In January Citrix announced the upcoming 7.5 version of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product XenDesktop and desktop and virtualization product XenApp. At that time especially the fact that the XenApp product returned since it was integrated in XenDesktop when version 7.1 was released. The reason for this was the integration of both platforms to the Flexcast Management Architecture (FMA) platform, providing better integration between the XenApp and XenDesktop products.
Transforming the feature set from XenApp 6.5 to the XenDesktop 7.1 caused a lot of features in the XenApp product to disappear, as noted by Citrix CTP Alexander Ervik Johnsen en Brian Madden on his website. Based on these articles, we can conclude that bringing back the XenApp product name is more marketing related than technical.
Citrix now has announced the general availability of XenApp 7.5 and XenDesktop
7.5 ,providing the following new features:
- Provisioning from Citrix Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services
- Platinum edition customers will be able to benefit from the full feature set of AppDNA, for a full list of the different editions and its features see this article.
- Wake-on-Lan support for RemotePC Access via Microsoft System Center leveraging Active Management Technology (AMT) capabilities enabled in the BIOS.
- Connections can be configured to VMware vSphere 5.5 hypervisors
- Support for Web Interface 5.4.
Citrix also announced that Receiver and StoreFront 2.5 will be updated to support the new versions of both XenApp and XenDesktop.
With the announcement Citrix also released two new blueprints for deployment of both XenApp and XenDesktop: