HDX user experience

• Support for Microsoft OCS Video conferencing - through enhancements to the HDX Realtime feature customers can deliver Office Communicator and using Web Cams video conferencing even over WAN connections.
• Enhanced Audio Codecs – the optimised speech codecs provided with HDX Realtime deliver clear audio for softphones and voice chat using a bandwidth of less than 20Kbps. High definition video can also be delivered with CD Quality audio using 90% less bandwidth using the new codecs.
• VOIP Softphones – the improvements in the HDX Realtime audio codecs provide enhanced capability to deploy softphones such as Avaya via XenApp.
• Enhanced Colour and Monitor Support – includes 32-bit colour depth support, DirectX / Direct3D hardware acceleration and much improved multi-monitor support technology.
• USB Device support – HDX Plug-n-Play enhancements provide support of additional USB devices plugged into XenApp sessions such as cameras, scanners and point of sale devices

Management

• Single Management console – features a new MMC 3.0 style console which combines the previous separate consoles and provides a simplified and faster interface.
• AD Group Policy – XenApp now uses AD group policies to manage Server and Farm properties, this allows customers to leverage their Active Directory, simplifies management and ensures consistency of settings across the farm servers.
• Worker Groups – servers can now be added into Worker Groups and published applications and load balancing policies can then be applied to these groups. This makes it easy to assign servers to roles / silos since adding them to a group in one go can assign multiple published applications and ensures configuration consistency
• Simplified installation – the installation is now split into two phases one that installs the components /roles then a second phase where the configuration of these is completed. This lends itself to single image provisioning as the components can be installed on the single image and then each separate server can be configured at boot. The setup also now automatically installs all pre-requisites which greatly simplifies and speeds up the process.
• PowerShell SDK – in line with the other Citrix products XenApp 6.0 can be fully managed via PowerShell which greatly improves the ability to automate XenApp tasks as part of more complex workflows.
• Scalability – XenApp 6.0 running on Windows Server 2008 R2 supports 15-20% more sessions on the same hardware than XenApp 5.0 improving user density and reducing TCO

Application virtualisation

• Microsoft App-V – customers can use Citrix Receiver to distribute the App-V plug-in and publish App-V packages using XenApp which can also be subscribed to via Dazzle.
• Citrix Streaming – this has been enhanced to support applications that install services such as Microsoft Office 2010 using the new service isolation technology

Considerations

• XenApp 6.0 is only supported on Windows 2008 R2
• XenApp 6.0 farms cannot contain earlier versions so there is no mixed farm upgrade path
• No support for 16-bit applications
• All your applications must be supported on a 64-bit Operating System and specifically Windows 2008 R2
• Session based printers will require 64-bit drivers supported on Windows 2008 R2

Key features

• Bare-metal client Hypervisor – XenClient is based on the proven XenServer Hypervisor and in conjunction with Intel’s v-Pro technology delivers near native performance whilst at the same time providing complete isolation of virtual machines and the highest levels of security. It provides separation of the virtual machine from the physical hardware meaning a single VM can be used on multiple vendor and multiple hardware configurations.
• Citrix Receiver for XenClient – this provides users with a graphical interface for switching between and managing virtual machines whether creating them locally or downloading managed pre-defined ones from the data centre
• Synchroniser for XenClient – synchroniser enables the central management and deployment of predefined virtual machines to enterprise PCs and laptops. It also provides the ability to define policies to restrict the use and accessibility features of virtual machines protecting corporate data.
• Automatic backup and recovery – the synchroniser also backups user data to the data centre of over a secure connection when the device is connected to the internet. This also allows for the self-service recovery of this backup data by the user and in the event that the user needs a new device the whole VM can very quickly and easily be distributed to a new device.
• Secure corporate data – complete isolation of the virtual machines from the hardware up prevents malware or cyber-attacks in one VM affecting any other VMs. Enterprises can also use a kill pill to disable virtual machines on lost or stolen devices.
• High-definition user experience – XenClient has been developed by close collaboration between Intel and Citrix and has therefore been optimised to take advantage of Intel’s built-in VT-d technology. This enables XenClient to provide virtual machines with direct access to the graphics hardware enabling the richest graphics experience possible on the device from within a VM

Potential use cases

• Single VM – manage a single image centrally that can be synchronised to all your PCs and Laptops regardless of model or vendor and provide automatic backups. This will drastically improve management of user devices and significantly reduce costs.
• Secure VM - the inherent security and ability to remotely kill VMs means that different VMs can be used for different levels of security. If a particular application requires very high security and lockdown then this can be delivered in a single app VM with a high level of security policy and lock down
• Personal VM – In this scenario a user can create a personal VM over which they have total control and can use for their own purposes and at the same time have a completely separate secure Corporate VM which is managed by the enterprise which delivers their work environment. This use case would lend itself to a BYOC policy
• Test and Development - Use XenClient to create test and development VMs on an end user device but with the performance capabilities of a bare metal hypervisor.
• Demonstrations – be able to create portable multiple virtual machine performant demonstration environments for use at customer sites / seminars / workshops
• Training – be able to deliver training VMs quickly to multiple machines for different courses and also have the ability to provide courses requiring multiple virtual machines on a single hardware device.

Current status

• Available as a preview / beta release
• Limited Hardware Compatibility List
• First full release due later in the year

vSphere 4.1 - Release summary

• 2X larger resource pools with 3X the management power - VMware vSphere 4.1 includes dramatic scalability enhancements, enabling customers to aggregate twice the computing resources within a single pool. VMware vCenter Server can now manage up to 10,000 concurrently powered on VMs – three times as many as before.
• Up to 25% better performance and reduced cost per application - With the addition of new memory compression technology, VMware vSphere 4.1 preserves the performance of systems under heavy load, resulting in up to 25% better performance over previous approaches.
  5X faster virtual machine migrations for increased agility - Speed and scale enhancements to VMware vMotion™ enabling up to eight concurrent vMotion events per server pair.
• New network and storage I/O controls deliver Quality of Service guarantees - VMware vSphere network and storage I/O controls provide granular control over how applications access shared storage and network resources.
• Increased performance through open integration with storage environments - With the introduction of new VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), VMware vSphere 4.1 enables tighter integration with solutions from VMware’s storage partners to increase the efficiency and performance of the platform in cloud environments.
• ESX EOL announced - VMware vSphere 4.1 will be the final product update release to support ESX. All new releases of vSphere will only support ESXi. vSphere 4.1 ESXi features have been brought into line with ESX in order to ease migration to the dedicated hypervisor platform
• VMotion now included in the Essential Plus license
   

vSphere 4.1 - Key features

• Scripted Install now available for ESXi
• Boot from SAN - ESXi boot from SAN (BFN). iSCSI, FCoE, and Fibre Channel boot are now supported.
• Hardware Acceleration with vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) - ESX can offload specific storage operations to compliant storage hardware.
• Storage I/O Control. This feature provides quality-of-service capabilities for storage I/O in the form of I/O shares and limits that are enforced across all virtual machines accessing a datastore, regardless of which host they are running on.
• iSCSI Hardware Offloads - vSphere 4.1 enables 10Gb iSCSI hardware offloads
• Network I/O Control - Traffic-management controls allow flexible partitioning of physical NIC bandwidth between different traffic types, including virtual machine, vMotion, FT, and IP storage traffic
• Windows Failover Clustering with VMware HA. Clustered Virtual Machines that utilize Windows Failover Clustering/Microsoft Cluster Service are now fully supported in conjunction with VMware HA.
• vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) Enhancements. VADP now offers VSS quiescing support for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 servers.
• vCLI Enhancements. vCLI adds options for SCSI, VAAI, network, and virtual machine control, including the ability to terminate an unresponsive virtual machine.
• Lockdown Mode Enhancements - VMware ESXi 4.1 lockdown mode allows the administrator to tightly restrict access to the ESXi Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) and Tech Support Mode (TSM).
• vCenter Converter Hyper-V Import - vCenter Converter allows users to point to a Hyper-V machine.
• Enhancements to Host Profiles - You can use Host Profiles to roll out administrator password changes in vSphere 4.1.
• Improved Support for Handling Recalled Patches in vCenter Update Manager - Update Manager 4.1 immediately sends critical notifications about recalled ESX and related patches.
• License Reporting Manager - The License Reporting Manager provides a centralized interface for all license keys for vSphere 4.1 products in a virtual IT infrastructure and their respective usage.
• DRS Virtual Machine Host Affinity Rules - DRS provides the ability to set constraints that restrict placement of a virtual machine to a subset of hosts in a cluster.
• Memory Compression - Compressed memory is a new level of the memory hierarchy, between RAM and disk.
• vMotion Enhancements - Performance improvement of up to 8x for an individual virtual machine migration, and support for four to eight simultaneous vMotion migrations per host.
• ESX/ESXi Active Directory Integration - Integration with Microsoft Active Directory allows seamless user authentication for ESX/ESXi.
• USB Device Pass-through from an ESX/ESXi Host to a Virtual Machine

Provisional feature summary of VMware View 4.5

• The bare metal client hypervisor known as Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) is likely to be dropped from View 4.5
• Offline desktop to be fully supported (currently experimental)
• RTO based Profile Management - expected to be delayed till later than 4.5
• Improved View Manager UI – New Adobe Flex based User Interface
• ThinApp 4.5 – inclusion of application entitlement
• Tired Storage - Different data types aligned to separate data stores for performance optimisation
• Disposable disk technology – i.e. clean temp swap data automatically
• Snapshot support for linked clones
• Role based administration
• Kiosk mode desktop pools
• Native Mac OS client
• Web download portal – for downloading the VMware View client