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The new XenDesktop 5.5 adds the “Personal vDisk” technology acquired earlier this month from RingCube.

What’s New

• Virtual Desktops Made Personal – XenDesktop 5.5 gives IT the ability to deliver personal VDI desktops through the innovative “Personal vDisk” technology acquired recently from RingCube. This technology is now available at no charge as an early access capability in all editions of XenDesktop 5.5, making it easy for customers to gain hands-on experience and begin pilot deployments. This new feature will enable broader enterprise-wide deployment of virtual desktops by storing a single copy of Windows centrally, and combining it with a personal vDisk for each employee’s personal apps, data and settings, enhancing user personalization and reducing storage costs. (See blog for additional details)
• Raising the Bar on High-Definition User Experience – With more than 150 new features, XenDesktop 5.5 represents the most significant enhancement ever to HDX user experience technology. Central to the release is the ability to deliver virtual desktops over the WAN to mobile workers and branch office employees up to three times faster, at a fraction of the cost. Key enhancements include six times faster printing and scanning, two times faster app launch, and flexible new Quality of Service controls to ensure superior user experience in all network conditions. The new release also features significant multimedia, voice and video enhancements, including new Flash redirection technology that delivers stunning video and audio experience over the WAN at less than half the cost. (See blog for additional details)
• Support for More than One Billion Devices – Combined with the Citrix Receiver™ universal software client, XenDesktop 5.5 extends the company’s already significant lead in delivering apps and desktops to the widest possible range of end user devices. Using XenDesktop 5.5, customers can deliver self-service apps and desktops to more than one billion devices, including PCs, Macs, tablets, smartphones and thin clients – and all major device operating platforms, including new environments like Apple iOS, Google Android and Google ChromeOS. (See blog for additional details)
• Unparalleled Native User Experience on Tablets and Smartphones – Unlike competing products that offer only basic support for non-PC devices, XenDesktop 5.5 enables a rich, native experience on each unique device, including support for gestures and multi-touch features. This experience is also customized based on the type of device. Smartphone users, for example, tend to be document-centric. Instead of opening a full Windows desktop, they generally prefer to interact with individual files. Tablet users, by contrast, tend to be app-centric, preferring to launch individual applications, rather than navigating a full Windows desktop. In all cases, XenDesktop 5.5 enables a rich, native experience on each unique device, allowing users to access corporate apps and data in whatever way is most convenient and natural. No other desktop virtualization product in the industry comes close. (See blog with additional details)
• Millions More Laptops Supported with XenClient 2 – XenDesktop 5.5 also includes Citrix XenClient™ 2 as a standard feature (see XenClient tech preview announcement). XenClient extends the value of XenDesktop to millions of laptop users, enabling customers to manage desktops centrally, but execute them locally on client hypervisors rather than run directly on each laptop – even when disconnected from the network. The XenClient 2 technology includes a host of new enhancements that significantly expand hardware compatibility, deliver a simple user experience and enable larger more complex production deployments. (See blog for additional details)
• Faster App Delivery with XenApp 6.5 – XenDesktop 5.5 includes the new Citrix XenApp™ 6.5 as an integrated feature. XenApp 6.5 delivers applications with the same high-definition experience as desktops delivered via XenDesktop. In addition, end-users benefit from the new Instant App Access feature that reduces application launch times by 50 percent. Customers can also manage applications delivered by XenApp alongside virtual desktops from within the XenDesktop Desktop Director console. (See blog for additional details)
• Enhanced Support for Microsoft Technologies – XenDesktop 5.5 includes support for Microsoft RemoteFX, a key capability of Microsoft Hyper-V. XenDesktop with HDX and RemoteFX delivers a great user experience for rich content, including Aero-based Windows 7 desktops, whether executing on the server or the client device. Support for Microsoft management technologies, such as App-V and System Center enables IT to virtualize applications and manage their desktop infrastructure, including physical and virtual desktops and applications, from a single view.

Citrix has released a new firmware for Netscaler appliances, this firmware can be used for both the physical and virtual appliances.

This firmware can be downloaded from: http://www.citrix.com/English/SS/downloads/results.asp?productId=21679

Regards,

Timco

Gisteren was ik te gast bij NGN (http://www.ngn.nl/). Ik ben geïnterviewd door Martijn Bellaard (http://twitter.com/MBandCO), we hebben gesproken over remote access producten van Citrix.

I just want to through something out there : Should your virtualized XenApp Servers be high available ? This can trigger some interesting discussions I think. First I want to take you back to the years before XenApp servers were virtualized. In a traditional SBC server farm you had multiple XenApp servers installed on physical hardware, you made sure your servers were the same. In this scenario you could lose one or more XenApp servers, but your users only had to logon again to be connected to a new ICA session.

Back to present day, now your XenApp servers are virtual machines hosted on for example XenServer, for the best practices on how to configure your virtual XenApp server please check Project VRC . But why should you buy the Workload Balancing feature for XenServer. When a Xenserver host fails, your users have to logon again to get a new session, as they are used back in the day.

So I’m not saying you should make your virtual XenApp servers high available but, you should take to pro’s and con’s in consideration when you make your design for your virtual XenApp server farm.

Please feel to comment on this subject

Regards,

Timco 

Citrix has released its VPX version of Access Gateway 4.6, check out the video below

Regards,

Timco

Citrix announced the release of NetScaler 9.2. It’s available for download on MyCitrix.com for all customers with a valid maintenance agreement. You’ll definitely want to check out all the cool new features that make NetScaler 9.2 the most cloud-ready application network platform for virtual datacenters. NetScaler 9.2 transforms infrastructure into a shared service, delivering cloud-scale performance and unmatched entity scaling for consolidation, supports easy management of app infrastructure, accelerates Web 2.0 and multimedia in the cloud and brings enterprise SLAs and security to the cloud. With over 75 new features, NetScaler 9.2 transforms the economics of app delivery and makes virtual datacenters a reality for both enterprises and service providers. Key new capabilities in NetScaler 9.2 include:

Deliver Cloud Economics and Scale

NetScaler provides unmatched performance, scalability, consolidation and flexibility. New NetScaler MPX solutions deliver the industry’s first 50 Gbps appliance in an energy and space efficient 2U form factor and introduce unparalleled elasticity into the physical network with “Pay-as-You-Grow” – allowing customers to scale from 20 Gbps, 35Gbps and 50Gbps on the same physical appliance without the need for expensive forklift upgrades.

In addition, to support the rapid global adoption of IPv6 while simultaneously becoming the consolidation backbone for very large Service Providers, IPv6 performance and NetScaler’s capacity to support cloud-scale configurations has increased dramatically with NetScaler 9.2. IPv6 performance increases by 50% while IPv6-IPv6 HTTP requests per second increase by 4X, enabling organizations to standardize on IPv6 for better scale, quality and performance. NetScaler’s capacity to support thousands of tenants and their associated configuration services, entities and applications has increased by 2X-7X driving network consolidation and economies of scale and simplifying management.

Drive Next Generation Multi-Tenancy

Shared services is a key attribute of a virtualized datacenter. New Network Aware Policies and Policy-Based Routing features enable an application aware multi-tenant network by segmenting traffic by vLAN or other L2-L4 parameters. Additionally, new NetScaler AppExpert Template and Visualizer features simplify management, migration, monitoring and synchronization of application delivery policies. Specifically, templates from existing configurations can be created for easy import/export into test and dev environments by abstracting management complexity and allowing creation of environment specific configurations.

AppExpert Network Visualizer provides a completely new way to look at how NetScaler is connected to your network. This is a graphical and fully interactive view of your network. You can configure network components like interfaces and vLANs by clicking on them directly from the configuration map. It’s also possible to add channels, view properties of configured network-related entities, and pull down statistics and counters for a particular interface or vLAN.

Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB), by it’s nature, has several layers of configuration in the feature. Once you start adding a few sites and remote services, the configuration can start to become a little involved. The GSLB Visualiser is the perfect way to graphically represent your GSLB configuration. It will organize it intelligently by the domain names you are running on GSLB, and show you exactly which systems are up / down, and allow you to get statistics on each entity.

Bring Enterprise SLAs and Security to the Virtual Datacenter

New Active-Active capabilities provide greater high-availability and network utilization to ensure enterprise SLAs are met. In addition, new web services and XML security capabilities protect applications from attacks and help enterprises comply with security regulations. These include: cross-site request forgery protection, XML attachment checks, entity expansion attack protection, SOAP fault filtering, WSDL scanning protection and XPath injection protection.

To support the transition of various application workloads to off-premise cloud deployments while providing a seamless user experience, NetScaler 9.2 has various enhancements to its Global Load Balancing suite of features including spillover of user traffic which is a critical element to drive Cloud Burst scenarios.

Optimize delivery of Video, Web 2.0 and Multimedia

NetScaler 9.2 introduces 64-bit shared-memory caching.  High-end NetScaler MPX platforms can provide up to 24GB of memory cache capacity, to cache large video files at the service provider edge, or to offload back end servers. Delivery of Web 2.0 applications are optimized with new Fast XML XPath support, which provides deep XML payload inspection and enables high-performance business logic routing