July 18, 2024

What’s Going On?

Citrix’s Long-Term Service Release (LTSR) versions have a defined support lifecycle of five (5) years from their release date. CVAD 1912 LTSR’s end-of-life date is December 18th, 2024.

Source: Citrix.com | Date of Retrieval: Jul 18, 2024

Details on Citrix’s lifecycle support milestones can be found below, with details available here.

What Should Customers Do?

Customers have five (5) months from the time of this advisory to upgrade their Citrix platform(s) to a supported release that will continue to receive security and stability fixes as well as support eligibility. Depending on the size of their environment, this may be ample or insufficient time. Customers should undertake necessary environment and dependency review, upgrade planning, design, deployment, pilot, and migration activities as soon as time and financial budgeting permits. Customers may have the option to purchase extended support for CVAD 1912 LTSR, typically sold in 6-month support increments. Still, approval to purchase this add-on is not guaranteed by Citrix and is evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Customers with active support/subscription entitlements have two LTSR upgrade targets to consider:

CVAD 2203 Long-term Service Release (LTSR) – Current EOL of March 23, 2027 per Product Lifecycle Matrix
CVAD 2402 Long-term Service Release (LTSR*) – Current EOL of April 15, 2029 per Product Lifecycle Matrix

*2402 LTSR is also the most Current Release (CR), although an actual CR build is likely to be released later in 2024. Update August 1: The new CR release is 2407, released July 31st 2024.

Although various factors (software support, etc.) may influence the recommended target version to transition to, for most customers, CVAD 2402 LTSR would be the most appropriate target as the system requirements are quite similar to 2203 LTSR.

Are There Migration Considerations?

There are numerous considerations customers should take under consideration when planning and initiating a transition from CVAD 1912 LTSR to either CVAD 2203 LTSR, CVAD 2402 LTSR, or a CR version of Citrix. Customers running Citrix DaaS with 1912 Virtual Delivery Agents (VDAs) and/or optional on-premises components such Citrix StoreFront may also need to consider some of these considerations.

The guidance below will focus on LTSR versions vs. CR versions, as customers on CVAD 1912 LTSR are likely to prefer remaining with an LTSR track.

Operating System Support

1912 LTSR is the last release to support Windows Server 2012 R2 for infrastructure components and VDAs
Both CVAD 2203 LTSR and CVAD 2402 LTSR support Windows Server 2016 through 2022, as well as Windows 10 (64-bit only) and 11
Customers using Windows Server 2012 LTSR in their Citrix platforms will need to transition to a new OS as part of their transition to a newer Citrix release. Note that in-place OS upgrades are not recommended, and some components, such as StoreFront, explicitly do not support them

SQL Support

Note that while some versions may be supported, some older versions for some products have been depreciated.

Both CVAD 2203 and 2402 LTSRs support SQL Server 2016 through SQL Server 2022 (see specific SP or CU details here)
Citrix Provisioning (PVS) 2402 LTSR supports SQL Server 2017 through SQL Server 2022 (see specific SP or CU details here) as well as Azure SQL Managed Instances and Azure SQL Database
Citrix Provisioning (PVS) 2203 LTSR supports SQL Server 2012 through SQL Server 2022 (see specific SP or CU details here) as well as Azure SQL Managed Instances and Azure SQL Database
Citrix Session Recording 2402 LTSR support SQL Server 2016 SP2 through SQL Server 2022 as well as Azure SQL Managed Instances, Azure SQL Database, and AWS RDS SQL Server
Citrix Session Recording 2203 LTSR support SQL Server 2008 SP3 through SQL Server 2022 (see specific SP details here) as well as Azure SQL Managed Instances and AWS RDS SQL Server
CVAD and PVS 1912 LTSR support up to SQL Server 2019 officially, which may affect SQL Server planning if upgrading an existing deployment

Feature or Component Support Removal

For the full list of feature and component removals and depreciations, please refer to this article.

Below are a couple of notable removals above and beyond SQL and OS that may affect more customers in general.

Self-Service Password Reset (SSPR) feature (not to be confused with the SSPR feature on NetScaler)
.NET Framework versions below 4.8 on Citrix infrastructure components and VDAs requiring an upgrade to .NET 4.8 for any components where in-place upgrades are occurring

Both CVAD 2203 LTSR and CVAD 2402 LTSR introduced many new features and capabilities upon their respective releases. Customers migrating from 1912 LTSR will benefit from numerous improvements, even if the core functions of their platform remain unchanged. Earlier this year, Ferroque and Citrix presented a “What’s New” webinar for CVAD 2402 LTSR and discussed migration options. This video is a great place to start for those who have not had a chance to delve into the latest LTSR release. Supplemental links are also included below for further research and planning.