Solutions


Citrix XenDesktop

Citrix® XenDesktop™ provides a comprehensive solution for delivery of Windows-based virtual desktops throughout the enterprise. F5’s best-in-class Application Delivery Networking solutions create a dynamic virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for delivery of desktops to PC, Mac, tablet, smartphone, laptop, and thin client devices anywhere. F5 maximizes the benefits of XenDesktop by ensuring availability, data security, and scalability. By providing advanced network and performance optimizations, F5 helps you deliver the absolute best end-user experience and gain the most from your investment.

Why do I need F5 for my Citrix XenDesktop deployment?

F5 solutions are essential to helping you realize the full promise of desktop virtualization by minimizing cost and improving efficiency. F5 provides unrivaled application fluency to ensure you can meet changing demands for desktop delivery and future integration with other virtualization technologies and cloud services. By intelligently monitoring server health and performance, F5 ensures availability, best performance, and effective disaster recovery. F5 also provides an unsurpassed layer of security and consolidates network components common to XenDesktop deployments, then easily scales as your VDI needs change. With F5, you gain a higher quality of service to meet the most demanding service level agreements and the flexibility you need to support your evolving virtualization efforts.

Benefits of F5's Application Ready Solution for Citrix XenDesktop:

  • Reduced hardware acquisition and costs.
    With integrated authentication and directory services, high-speed SSL and DTLS, and SSL offloading throughout the virtual desktop infrastructure, F5 solutions enable you to optimize XenDesktop with fewer resources.
  • Fast and secure PCoIP user experience.
    F5 securely transports and optimizes the PCoIP protocol over the WAN to support remote offices without degrading performance.
  • Lower bandwidth consumption.
    WAN optimizations maintain a high quality user experience for remote users while reducing the required bandwidth and costs.
  • High availability and scalability.
    Through intelligent load balancing, health monitoring, and SSL offload, F5 improves the scalability and availability of your VDI implementations.
  • Broad virtualization support.
    F5 solutions easily support VDI strategies that may include file, storage, server, or application virtualization technologies from Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, and others.

Solution Documents

Successfully Managing VDI Services with the BIG-IP System | Overview

The F5 BIG-IP system supports heterogeneous virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) architectures comprising Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop, Microsoft VDI, and VMware View by improving the security, reliability, and performance of VDI implementations. The BIG-IP system meets the unique challenges inherent in the design and deployment of architectures required to efficiently manage growth and scaling of virtual desktop services.

Optimizing Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop | Overview

Optimizing Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop

Top White Papers

Optimizing and Securing Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop | Overview

Many organizations embracing Citrix XenApp and Citrix XenDesktop as the foundation for a virtualization strategy have encountered challenges in realizing the full value of their investment. Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop are powerful solutions for providing access to enterprise resources. Both depend on a highly efficient and tuned application delivery infrastructure to function at their peak performance, security, and availability. F5 offers market-leading ADC solutions for Citrix, including a variety of physical and virtual devices, that deliver greater efficiency, streamline management, and maximize performance to dramatically increase the availability, security, performance and ROI of resources delivered through these desktop and application virtualization solutions.

Simplifying Single Sign-On with F5 BIG-IP APM and Active Directory | Overview

Implementing single sign-on supported by Active Directory to manage application access in multi-domain environments across a diverse set of devices, applications, and services is challenging. An F5 BIG-IP APM and Microsoft Active Directory solution simplifies operational configuration while consolidating identity and application access management.

Top Case Studies

DevCentral Content

Scaling VDI Architectures

Resources

How do I deploy Citrix XenDesktop with F5?

Deploying F5 solutions with Citrix XenDesktop is simple and easy with minimal implementation requirements, application ready configuration templates, and step-by-step deployment guides that take the trial and error out of your initial configuration. F5 has built-in support for Citrix XenDesktop, so you can simply select XenDesktop from a list of supported configuration options that provide the base level setup from which you can customize. F5 eliminates the need to configure additional point products to manage authentication, giving you a total solution for traffic management, security, app acceleration, and more.

Deployment Guides

Citrix XenApp or XenDesktop (BIG-IP APM 10.2.1) | Overview

With the combination of BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) and Citrix XenApp or XenDesktop, organizations can deliver a complete remote access solution that allows for scalability, security, compliance and flexibility. Document revision 1.1

Citrix XenApp or XenDesktop (BIG-IP APM v11) | Overview

By deploying the iApp for BIG-IP APM with Citrix XenApp or XenDesktop, organizations can deliver a complete remote access solution that allows for scalability, security, compliance and flexibility.

Citrix XenDesktop (BIG-IP LTM v10) | Overview

This guide contains step-by-step procedures for configuring the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for directing traffic, ensuring application availability, improving performance and providing a flexible layer of security for Citrix XenDesktop version 5.0.

Citrix XenDesktop (BIG-IP LTM v11) | Overview

This guide shows how to configure the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) for directing traffic, ensuring application availability, improving performance and providing a flexible layer of security for XenDesktop version 5.0.

DevCentral Content

F5 BIG-IP v11 iApps for Citrix

Resources

DevCentral Community

F5 DevCentral, is our community driven site that helps customers and partners maximize the effectiveness of F5 technologies & solutions.

F5 Knowledge Base

The AskF5 Knowledge Base has product manuals, security advisories, and release notes on F5 products.

What F5 offerings do I need for a Citrix XenDesktop solution?

F5's entire portfolio of products can work together to ensure your XenDesktop deployment is always secure, fast, and available.

Products or technologies that apply to this solution

Resources

BIG-IP Overview Demo

This in-depth Flash demo gives a video introduction, overview, and next steps for using BIG-IP.

How to Buy

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