I have been struggling with a problem lately in my venture to the cloud. When trying to run Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops or Windows Virtual Desktop, even when I’m not actively using my Windows 10 desktops, servers or applications, my Azure credits keep trickling away each month. In my very first Azure experience, I was running a small-scale App-V lab for the fun of it. I learned quickly as others have talked about that you need to power manage your VMs. If you accidently leave your VMs powered on when not using them, you will quickly incur the costs of that mistake. In recent years, some vendors and community rockstars have helped with this problem by creating products that help smartly manage VMs based on work schedules and/or resource demands. Nevertheless, as I obsessively ensure my VMs are powered down the same way I make sure my front door is locked 3 times before going to bed each night, my credits still get chewed away even with the VMs off!
Recently, I discovered Cycloud which my first impression was to dismiss the product as another VM power management solution but it turns out I was wrong, they take a very different approach. They do not just power off your VMs on a schedule or when resource demand wains. They actually deprovision the VM entirely ensuring the VMs are not even in your resource groups anymore, there’s no storage being taken up and no footprint for the VMs meaning you aren’t getting charged for them even when powered off anymore.
The product also can provision and deprovision VMs on a schedule that suits your worker’s hours or on-demand as consumption grows. If resource utilization such as disk queuing, CPU or memory utilization passes a set threshold the product can provision a new VM to help handle the increased demand. You can also optionally send a message to your users letting them know you detected high resource consumption and that if they are experiencing slowness or problems they can just log out and re-launch to get to the new desktop. If you are a Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop customer running in it Azure, this provisioning and deprovisioning differs from MCS. Cycloud uses the Scaling Sets feature within Azure which provides much appreciated elasticity for your VDAs.
Importantly, Cycloud is flexible enough to allow you to configure VDAs for different zones to ensure you can effectively manage VMs for users across all of your regions ensuring the best end user experience for them based on their locality too.
In conclusion, Cycloud helps you save a lot of money by reducing Azure consumption costs by deprovisioning VMs rather than just shutting them down. It also ensure you only scale up when and as needed and that VMs deprovision as the demand drops off. This is not a sponsored post, I am not getting paid to write it. Like I said at the top of this post, this is a challenge I have had to deal with it and I figure many of you have to. It’s good to be aware of solutions out there. After speaking with Cycloud, it sounds like they will be expanding their support for other public clouds and platforms in the future, as well as adding new features.
