Citrix yesterday announced the availability of the tech preview of Excalibur .
Excalibur is part of project Avalon and provides one install, one architecture and one console for both Citrix’s Desktop and Application virtualization platform XenApp and Citrix’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution XenDesktop. Avalon covers the integration of several products which were developed and acquired by Citrix in the last couple of years and its intention is to create a platform to deliver desktops and applications as cloud services as announced in May during Citrix annual Synergy conference by Mark Templeton.
Besides a uniform platform for both XenApp en XenDesktop, Excalibur also provides a new FlexCast 2.0 architecture. FlexCast will provide both provisioning and personalization of desktops and applications.
Excalibur Tech Preview also supports Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, where apps can be delivered from a Windows Server 2012 Remote Desktop Services server and Windows 8 can be the hosted VM in the XenDesktop solution. Also a self-service portal is provided called Storefront.