This is huge news! Microsoft Azure has for some time now had a solid IaaS platform with suppor for most of the different Windows Server roles and features, except the most importent one RDS.
Since Microsoft until recently didn’t allow for use of RDS or other options like Citrix to run against Azure, (because of the licensing) people would have to use on-premise solutions until that was allowed / fixed
But now with the latest changes on the Volume Licensing agreement http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/about-licensing/product-licensing.aspx#tab=2 you can now bring SPLA based RDS sal usage in the cloud.
Now this brings two options for a service provider in Azure.
* Session Shared Terminal Servers
* Server VDI Workers (VM/Server Isolation)
So first of, this makes ALL of the different Citrix components supported in Azure not just XenDesktop 7, of course this restricts itself such as RemotePC cannot be used there.
And Citrix has also created two design guides for how you can setup Citric XenApp / XenDesktop in Microsoft Azure. This also requires that users enter to the citrix servers trough a Netscaler gateway on-premise.
http://bit.ly/12podxp XenDesktop 7
http://bit.ly/185lKOv XenApp 6.5
And im guessing with the next release of XenDesktop 7 (Project Merlin) will include provisioning options against Azure but until that arrives we will have to manually provision and use PowerShell. Since also Citrix and Microsoft has a strong relationship im guessing that more options on how to host Citrix in Azure will appear.