Having implemented Citrix DaaS back before Rendezvous was available, I’d been using TCP and 2 Cloud Connectors with not a lot of problems. That is until some issues with the onprem virtual environment took one of the cloud connectors down, and I learned the hard way that there is no automatic failover between them. User sessions are proxied through them and are disconnected if one goes down. Sure the user can reconnect, but this isn’t ideal.
Rendezvous v2 allows VDAs to register directly with the Gateway Service so that connections do not have to be maintained by a Cloud Connector. The Cloud Connectors are still needed for AD joined or Azure Hybrid joined VDAs to register with the Citrix Control Plane and broker the initial connection, as well as to connect to the hosting environment, but you remove the need for them to maintain the user sessions.
I had heard of Rendezvous but I usually stay away from brand new features for production. When v2 came out I figured it was probably pretty stable, but for some reason I thought it would be complicated to implement. It’s really not.
So, How To Implement Rendezvous v2?
- Your VDA must be 2203 or above.
- You’ll need to apply a Citrix Policy to your VDAs that does the following, you can either apply it to a test delivery group if you have one, or use a tag to apply it to individual test machines:
- Enables HDX Adaptive Transport (EDT) Preferred
- Enables the Rendezvous Protocol
- If you have VDAs running version 2308 or older you’ll need the following registry setting on them, set to 1 to enable V2
How Do You Know IT’s Working?
A quick way to know if you’ve got this working is to check in Monitor. You can go to the Details of the User Session that is logged into the machine you’ve configured for Rendezvous v2 and you should see the highlighted:
If you have a more complicated environment you may need to check Firewall and proxy settings in this article: https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-daas/hdx-transport/rendezvous-protocol/rendezvous-v2.html