This is a guest blog post from James Kindon, Senior Solutions Architect – EUC at Nutanix, and was co-authored by Leon Feng, Product Manager (Citrix Session Recording) at Citrix.
In a complex, disparate and compliance focused IT landscape, organizations must balance delivering an optimized user experience without sacrificing security. Introducing new security controls may directly impact the user experience, whilst introduction of new compliance requirements may leave administrators scratching their heads on how to meet the demand.
Add in the complexity of new systems, applications or operational procedures that end users may be struggling with, the number of items to juggle can become a blur, with the end user virtual operating environment, at times, a black box.
Simplifying admin experience and offering strong security capabilities that don’t hinder user experience have been priorities of Citrix and Nutanix for years. By bringing together the power of Citrix Session Recording and Nutanix Files, we simplify the admin experience even more. Below we will take a closer look at Citrix Session Recording, Nutanix Files, and how they work better together.
What is Citrix Session Recording
Citrix Session Recording is a built-in Citrix functionality that records, catalogs, and archives virtual app and desktop sessions for retrieval and playback. Session Recording provides flexible and dynamic policies to automatically trigger recordings of application and desktop sessions.
It also enables IT personnel to monitor and examine user activity, supporting internal controls for regulatory compliance and security monitoring. Although there are many solutions to address compliance and security concerns in VDI and DaaS solutions, Citrix Session Recording is an excellent tool for Citrix workloads. In addition to it being purpose-built for Citrix virtual resources, it also includes abundant features, controls, a low cost to implement, and seamless integration with other Citrix technologies. Citrix Session Recording also aids in technical support by speeding problem identification and time-to-resolution.
Citrix Session Recording can be deployed and managed either completely on-premises or via the Session Recording service as part of the Citrix Cloud offering.
The Session Recording service facilitates administrative tasks by providing a unified web console to manage and observe the Session Recording infrastructure across your organization. Customers have the flexibility of choice for deployment based on their situation and preference.
Benefits of Session Recording
Organizations who implement Session Recording gain a number of benefits:
- Enhanced security through logging and monitoring. Session Recording allows organizations to record on-screen user activity for applications that deal with sensitive information, monitoring and preventing the leakage of sensitive information from virtual sessions. This is especially critical in regulated industries such as healthcare and finance.
- Powerful activity monitoring. Session Recording captures and archives screen updates, including mouse activity and visible output of keystrokes to provide a record of activity for specific users, applications, and servers. Though Session Recording is not designed primarily for evidence collection for legal proceedings, organizations can use Session Recording together with techniques such as conventional video records and traditional text-based eDiscovery tools.
- Faster problem resolution. When users call with a problem that is difficult to reproduce, help desk support staff can enable the recording of user sessions. If the issue recurs, Session Recording provides a time-stamped visual record of the error, which can then be used for faster troubleshooting.
Continuously Optimized Citrix Session Recording
Citrix Session Recording is made up of the below components in a typical deployment:
Due to the native integration of the Session Recording Agent and the Citrix Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA), there is no decoding or encoding performance cost to implementing Session Recording into an existing environment. This means you can quickly introduce the solution without having to consider if your user experience will be impacted.
Citrix Session Recording is continuously optimizing storage consumption and storage management.
In the most recent Citrix Session Recording 2303 current release, features such as compressed recording, image resolution scaling for lossy video codec, and enhanced ICDLB command options, enhanced capabilities and optimized storage space.
Even with optimizations, we realize that Citrix Session Recording is a storage intensive technology. It is heavily dependent on highly performant storage that is both highly available and able to keep up with the demand of recording data across thousands of active sessions. Additionally, the recordings themselves are sensitive in nature and security of the storage is paramount. Traditionally, Citrix has ensured these requirements were met by favoring local disks or SAN-based LUNs being provisioned directly to the Session Recording servers.
Enter Nutanix Files: Nutanix Files offers an alternate, more scalable approach to this traditional architecture, without compromising the core considerations of performance, availability and data security.
Nutanix Files for Citrix Session Recording
Nutanix Files is a software-defined, scale-out file storage solution that supports SMB and NFS on top of Nutanix AOS. Many Nutanix customers deploy and consume Nutanix Files capability on a day-to-day basis, including those with large deployments of Citrix Session Recording.
Nutanix recently undertook significant testing to identify if Nutanix Files could offer an alternative solution to local storage of Session Recordings. Testing, benchmarking, and collaboration between Nutanix and Citrix identified that Nutanix Files SMB-based shares offer an exceptional option in both performance and security for scalable Session Recording storage repositories.
Testing was undertaken with the current release version of Citrix Session Recording 2212 which was known to have several performance improvements in the product. When engaging with existing Nutanix and Citrix customers, it was unanimous that the Current Release (CR) capability was used.
Testing showed exceptional performance and that Nutanix’s implementation of Continuously Available (CA) for SMB allows Session Recording to handle planned and unplanned outages with zero data loss.
Nutanix Files simplifies Disaster Recovery capability with built-in replication and protection. Tiering capability may also add significant value to Session Recording data without the need to introduce complexity associated with database record alterations.
As you read through the Citrix documentation, you’ll notice wording has been updated to provide customers with some guidance aligned to deploying Session Recording services with Nutanix Files, for example:
“Storing data on a NAS, based on file-based protocols such as SMB and NFS, might have performance and security implications. Use the latest version of the protocol in place to avoid security implications and perform scale testing to ensure proper performance.”
Simplicity, Security, Scalability and More
By combining the power of Citrix Session Recording with Nutanix Files for storage, IT admins achieve greater monitoring and compliance with faster problem resolution capability, whilst gaining the performance, scalability, fault tolerance, simplicity, and security of SMB shares hosted on Nutanix Files infrastructure.
If you are deploying or managing Citrix Session Recording currently, then the latest documentation from Nutanix and the updated storage guidance from Citrix may offer you a more simplistic way of managing your deployment. If you are investigating Citrix Session Recording for the first time, then the testing and findings outlined may well assist in addressing challenges at the start.
The full Session Recording testing documentation includes test results and suggested architectures on the Nutanix Solutions Portal. Take a look and see how you could optimize your performance today!
What’s .NEXT for Citrix and Nutanix?
Find out at #NEXTconf May 9-10. We’ll be there hosting a number of sessions on how our technologies work together, what’s next for Citrix, and more.
Visit Citrix at Booth P3 at Nutanix .NEXT 2023, May 9-10.
Disclaimer: The development, release and timing of any features or functionality described for our products remains at our sole discretion and are subject to change without notice or consultation. The information provided is for informational purposes only and is not a commitment, promise or legal obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions or incorporated into any contract.
