Last year I wrote a blog on how to find out which Linux distributions are supported by VMware/Citrix, at the time I struggled to find some of the Citrix info as there wasn’t a master list in their documentation. With the recent 7.12 XenDesktop release though this changed and there’s now a nice clear list in the System Requirement Documentation (at the time of writing for 7.12), this reads:
- SUSE Linux Enterprise:
- Desktop 12 Service Pack 1
- Server 11 Service Pack 4
- Server 12 Service Pack 1
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- Workstation 6.8
- Workstation 7.2
- Server 6.8
- Server 7.2
- CentOS Linux
- CentOS 6.8
- CentOS 7.2
- Ubuntu Linux
- Ubuntu Desktop 16.04
- Ubuntu Server 16.04
It’s great to see the addition in 7.12 of support for Citrix users for the Ubuntu OS. It is important you use a supported _version_ to ensure support. There’s a really good overview of this addition and other details of the latest Linux VDA from the Citrix Product Manager for the product, Vipin Borkar, on the Citrix blog – worth a read, here.
VMware Linux VDA Support
For VMware there is similar documentation linked to from their Linux VDA home page in the “Horizon 7 for Linux FAQ”.
- Which flavors of Linux are supported in the first release of Horizon 7 for Linux?
- Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.6 and 7.1, CentOS 6.6, and NeoKylin 6 Update 1 (Chinese), SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 SP3 are supported with Horizon 7 for Linux.
NVIDIA GRID Support
NVIDIA GRID vGPU technologies also support some Linux OS versions and distributions. These are a subset of those supported by VMware and Citrix so you need to also check that as well as using a supported OS for the Linux VDA in use that you also use a version supported by the vGPU technologies. The OS versions and genres supported for each hypervisor are listed in release notes for the driver for each hypervisor, these are available in the driver download but have been added to NVIDIA’s knowledge base for certain releases, e.g.
If you are mixing vendors for VDI and hypervisor, e.g. Citrix XenDesktop on VMware ESXi you will also want to double check the hypervisor and Linux VDA support matrices overlap.
XenServer Support for Linux Guest OSs
This is documented in the “Citrix XenServer® Virtual Machine User’s Guide” for the relevant version of XenServer e.g. for 7.0, here: http://docs.citrix.com/content/dam/docs/en-us/xenserver/xenserver-7-0/downloads/xenserver-7-0-vm-users-guide.pdf
ESXi/vSphere Support for Linux Guest OSs
Supported Linux OSs are listed in the “VMware Compatibility Guide”: https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software
Virtually Visual 
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