Evolve your Citrix Infrastructure: Unlocking agility and efficiency with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

The infrastructure decisions you make today shape your organization's flexibility tomorrow. But for many IT leaders, the challenge isn't choosing the next technology, it's figuring out how to move forward without breaking what already works.

This is where implementing Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization as the foundation for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops makes a difference. It brings together Citrix's proven desktop delivery model with OpenShift's modern virtualization layer. The result is a unified, cloud-ready platform that supports your existing Citrix workloads while opening the door to smarter scaling, streamlined operations, and hybrid cloud optionality.

Why it matters

Citrix deployments have long been the workhorse for virtual desktops and apps. But they often sit in silos, and are managed separately and scaled manually. They're often run on potentially expensive and increasingly rigid hypervisors. OpenShift Virtualization addresses this without asking you to change how Citrix works. Instead, it offers a more efficient way to run the Citrix stack while preserving the virtual machine (VM) tools and workflows your team already knows.  

It's a shift in infrastructure strategy that respects where you are, while preparing you for what's next.

Key benefits

• Unified management:  Run your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops services alongside containers and serverless workloads on a single platform with consistent management and tooling. Your Citrix admins can keep using Studio, with a new OpenShift connection, while OpenShift handles VM provisioning, scaling, and automation behind the scenes. That means fewer tools, fewer silos, and less operational overhead.
• Scalability and performance: OpenShift's architecture supports thousands of nodes, and scales quickly to meet demand. Whether you're spinning up new Citrix VDAs or expanding infrastructure for seasonal load, adding capacity is simple. This isn't theoretical—organizations have seen measurable improvements in consolidation ratios and provisioning times.
• Efficiency and cost control: Share infrastructure between Citrix VMs and containerized workloads and increase the number of VMs on nodes to maximize hardware resources, thereby improving operational effectiveness and controlling costs. OpenShift Virtualization uses a straightforward, usage-based subscription model, with no hidden hypervisor licensing. The platform is built for lean, efficient virtualization, with no unnecessary overhead.
• Hybrid and multi-cloud readiness: OpenShift runs anywhere, on-prem, in the cloud, or both. That makes it easy to extend Citrix deployments to public cloud environments like AWS (using ROSA) or Azure (using ARO). Whether you're bursting during high demand or migrating long-term, the same tools and processes apply.
• Enterprise-grade security: OpenShift includes built-in protections like role-based access control, SELinux enforcement, secure boot, and network policies that apply to both VMs and containers. Tools like Calico provide consistent microsegmentation and firewall control, meaning your Citrix workloads get modern security coverage without custom tooling.
• Path towards modernization: OpenShift Virtualization offers a seamless path for infrastructure or application modernization, allowing you to innovate and bring products to market faster. Bring modern application development processes and tooling to your Citrix workloads at your own pace for a flexible path towards cloud-native agility.  

Architecture overview

In this setup, Citrix infrastructure components, including Delivery Controllers, StoreFront servers, and SQL databases, run as virtual machines inside an OpenShift Virtualization environment. These VMs operate within a Kubernetes-managed cluster, but they behave just like traditional VMs. Citrix admins create an OpenShift connection in Studio and publish machine catalogs backed by these VMs.

Power management (start, stop, reboot) happens through familiar Citrix policies. Meanwhile, OpenShift handles orchestration, lifecycle management, and high availability. Existing VM images, from VMware or Hyper-V, can be imported using built-in migration tools. And because the platform is managed as code, repeatable deployments and DevOps integration become easier to achieve.

This isn't about lifting and shifting Citrix into containers. It's about making your virtual desktop infrastructure scalable, efficient, and future-ready, without disrupting your current workflows.

What's next

Start running your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop workloads on OpenShift Virtualization now. Check out the documentation, download the overview and read our technical blog to explore deployment details and architectural guidance. Or watch the demo to see how Citrix and OpenShift work together in real time.

Explore the new way to run Citrix: Smarter, more flexible, and ready for wherever your infrastructure needs take you.