Enabling Service Continuity in Citrix Cloud

31 Jan

Ronnie Hamilton
Principal Technical Consultant, DataSolutions.

If you were one of the lucky ones that already had Service Continuity enabled, you can give yourself a gold star! It looks like your helpdesk phone may not have been hopping like so many last week, when Microsoft had a critical outage which had many knock-on effects.

One being users of Citrix Cloud not being able to authenticate to their Workspace App to gain access to their critical business apps and desktops. Although Service Continuity would have helped the majority of users, there are some instances where just having Service Continuity enabled would not. You can check out the full details here.

Which states:

Service continuity removes or minimizes dependence on the availability of components involved in the connection process. Users can launch their Citrix DaaS apps and desktops regardless of the cloud services health status.

Service continuity allows users to connect to their DaaS apps and desktops during outages, as long as the user device maintains a network connection to a resource location. Users can connect to DaaS apps and desktops during outages in Citrix Cloud components or in public and private clouds. Users can connect directly to the resource location or through the Citrix Gateway Service. Ref :// https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-workspace/optimize-cvad/service-continuity.html

Now that we know what it can help us with, today I’m going to walk you through the steps required to enable it in your Citrix Cloud environment.

Step 1

Log into your cloud tenant
Select Workspace Configuration

Step 2

Select Service Continuity
You can see by default it is not enabled in our demo environment.

Step 3

To enable it, check your cloud connectors are up to spec and have at least 4vCPU and 4 GB of RAM.

When you are happy with this go ahead and enable it.
We have two cloud connectors both running with 4 vCPU and 6 GB RAM so it’s OK to enable the toggle and turn on Service Continuity.

Step 4

Select the toggle as Disabled.

Step 5

This will then open this screen
Select Next

Step 6

Select Enable

Step 7

Choose your lease period, I have picked 7 days to hold the lease token, but you can decrease to as little as 1 and up to a max of 30 days.

Step 8

You should also check what you have set your Workspace reauthentication policy to as well and match them. Users do not have to re auth every 14 days and you change this to 7.
Users will notice they do not have to re auth to Workspace more often.
This can be checked by:
- Select Workspace Configuration
- Select Customise.
- Select Preferences.

Step 9

Check Current Reauthentication Period
This is set to 7 days so users should not see any difference in the reauthentication period.

Step 10

Enter number of days required, 7 in this case
Select Save

Step 11

When you now look at Service Continuity, you see it’s enabled and next time users authenticate via workspace it will give some level of protection when certain service outages occur.
Please ensure you check the documentation for the different scenarios that you will be protected from: https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-workspace/optimize-cvad/service-continuity.html

Step 12

When a user connects to Workspace App and there is an issue, there will be a message displayed at the top of the Workspace app.
Depending on the outage, some apps will be available, and some might not.
You can see that Chrome & Outlook are still available but Workday and Concur are not.