As many of you may know this week Citrix Summit and Synergy are held in Anaheim, USA. I couldn’t schedule it in as I was planning to go to Barcelona and we all know what happened to that plan.

After trying to follow the announcements made during Citrix Summit and Synergy in Anaheim remotely I thought it would be a good idea to sum them up in a blog post:

XenDesktop

• XenDesktop 7 is the new name for what once was Project Excalibur.
• XenDesktop 7 App Edition (RDS/VMHA only).
• Citrix Streaming profiler is no longer available in XenDesktop 7
• AppDNA, HDX Edgesight and HDX LocalApp are now included in XenDesktop Platinum (automated app publishing).
• The introduction of EdgeSight Performance Manager/Network Inspector in Citrix Director (included in Platinum, 365 days of data)
• Edgesight Performance Management is included in VDI/Advanced/Enterprise for XA/XD (8 days of data)
• NVIDIA GRID vGPU integrated into Citrix XenDesktop 7

HDX

• HDX Mobile (Touch&Sense bringing multitouch gestures).
• HDX LocalApp (Reverse seamless is available in XenDesktop 7).
• HDX 3D Pro with OpenGL.

Networking

• NetScaler 10.1 is released.
• OPSWAT integration (Q3)
• SmartAccess when using Platinum: EPA, Adaptive SmartAcess, Full SSL VPN and Enterprise MAM/MDM Ready.
• Branchrepeater renamed to CloudBridge and the VPX is delivered with XD Platinum.

StoreFront

• StoreFront 2.0 (Unified AppStore).
• Client-less Receiver (HTML5).

XenApp

• XenApp 6.5 FP2 (OpenGL, Unified App Store, Lync 2013, Hyper-V 3,0 and performance improvements).
• Automated App Migration (Application migration, portfolio analysis and remediation.

ShareFile

• StorageZone Connectors for SharePoint and CIFS
• ShareFile available on Azure
• No longer RO only with StorageZone Connectors, we can edit docs from ShareFile!

Other announcements:

• XenPlayer/MacPlayer.
• Next gen XenMobile.
• WorxMail and WorxWeb (with enhanced MDX tech).
• XenMobile: App/MDM and Enterprise Edition. App edition can be installed next to 3th party tools.
• Worx App SDK: worx-enable any mobile app with a oneliner.

With these releases Citrix proves to listen to their users/partners as Jarian Gibson wrote a blogpost titled Does Citrix Need to Revamp the Licensing for XenApp and XenDesktop? because the licensing model is revamped and the platinum license gives an added value again.

Although the NetScaler 10.1 code does have some enhancements for the mobility part we didn’t hear a lot about mobility in the first couple of days of Summit. A topic that was discussed a lot during Summit/Synergy Barcelona last year. From the article Alexander Ervik wrote:

NetScaler release 10.1 has a rich set of features to match these transformations in the data center in three key areas:

• Superior Mobile application experience
• Cloud Like Service in the Enterprise Data Center
• Deep visibility for Web Apps and Virtual Desktops

So we can see there are enhancements for the mobility part of Citrix’ mobility strategy but it’s still far from what I expected. The keynote is basically a description of the mobilification of XenDesktop so focus is on applications but it can be a desktop as well. We should no longer be having conversations on HPCI and HSCI but on functionality based on what kind of device is being used to access the subscribed services.

With XenDesktop 7 the automation part is nearly done, the development of Avalon (Merlin) will bring orchestration for elastic deployments, self servicing and seamless workload migrations (between XA6.5 and XD7).

The best part is not the innovation on products but seeing them all integrated into a great end to end solution for cloud based service delivery (apps/data and desktops).

It could be possible I missed one or two announcements but they’re all listed over here: http://blogs.citrix.com/

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Kees Baggerman

Kees Baggerman is a Staff Solutions Architect for End User Computing at Nutanix. Kees has driven numerous Microsoft and Citrix, and RES infrastructures functional/technical designs, migrations, implementations engagements over the years.

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