Citrix VDA version breakdown update

Table of Contents

In September this year Citrix released version 7 1909 for the Current Release (CR) branch of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (CVAD) to the world. During that time Citrix also released two new Cumulative Updates, tentatively called CU4 and CU5 for the Long Term Service Release (LTSR) 7.15.

While performance and scalability are by no means the only rationales for choosing either CR or LTSR, in this research we just wanted to focus on these two aspects to determine if CR would be still be the most obvious choice link.

Build 1909 was released roughly 9 months after version 1811.1, which was the latest version available when we released our previous research of the various Citrix VDA agents.

In our previous research, we concluded that based on those results, that CR would be the better choice in terms of performance, scalability and feature richness.

Citrix VDA Current Release (CR) versus Long Term Service Release (LTSR)

The Long Term Service Release (LTSR) program provides stability and long-term support for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops releases. CVAD LTSRs are currently available for versions 7.6 and 7.15 at the moment, but Citrix is targeting to release the next LTSR version (version 1912) this quarter. LTSR 1912 will be based on the lasted CR version, version 1909, which has served for Citrix as the base platform for the 1912 release. More information on the new 1912 LTSR can be found here.

The current LTSR version, version 7.15 was released almost two years ago, and in the meantime Citrix released 8 CRs up until the lasted 1909 CR release.

CR Version 1909 of the VDA for Windows Desktop OS brought AMD GPU hardware support and Enhanced session reliability logging capability among other things. With Enhanced session reliability logging, Citrix VDAs will now report more information to the Windows Eventlog for diagnostic purposes.

More information on version 1909 can be found in the following blogpost and in the ‘Virtual Delivery Agents (VDAs) 1909’ paragraph of the ‘whats new’ section of the Citrix Documentation website.

Based on recent poll that we conducted on Twitter where we asked if respondents preferred to deploy CR over LTSR, the results couldn’t be more evenly divided with a clean split through the middle.