I am excited to announce support for the protection and recovery of Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp environments in Azure using Azure Site Recovery (ASR).  We have been working closely with Citrix to validate and provide guidance on leveraging ASR to build a robust, enterprise grade DR solution for the recovery to Azure of on-premises XenDesktop and XenApp environments running on VMware/Hyper-V.

With ASR, you can protect and recover the essential components in your on-premises XenDesktop and XenApp environment including:

• Citrix Delivery Controller
• StoreFront Server
• XenApp Master Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA)
• XenApp License Server
• AD DNS Server
• SQL Database Server

Additionally, ASR provides you the ability to:

• Recover to an application consistent point in time, which is useful to recover your multi-tiered Citrix VDI environment to an application-consistent state.
• Use flexible recovery plans to customize the order of recovery by grouping together machines that need to failover together, add automation scripts, and manual actions to be executed on a failover.
• Perform Non-disruptive recovery testing, that lets you test the failover of your Citrix VDI farm to Azure, without impacting on-going replication or the performance of your production environment.

Please note that:

• Protection and recovery of on-premises deployments using Server OS machines to deliver XenApp published apps and XenApp published desktops is supported.
• Protection and recovery of on-premises deployments using desktop OS machines to deliver Desktop VDI for client virtual desktops, including Windows 10, is not supported. This is because ASR does not support the recovery of machines with desktop OS’es.  Also, some client virtual desktop flavours (eg. Windows 7) are not yet supported for licensing in Azure. Learn More about licensing for client/server desktops in Azure.

A detailed step by step guidance for building a disaster recovery solution using ASR has been chalked out in close collaboration with Citrix. The whitepaper from Citrix detailing the same can be downloaded.

Ready to start using ASR? Check out additional product information to start replicating your workloads to Microsoft Azure using Azure Site Recovery today. You can use the powerful replication capabilities of Site Recovery for 31 days at no charge for every new physical server or virtual machine that you replicate.

Azure Site Recovery, as part of Microsoft Operations Management Suite, enables you to gain control and manage your workloads no matter where they run (Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, VMware or OpenStack) with a cost-effective, all-in-one cloud IT management solution. Existing System Center customers can take advantage of the Microsoft Operations Management Suite add-on, empowering them to do more by leveraging their current investments. Get access to all the new services that OMS offers, with a convenient step-up price for all existing System Center customers. You can also access only the IT management services that you need, enabling you to on-board quickly and have immediate value, paying only for the features that you use.