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More Mobile, Cloud-Friendly XenApp, XenDesktop
Citrix adds new cloud-friendly and mobility features to XenDesktop 75 and XenApp 7.5. Also new is support for AWS and CloudPlatform-powered clouds.
Citrix said it will be making some significant updates to XenDesktop and XenApp to make them more cloud-ready. The updates will be available in March.
Coming to XenDesktop will be the ability to provision application or desktop workloads to private or public clouds, in the same way those workloads are already provisioned on virtual environments. Those capabilities will be available to clouds built on Amazon Web Services or the Citrix CloudPlatform. Citrix said support for Windows Azure will be forthcoming.
Also new is a Wake-on-LAN to Remote PC Access feature that allows remote users to gain remote access to office-connected PCs, even when if those PCs are powered off or in suspended mode.
Also coming is a new Citrix Ready program, called the Citrix Ready IaaS Cloud for XenDesktop, which will be used to validate a cloud provider's infrastructure to run the new version. Participating cloud providers will have to pass a test suite to verify that XenDesktop can run natively.
Another program, called the the Citrix Ready Low-Cost Converged Infrastructure Verified program, will be used for companies who create converged solutions to validate their hardware for running XenDesktop 7.5. It's aimed at validating low-cost, system on a chip systems that are Citrix HDX-enabled. As such, this part of the program is essentially an extension of the Citrix Ready HDX Verified program.
On the XenApp side, Citrix said version 7.5 will simplify application migration by allowing the hosting of Windows versions as old as Windows XP within the same infrastructure. Those applications can be deployed on any mobile device as well, now that XenApp 7.5 will include Citrix AppDNA already built in.
And like XenDesktop 7.5, XenApp 7.5 will also support AWS and CloudPlatform (it already supports Windows Azure).
For more details on XenDesktop 7.5, go here; for XenApp 7.5, go here.
About the Author
Michael Domingo has held several positions at 1105 Media, and is currently the editor in chief of Visual Studio Magazine.