If you’ve been paying attention to Twitter lately, you’ve probably noticed that there have been a lot of new announcements and releases from Citrix over the past 7 days. So many in fact it can be difficult to keep straight exactly what is going on. I’m going to try to clear up some of the murk and hopefully help you understand how these announcements are going to impact your plans for the near future. I’ll try to detail each of the announcements and product updates and what’s new with them.
XenDesktop 7: This is Citrix’s flagship VDI product, which competes head to head with VMware’s Horizon View. Hopefully most Citrix customers are also aware that most of the license editions for XenDesktop also include rights to Citrix XenApp (also knows as Presentation Server or MetaFrame). Despite the bundling, XenApp and XenDesktop have always been two distict products with separate infrastructures and management frameworks. XenDesktop 7 changes all that. With the v7 release XenDesktop now fully encompasses all the functionality for application and desktop publishing from both server OS (XenApp/RDS – aka Hosted Shared) as well as desktop OS (XenDestkop/VDI – aka Hosted). This means that from a single console you can configure desktops and apps published from Windows XP, 7, 8, Server 2008R2 and Server 2012. Yes, I said desktops and apps! Actually XenDesktop has had the ability to do “VM Hosted Apps” for a while but it was infrequently used; that capability is now core functionality and delivers the “seamless” published apps from both destkop and server environments.
Did I mention this is all in a single console? Well, actually there are two consoles – the management/configuration interface which is now named “Studio” and a helpdesk and monitoring interface named “Director”. XenDesktop admins will be familiar with both of these. By the way, Director now has the ability to mine Edgesight data to provide historical information about users, apps, sessions, and hosts.
With the merger there is now a 4th edition of XenDesktop – now giving us Platinum, Enterprise, VDI, and Apps. The Apps edition will map to the functionality which was previously provided by XenApp.
XenDesktop 7 also brings a host of new features and functionality including the H.264 supercodec, reverse seamless applications, and App DNA integration. RemotePC is now configured from within the Studio console. One of the more interesting capabilities is that you can now use MCS to manage your published app server farms which will greatly simplify single image management for smaller environments. Check out this blog for more details and a link to the Citrix TV session detailing the new features.
XenDesktop 7 brings with it a host of other updates:
- StoreFront 1.2 -> StoreFront 2.0
- Web Interface 5.4 -> StoreFront 2.0 (StoreFront is now required)
- Provisioning Services 6.1 -> Provisioning Services 7.0
- XenServer 6.1 -> XenServer 6.2
- Receiver 3.4 -> 4.0 (and new receivers for iOS, Android, and OSX too)
It’s a pretty safe bet that if you use XenDesktop or XenApp you’ve got some new code in your future.
XenApp 6.5 Feature Pack 2: Much less hubbub about 6.5 FP2, but very noteworthy that in this same timeframe Citirx has chosen to issue an update to the existing XenApp product which offers many of the end-user benefits associated with XenDesktop 7. This appears to be a recognition on Citrix’s part that customers probably will not migrate off of XenApp 6.5 in any great hurry, and this update removes much of the need. XenApp 6.5 was originally released in August of 2011 and is widely deployed. Details of the new features can be found here.
Cloudgateway is now XenMobile Apps: So if you’re looking for an updated App Controller, you need to look in a new place. This heralds future integration between the XenMobile MDM solution and Citrix’s Web/SaaS/Mobile Application management. We also saw a new release of XenMobile MDM 8.5 on June 28.
ShareFile Storage Center and Connectors are now Storage Controller 2.0: This brings the integration of the on-prem storage options for ShareFile all into one product, reducing the number of servers needed to connect to local storage zones, CIFS shares, and SharePoint. It also provides read/write access to SharePoint sites!
XenServer 6.2: The latest release of Citrix’s XenServer hypervisor is more incremetnal and has not received much fanfare, with the largest announcement being that the product is now fully open source. More details on the future strategy and new features can be found here.
NetScaler 10.1: It seems like this release has been kept fairly quiet, however the new HDX Insight reporting feature will offer great value to shops using NetScaler for its Access Gateway Enterprise Edition features. Want to know how much data user sessions are moving? Look no further!
VDI in a Box: Even VDI in a Box got an update, now at version 5.3. ViaB gets updates to support better 3D graphics. newer hypervisors, the H.264 supercodec, Windows 8 and Personal vDisk. More info can be found here.
So June has been a huge month for Citirx with updates across nearly the entire product portfolio. If you have or use Citrix products these changes will affect you. If you need help or just want more information reach out to your Lewan Account Executive. We’re here to help.
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