XenApp and XenDesktop Long Term Service Release

At Summit 2016, Citrix announced LTSR. LTSR stands for Long Term Service Release. With LTSR, a lot of customers can sleep better at night, and here is why.

Long Time Service Release is the release of XenApp / XenDesktop that you can choose if you need support for longer than regular releases. Citrix supports their LTSR releases for five years. The release consists of specific versions of the components of XenApp and XenDesktop.

If you look at the Citrix Product Lifecycle, you can see that XenDesktop 7.x for Windows 2012 R2 is EOL before 7.6 LTSR. This is because Citrix would like to give their customers a long-term solution. If we look back, Citrix usually EOL their releases after three years. Because of that, customers need to upgrade their XenApp / XenDesktop installation to continue getting support.

You can read more about Citrix’s Product Lifecycle here. https://www.citrix.com/support/product-lifecycle/product-matrix.html

Upgrading XenApp or XenDesktop can be very expensive for many companies. For companies, e.g. in the medical industry, upgrading an application or application delivery platform is time-consuming and expensive. So it would be a great solution for them if they could choose a platform for the next five years and an option to extend it for another five years if that is needed.

Citrix will release cumulative updates that contain fixes. No new features will be a part of these updates.

Where do I get the Long Term Service Release of XenApp and XenDesktop?

You can get the LTSR of XenApp and XenDesktop from the Citrix download site. The LTSR does not come as an ISO. Instead, you need to download each component and install them individually.

You must have Software Maintenance on your licenses to use the Long Term Release.