We are continuing to evolve and add capabilities to our Connector Appliance. In case you missed it, I recently published a blog post taking a closer look at the fundamentals. To summarize, the continued development of the Connector Appliance is part of an ongoing effort to reduce the on-prem footprint needed to run Citrix and related infrastructure. This effort includes minimizing and unifying the number of connectors needed. In this blog post, I wanted to look closer at where you can host the Connector Appliance and what that means for you.

The Connector Appliance is a virtual appliance that, behind the scenes, runs a custom Linux-based operating system that customers can host in the way it best suits them. With that in mind, in combination with making the Connector Appliance fit more use cases, we have also looked to increase the options available for where you can host Connector Appliances.

Options for Hosting Connector Appliance

On-Premises Hypervisor Public Cloud
NEW: Nutanix AHV Microsoft Azure
Citrix Hypervisor (XenServer) Amazon Web Services
Microsoft Hyper-V Google Cloud
VMware ESXi

New: Support for Nutanix AHV

We are excited to announce that we have added Nutanix AHV to the list of options for running the Connector Appliance! Working closely with Nutanix, the Connector Appliance now includes the virtual drivers needed to integrate fully with the Nutanix Prism web console. These include resource metrics, as shown in the image below.

Support for Additional On-Prem Hypervisors

Official support for Nutanix AHV is the latest addition to the options for running the Connector Appliance. When it comes to on-prem hypervisors, the Connector Appliance already supports all other major hypervisors. This includes Citrix Hypervisor (XenServer), Microsoft Hyper-V, and VMWare ESXi. Every release of the Connector Appliance is tested against each of these hosts to ensure compatibility and makes the most of all the latest technologies.

Running in Public Cloud

Traditionally, most enterprises ran their Citrix infrastructure in private environments, using on-prem hypervisors like those described above. In recent years, more organizations have moved to use public clouds for hosting their Citrix environments. To support these, the Connector Appliance has long provided images and scripts to set up connectors in Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud. You can download packages including the disk image and deployment script from the Citrix Cloud console.

To further simplify the deployment of the Connector Appliances in the public cloud of your choice, we have offerings available now on the Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud marketplaces. These allow rapid deployment of multiple Connector Appliances within your environment. The offerings can be found by searching for “Citrix Connector Appliance” in each marketplace or at the links above. You can find more information about deploying from each marketplace in our product documentation.

What’s Next?

In recent months, we’ve been focused on expanding supported environments for the Connector Appliance. As we’ve covered here, this has included supporting Nutanix AHV and adding listings in cloud marketplaces; but behind the scenes, this has meant enhancing our comprehensive testing for each release to ensure continued compatibility.

This focus on choice for adoption has meant the Connector Appliance has seen increased adoption for the use cases it currently supports — including multi-Domain AD authentication, SPA, IPS, and Citrix Hypervisor Cloud. Looking ahead, we plan to continue to add more use cases relating to DaaS and NetScaler to the Connector Appliance. Keep an eye-out for updates in the coming months!


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.