New XenApp 5 Feature Pack 2 from Citrix
Since Citrix bought virtualization upstart XenSource, it’s been a bit confusing keeping track of all the similarly named products. But here’s something to tax your brain a bit more, Citrix is mixing different technologies to give more choices to customers trying to get consumers and business users to tap centrally controlled applications to PCs.
XenApp 5 Feature Pack 2 is Citrix’s new product, and here are some key features: It uses the terminal services method of giving PC users access to server variants of PC applications hosted on servers, and it can also stream an application stack from data center servers down to PCs and let the applications run locally on PCs or laptops that have a live link to those servers. The coding takes place on the PCs, not on the servers, and so there’s a lot less overhead on the servers. You get the application performance that you’d expect from a local PC. Gone are the hassles of tweaking PC apps (which you sometimes have to do to make terminal services work). Citrix is taking some of the code from its XenDesktop VDI solution and its XenServer hypervisor and wrapping them into XenApp 5. (You see what I mean about confusing names?)
According to an article in The Register, Citrix’s new app also has some valuable tools to "monitor server usage and loading in real-time, and allows system administrators to create policies to manage the powering up and down of servers in a XenApp network as workloads change." Citrix has also updated XenApp with better capacity management tools so that administrators can more easily do predictive capacity planning and help them sort out where to apply XenApp workloads (terminal services, streamed apps, or VM hosted apps) on a network of servers.
There are other improvements too, to note: more powerful HDX high-definition features. For one, through MediaStream for Flash, apps hosted inside multiple application containers in XenApp can nonetheless make use of local PC processing capacity to render Flash graphics and applications, and that takes a load off servers back in the data center. Another change: HDX also now supports plug-and-play USB devices locally on PCs -in other words, an app that needs to access a USB port is now possible over the network.
IntelliCache for MAPI is also a new feature, and it helps cut down on the "protocol chatter" between Microsoft Exchange Server messaging servers and Outlook PC clients. According to Citrix, Outlook/Exchange bandwidth can be cut down by a factor of six, and can improve email response time by as much as a factor of 50.
All in all, I think Citrix’s re-powered XennApp gives its business customers a strong choice for converting to centrally controlled apps. And choice is always good, yes?
