature Pack). If you want to cross generations, it will only happen once every 2-3 years. This kind of update, which seems slow at present, was normal 5-10 years ago.

So in the current era of rapid changes in IT, everyone emphasizes agile development, and this approach becomes less applicable. So Citrix put forward the product life cycle planning such as LTSR and CR at the end of 2015.

LTSR: long-term stable support version

CR: current version

Https://www.citrix.com/support/programs/software-maintenance/xenapp-and-xendesktop-servicing-options.html

# here Citrix Cloud is a SAAS service owned by Citrix, and we have the opportunity to introduce Citrix Cloud, a new business model that Citrix is promoting from North America to the world, to promote the transformation of users to pure SAAS desktop cloud.

From the picture, we can see. In this system, LTSR and CR are not two completely separated products, all CR is released in an average quarterly cycle (not more than 3 quarters) a new version, which is characterized by the addition of new features in each version (objectively speaking, almost every version has a very substantial content in it) personal suggestions that if you catch up with the new function, you can update in half a year, that is, 2 versions as a cycle. LTSR is integrated once every 18-24 months.

The biggest benefit of the CR version is the addition of the new features mentioned above, such as IO Optimization,FULL CLONE in the preparation of NVENC,MCS in HDX3D, new transport protocol EDT and so on. But with any new product, new features will easily bring the same problems, relatively speaking, the problem is commonly known as BUG is relatively more. (although each new version also fixes some known problems in the old version)

Therefore, for those users who have no special new functional requirements and pay more attention to stability, the long-term stable support version of LTSR is more valuable.

LTSR is to choose a CR version as the blueprint, or the basic version, and then take this as the basis without doing any new feature development and support, only to do one thing is to fix BUG. So LTSR is also commonly known as the stable version, and that's why. After collecting all kinds of internal tests and customer feedback, it fixes the problems by CU (Cumulative Update) for all users to use.

Several major benefits of this approach:

First of all, the life cycle of LTSR is calculated from the date of release. Take the only LTSR version 7.6 LTSR that has been released as an example, if it is released in January 2016, Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop provides 5 years of service by default (the corresponding service needs to be purchased), so it can be effectively supported until 2021. If you wish, you can discuss further extension support with Citrix after expiration, up to a maximum of 5 years. To provide users with a long product service cycle.

Https://www.citrix.com/support/product-lifecycle/product-matrix.html

# I would also like to remind students using earlier versions of 7.x that the life cycle of 7.X before 7.11 is only 18 years in June.

CU is both a patch package and a complete installation package. This means that if you are in the 7.6 LTSR version, you can upgrade to the latest version via CU. If you are a new user or new environment, you can also install CU directly and deploy the latest version directly, instead of installing 7.6 LTSR before installing CU. As of writing time, the latest version of 7.6 LTSR is 7.6 LTSR CU4. Https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/xenapp-and-xendesktop/7-6-long-term-service-release/xad-whats-new/cumulative-update-4.html

You also need to pay attention to the following considerations when using LTSR:

LTSR is a general term that has strict restrictions on many components in Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop, so in a production environment, do not combine components at will unless necessary. Http://docs.citrix.com/en-us/xenapp-and-xendesktop/7-6-long-term-service-release/xad-whats-new/long-term-service-release.html

Some components in LTSR do not exist, such as Personal vDisk, which are not contained in VDA. If you need to use the Personal vDisk feature, you need to use the CR version.

Each new version of CU needs to identify SA, or Citrix product service validity, for example, the SA validity period of the latest 7.6 LTSR CU4 is June 14, 2017.

From my personal point of view:

If it is a pure VDI project, without some new functional requirements such as 3D, 7.6 LTSR and its latest CU version are highly recommended.

If it is an application virtualization, 3D-based project, it is recommended to use the CR version, the latest version is 7.14.

Of course, many friends have said that the functional gap between the current LTSR and the latest CR is so big that it is really difficult to choose. Objectively speaking, this is indeed true. There is a gap of 7 versions between the current 7.6 LTSR and the latest 7.14, and the functional gap is quite obvious.

However, this problem will be resolved soon. According to the Citrix update cycle, the LTSR version is updated every 18-24 months, so as shown in the previous figure, this year's Q3 (expected in mid-late August) Citrix will release the next version of LTSR, which is expected to be 7.15 LTSR. It will be modelled on 7.13 LTSR 7.14, when the new version of the feature will meet everyone's need for functionality and stability for quite a long time.

Please wait for it.

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