What's New in the Citrix World!

• HDX enhancements

• Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 support — Deliver a high-definition user experience on Windows 8 virtual desktops and physical machines. HDX 3D Pro has also been upgraded to support Windows 8.
• Desktop Composition Redirection — Extend the Aero Redirection feature introduced in XenDesktop 5.5 to provide users with a more fluid Windows 7 Aero or Windows 8 desktop experience by leveraging the graphics processing unit (GPU) or integrated graphics processor (IGP) on supported Windows user devices for local DirectX graphics rendering. This feature delivers rich multimedia applications to user devices, while maintaining high scalability on the server.
• Windows Media client-side content fetching — Enable a user device to stream multimedia files directly from the source provider on the Internet or Intranet to improve network utilization and server scalability.
• Multicast support — Reduce bandwidth consumption when streaming live video to branch offices. Multicast support enables a single Windows Media source transmission to support multiple users.
• Real-time multimedia transcoding — Enable audio and video streaming to mobile devices, improving the way that Windows Media content is delivered. Host-based transcoding provides a seamless user experience, even in extreme network conditions. To improve server scalability, if the Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) has a supported graphics processing unit (GPU) for hardware acceleration, transcoding is done in the GPU.
• User Datagram Protocol (UDP) audio for Server OS machines — Extend support for audio delivery over UDP/RTP to Server OS machines. This feature delivers superior audio quality for real-time applications like video conferencing and streaming media, even in environments when there is packet loss or congestion.
• Webcam video compression — Reduce bandwidth consumption to improve performance when using supported video conferencing applications.
• HDX 3D Pro — Deliver applications with graphics processing units (GPUs) for hardware acceleration to the desktop. This includes 3D professional graphics applications based on OpenGL and DirectX.
• Server-rendered Rich Graphics and Video — Deliver rich graphics (including Windows 8 or Windows Aero) to virtual desktop users on any client, platform, and bandwidth condition by rendering the content on the server. When users have the latest Citrix Receiver, they will also notice improved performance for server-rendered video.
• Improved Flash Redirection — Determine when to redirect Adobe Flash content to the user device for local rendering based on the user's network type and environment. Flash Redirection helps reduce server and network load, resulting in greater scalability while ensuring a high-definition user experience.
• New installer — Use a single, streamlined installer to guide you through installing the core components (Delivery Controller, Studio, Director, StoreFront, and License Server) and VDAs.
• Profile management — By default, Citrix Profile management 5.0 is installed silently on master images when you install the Virtual Delivery Agent, but you do not have to use Profile management as a profile solution.
• Configuration Logging — Capture Site configuration changes and administrative activities to a Configuration Logging Database. You can view the log in Studio using a variety of filters and generate HTML and CSV reports.
• Desktop Director — Monitor and troubleshoot deployments using Director's redesigned user interface with integrated EdgeSight features:
• A new help desk view offers an improved troubleshooting experience for help desk administrators, allowing user, machine, and application issues to be resolved quickly.
• Full administrators have access to other views, including a newly designed Dashboard to provide a graphical summary of your deployment in a central location, and a Trends page to provide improved, in-depth, graphical monitoring and troubleshooting of the entire deployment with various time ranges.
• EdgeSight performance management provides the historical retention and trend reporting. With historical retention of data versus the real-time assessment, administrators are able to create Trend reports, including capacity and health trending.
• EdgeSight network analysis leverages HDX Insight to provide an application and desktop contextual view of the network. With this feature, Director provides advanced analytics of ICA traffic in their XenDesktop deployment.
• Delegated Administration — Group objects into administrative scopes. This feature provides an enterprise-class administration model with role-based access control, custom roles with configurable permissions, and fine-grained, object-based control.
• StoreFront replaces Web Interface — Create centralized enterprise stores to deliver desktops, applications, and other resources to users on any device. This feature provides authentication and resource delivery services for Citrix Receiver.
• Delivery Controller auto-update — Automatically notify Virtual Delivery Agents (VDAs) when Controllers are added to and removed from the Site. This feature helps prevent VDA rejection of sessions that are launched by unknown Controllers, and VDA startup delays or errors caused by invalid Controller information. For information about how to preserve the CNAME functionality, see CTX137960.
• Client Folder Redirection — Change the way client-side files are accessible on the host-side session. When you enable only client drive mapping on the server, client-side full volumes are automatically mapped to host drive letters. When you enable client folder redirection on the server and then the user configures it on the user device, only the portion of the local volume that is specified by the user is redirected.
• Improved Virtual Desktop Access Control Settings – Control user access to both Server OS Machines and Desktop OS Machines in a simple and unified way with a new, streamlined group of security settings.
• Improved and integrated error reporting — Studio error reporting links directly to the Citrix Support website. When users encounter an error situation, choosing the Get Advice option submits information about the error to the Citrix website. The information is analyzed and the user is redirected to a Website containing remedial advice.
• IPv6 support — Connect to clients and core components on IPv4, IPv6, or dual-stack (IPv4/IPv6) environments.
• Personal vDisk — Personalize your virtual desktops. In addition, a dedicated storage disk is created, before logon, so that users can store their data on the desktop, including any applications they install.
• Machine Creation Services (MCS) support for Microsoft Key Management System (KMS) activation — Each virtual machine (VM) created with MCS provides a unique activation for the Windows operating system and Office 2010, which enables the KMS system to record each VM as a separate machine.
• Support for group policies configured in Citrix Mobility Pack — These policies for Citrix Receiver for mobile devices include Start menu redirection and removing common programs from the Start menu. For details, see Configure policies for mobility features.
• Multi-touch support — Touch functionality is supported on multi-touch computers, including Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows 8 workstations and Windows Server 2012 for VDAs.
• Remote PC Access — Automated administration of Remote PC Access is fully integrated into the core functionality of the XenDesktop Delivery Controller and Studio. One Remote PC machine catalog and one Remote PC Delivery Group are created automatically when you set up a Remote PC deployment; you can add more machine catalogs or Delivery Groups later using Studio. This process replaces the XML configuration file and PowerShell scripts used by Remote PC Access in XenDesktop 5.6 FP1. The current release also adds the ability to remotely access office PCs running Windows 8.
• Support for Fast User Switching using RDP connections — This Microsoft Windows feature makes it possible for multiple users to share a desktop without closing programs or logging off existing users. Administrators can take advantage of this feature to troubleshoot problems and install updates, without interrupting tasks or programs in use by the logged on user, by initiating an RDP connection to the VDA.
• Compatibility with AhnLab keyboard encryption used in Korea — This release is compatible with keyboard encryption that is installed on Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) hosts.

• http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/05/22/excalibur-is-xendesktop-7-what-does-this-mean-for-xenapp-and-xendesktop-customers/
• http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/05/22/xendesktop-7-brings-windows-apps-and-desktops-to-a-mobile-world/
• http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/05/22/monitoring-of-xendesktop-7-with-director-and-edgesight/
• http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/05/22/remote-desktop-mobility-with-remote-pc-access-in-xendesktop-7/
• http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/05/29/hdx-leaps-ahead-in-xendesktop-7/
• http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/06/04/xendesktop-7-director-and-edgesight-explained/
• http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/06/07/xendesktop-7-investing-big-to-make-application-delivery-easier/
• http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/06/21/xendesktop-7-upgrade-migration-paths-for-xendesktop-and-xenapp-customers/
• http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/06/24/follow-up-is-upgrade-for-everyone/
• http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/06/25/xendesktop-delegated-administration-automated-security-testing/

• Separate database no longer required - The requirement for a separate database has been removed. Users' application subscription data are stored locally and automatically replicated between StoreFront servers.
• High availability and multi-site configuration - To enable load balancing and failover between the deployments providing the desktops and applications, you can define groupings and hierarchies, including specific backup deployments. You can restrict user access to specific resources by mapping deployments to Active Directory user groups.
• Smart card authentication - StoreFront supports smart card authentication through both Receiver for Windows and NetScaler Gateway. Smart card authentication from desktop appliances and repurposed PCs through Desktop Appliance sites and XenApp Services URLs is also supported.
• Receiver for HTML5 integration - You can configure Receiver for Web sites to enable users who cannot install Citrix Receiver to access their desktops and applications directly within HTML5-compatible web browsers.
• Desktop Appliance sites - You can enable users to access their desktops from non-domain-joined desktop appliances. The web browser on the appliance is configured to access the Desktop Appliance site for a store in full-screen mode at startup.  
• Receiver for Web site shortcuts - You can embed on your websites links to desktops and applications available through Receiver for Web sites.  
• XenMobile App Controller workflow integration - Receiver for Web site users can subscribe to applications to which you are managing access with App Controller user account management.
• Receiver for Web site user change password - You can enable Receiver for Web site users to change their Active Directory domain passwords and configure notifications for users whose passwords are about to expire.
• Fast Connect support - StoreFront supports pass-through authentication with proximity cards through Fast Connect-compatible third-party products to XenApp Services URLs.
• IPv6 support - StoreFront supports communications with both servers and clients on IPv6 networks and on hybrid dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 networks.

• Licensing Simplification - As part of our commitment to ease of use, this release sees the introduction of XenServer 6.2.0 which replaces the previous XenServer Free, Advanced, Enterprise, and Platinum editions. Functionality previously available within premium versions of XenServer is now available free of charge. With this simplification we have also introduced per-socket licensing. Licenses no longer enable specific XenServer features, instead they signify that a XenServer is under a valid support contract. XenServer 6.2.0 no longer requires a license server or license file to enable features, as all features are enabled for free in unlicensed mode. Licenses are only required to receive Citrix Support and to enable the use of XenCenter for the installation of security and feature hotfixes. Hotfixes can continue to be installed on unlicensed hosts using the XE command line interface.
• Performance and Scale - Significant performance and scale improvements; given a server of sufficient capacity XenServer will scale to:

• Metric
• XenServer version 6.2.0
• VMs per host - 500
• vCPUs per host - 3250

• Reduction in the amount of traffic between a VM and the Control Domain (Dom0).
• Automatic scaling of Dom0 memory and vCPUs based on physical memory and CPU capacity on the host.
• Monitoring - The XenServer 6.1.0 Performance and Monitoring Supplemental Pack is now fully integrated and extended for XenServer 6.2.0. This provides detailed monitoring of performance metrics, including CPU, memory, disk, network, C-state/P-state information, and storage. Where appropriate, these metrics are available on a “per host” and a “per VM” basis. These metrics are available directly through the RRD interface, or can be accessed and viewed graphically in XenCenter or other third-party applications.

• It is now possible to export the performance information directly as a Comma Separated Values (.csv) formatted stream enabling the use, or easy development, of third-party tooling.

• New system alerts can be seen in XenCenter and XenDesktop Director and optionally sent by e-mail. Alerts are notifications that occur in response to selected system events, or when CPU, memory usage, network throughput, storage throughput, or VM disk activity go over a specified threshold on a managed host, VM, or storage repository. For details, refer to the Monitoring and Managing XenServer chapter in CTX137828 - XenServer 6.2.0 Administrator's Guide.

• Clone on Boot - This feature supports Machine Creation Services (MCS) which is shipped as part of XenDesktop. Clone on boot allows rapid deployment of hundreds of transient desktop images from a single source, with the images being automatically destroyed and their disk space freed on exit.
• New and Improved Guest Support:
• Microsoft Windows 8
• Microsoft Windows Server 2012
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP2 (32/64-bit)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.8, 5.9, 6.3, 6.4 (32/64-bit)
• Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) 5.8, 5.9, 6.3, 6.4 (32/64-bit)
• CentOS 5.8, 5.9, 6.3, 6.4 (32/64-bit)
• Debian Wheezy (32/64-bit)
• VSS support for Windows Server 2008R2 has been improved and reintroduced
• Other Improvements
• Improvements to logging in Dom0: logs cannot over-consume Dom0 resource, increasing host stability
• Live Storage Migration is now possible from the VM Storage tab in XenCenter
• Support for additional CPUs (AMD Piledriver, Intel Haswell-DT)
• Updated in-box device drivers
• Minor Hypervisor upgrade (Xen-4.1.5)
• Updated DM Multipath (0.4.9.56)
• Support for alert severity filtering in XenCenter
• Updated XenServer alert severity levels for consistency
• The PowerShell SDK has been redesigned for improved robustness, usability, and compliance

• New architecture - Profile management has been re-architected. A new mechanism for tracking file and folder changes replaces the Windows change journal. This simplifies the software's internal operation. As a result of this simplification, the Directory of the MFT cache file policy is also removed.
• Automatic configuration - Profile management now examines any XenDesktop environment, for example for the presence of personal vDisks, and sets defaults accordingly. Only policies in the Not Configured state are adjusted, so any customizations you have made are preserved. This feature speeds up deployment and simplifies optimization. No configuration of the feature is necessary, but you can disable automatic configuration when upgrading (to retain settings from earlier versions) or when troubleshooting. Automatic configuration does not work in XenApp or other environments.
• Integration with XenDesktop - Profile management is still available as a separate download but you can now also install it from the XenDesktop 7 media. Profile management is installed silently by default. Citrix Studio administrators can now configure Profile management settings using XenDesktop policies, and Desktop Director Administrators can now access diagnostic information for and troubleshoot user profiles.
• Improved troubleshooting - To assist troubleshooting, Profile management now processes local client administrators on desktop operating systems but ignores administrators on server operating systems. This is the default behavior so no configuration of this feature is necessary, but you can change the default using the Process logons of local administrator’s policy, if required. Also, instead of providing users with a temporary profile if a problem is encountered (for example, the user store is unavailable), a new policy lets you display an error message and automatically logs off users in this situation.
• Excluded groups - This new policy identifies profiles of Active Directory Group members, and excludes the profiles from processing by Profile management. This can be helpful in large deployments. The exclusion takes precedence over any inclusion by the Process logons of local administrator’s policy.
• Support for Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) - Compared with traditional Microsoft roaming profiles, user settings are stored differently for virtual applications created with App-V. Profile management works with App-V user settings without any need for configuration. The support does not include compatibility with App-V delivery mechanisms provided by some service providers.
• Extended synchronization - The personal vDisk feature of XenDesktop, which stores data outside the user profile, replaces extended synchronization. This Profile management feature, which also stored non-profile data by combining inclusion and exclusion lists, is no longer needed and is removed from this version. Use personal vDisk instead.

• Unified app store for desktops, apps, mobile and data
• 3D professional graphics at low cost powered by HDX 3D Pro GPU sharing
• Accelerated application P2V migration with AppDNA
• Latest Microsoft integration with Citrix Connector for Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2012
• Support for Microsoft® Lync® 2010
• Seamless local apps integration
• Mobile SDK for Windows Apps and enhanced mobility features
• The latest updates in HRP02 including optimized operations for mapped client drives

• Support for XenDesktop 7 features – Receiver supports the many enhancements provided by XenDesktop 7, including Windows Media client-side content fetching, multicast support, client folder redirection, Local App Access, and support for IPv6 connections.
• Support for StoreFront 2.0 features – Receiver supports the many enhancements provided by StoreFront 2.0, including smart card authentication and support for IPv6 connections.
• Integrated Smart card authentication – Receiver now provides integrated smart card authentication for StoreFront connections, including support for:
• Pass-through authentication (single sign-on) - Users of domain-joined devices enter their smart card credentials to log on to Receiver. They can then start virtual desktops and apps without needing to re-enter credentials.
• Bimodal authentication - Users can log on with a smart card or enter their user name and password. This enables a user to log on even if a certificate has expired or the user does not have the smart card.
• Multiple certificates - When users insert a smart card into a card reader, Receiver chooses the certificates needed and can use multiple certificates from one or more cards.
• Double hop sessions - Users can start a virtual desktop and then use Receiver on that virtual desktop to start an application from a different delivery group.
• Smart card-enabled apps - Users can digitally sign or encrypt documents in a virtual desktop or app session.
• User experience improvements –
• Receiver now displays a notification when installation of an update completes.
• When the session reliability policy is in effect, Receiver dims apps when the connection to the server is lost.
• H.264 decoding – When used XenDesktop 7, Receiver provides improved performance of rich and professional graphics apps on WAN networks.
• Support for HDX Insight – HDX Insight is the integration of EdgeSight network analysis and EdgeSight performance management with Director. With this support now in Receiver, XenDesktop administrators can check performance metrics related to the health of this component. No configuration of this feature is required.
• COM port and LPT port mapping change – In XenDesktop 7 deployments, COM port and LPT port mapping are disabled by default. Use the port redirection policies to enable mapping.

• XenDesktop 7 support - Receiver supports the many enhancements provided by XenDesktop 7 including support for IPv6 connections. No configuration of this feature is required.
• Desktop restart - Users can restart virtual desktops in Citrix StoreFront if they stall or become corrupted. You configure this feature in XenDesktop.
• H.264 decoding - HDX 3D Pro graphics from XenDesktop 7 servers can be displayed. This provides better performance of rich and professional graphics applications on WANs and in public clouds. No configuration of this feature is required.
• HDX Insight support - HDX Insight is the integration of EdgeSight network analysis and EdgeSight performance management with Director. With this support now in Receiver, XenDesktop administrators can check performance metrics related to the health of this component. No configuration of this feature is required.
• Windows shortcuts - Support for Windows logo key shortcuts is built into the Keyboard menu. This allows Mac users to send Windows shortcuts to their remote desktops and applications.
• StoreFront 2.0 support – Receiver supports the many enhancements provided by StoreFront 2.0 including support for IPv6 connections

Labels: blogs, Citrix, Citrix Receiver, EUC, Excalibur, HDX Insight, hyper-v, Microsoft, Mobility, Power, PVS, resiliency, VDI, virtual machines, Xendesktop 7