XenDesktopMaster

Yesterday Citrix Mark T. hold the first Keynote of Citrix Synergy 2010 San Fransisco. The presentation was full of live demos and very interesting topics. It also was very Apple-ish and there even was a “One more thing” thingy. If you missed the live keynote Citrix you can watch it on citrix.com/tv right now or read our short summary.

The following summary will only cover technical topic and leave out most of the marketing stuff. The keynote actual was about three topics (XenClient, Dazzle.next and Reciver, HDX Nitro, XenApp 6) which we will cover right now.

XenClient
Citrix today announced the immediate availability of Citrix XenClient (as a release candidate). XenClient is Citrix’s approach of delivery a type-1 hypervisor for clients. XenClient is based on the open source Xen Client Initiative (XCI). XenClient allows you to securely run multiple virtual machines on your local device (a notebook or even a desktop). This allows you for example to deploy a personal VM with all your personal applications like iTunes, Windows Live Messenger, Google Picasa and so on. In addition to that your corporate IT can centrally deploy business virtual machines with all needed business applications and policies to your local device. This is done through Citrix Synchronizer a virtual appliance which runs only on top of XenServer (at least for now).

There are many use cases for XenClient. For example if you have to run some application in a complete secure and locked down environment so that no data inside this VM can get outside you can to this with XenClient.

XenClient is based on the open source Xen hypervisor engine. To run Citrix XenClient you need a device which supports Intel vPro and therefore Intel VT-x and VT-d. The concrete requirments are:

• Intel Core 2 Duo series processor with VT-x and VT-d (Intel vPro)
• 4GB memory or more
• 160GB disk space or more
• Intel integrated graphic 4500MHD

On top of XenClient currently Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 are supported in their 32-bit versions.

Beside some experimental features like 3D graphic support and secure application sharing (publish applications from one local VM to another) it allows you, in conjunction with Citrix Synchronizer, to centrally deploy, restore and backup virtual machines running on your XenClient devices. It also allows you to do some security stuff like control which VM can use which local devices, how they can access the network, how long they can run without contacting the Synchronizer (time bombing) and send a remote kill pill to remotly wipe a stolen device.

You’re going to find more information on XenClient and the actual download on citrix.com/xenclient.

Dazzle.next and Receiver
Citrix finally gets serious about Dazzle and Receiver. At lot is coming to these both components but let’s start with Dazzle. Dazzle is the Apple AppStore for enterprises made by Citrix. While Dazzle has been around for a year the only thing you could do with Dazzle is to allow your users to add the applications they wanted to their start menus. But with Dazzle.next Dazzle get some really helpful feature like request management and a ask, learn and share feature.

Request managament allow a user to request access to a certain application which he wasn’t allowed to access before. The request then can go through some workflow and have to be allowed or denied. If it is allowed it than can be, for example, booked on a specific cost center.

Also it allows the IT personal to set up some kind of FAQ and learning site for your users. They also can ask the support directly or share their experience they made with Dazzle with other users.

Right after Dazzle.next there was some talking about Citrix Receiver. Citrix Receiver also was already around for a year or so. But now there coming lot of cool new plug-ins to Receiver like 3rd party anti virus plug-ins or the Citrix Encrypted Data plug-in.

The Citrix Encrypted Data plug-in allows administrators to encrypt (256bit AES) the data delivery through XenApp and App-V applications at your end point. Users can be forced to safe their data from seamless applications in a specific ecrypted container called SafeZone. Last but not least the administrators can centrally control the access to the SafeZone and also wipe it remotely.

Dazzle.next should be available later this year but if you want to try the Encrypted Data plug-in you can give the technical preview a try.

XenApp 6
There was a quick recap of the features and possilibies with XenApp 6. But as this is nothing now I will skip this part.

HDX Nitro Technologies
HDX Nitro is a bundle of five development projects around Citrix’s HDX protocol starting with HDX Mach 3.

• Project Mach 3 is an optimized kernel (as Mark T. refereed to it) of the HDX protocol which should deliver 3 times the peformance of the actual HDX protocol.
• Project Zoom silently pre-loads a HDX session which then allows you to instantly start published applications.
• Project Laser optimizes the universal printer stack which should reduce the needed printing bandwidth a bare minimum (10% of that what’s currently needed).
• Project Mecury should accelerate the HDX WAN sessions and make them very usable even over connections with up to 300ms of latency by using compression, caching and prioritizing techniques.
• Project Dynamo is an enhancement to Citrix’s adaptive orchestration feature of HDX which allows you intelligent QoS (Quality of Service) and policy-driven configuration to optimize your sessions regarding the quality of your network link and the capabilities of your end point.

Unfortunately there wasn’t any live demo or technical details about HDX Nitro. So check out hdx.citrix.com/nitro regularly to get the latest news about HDX Nitro.

One more thing…
As I already said the keynote was very Apple-ish and so there also was the “One more thing”. At this point Mark T. demonstrated a really cool feature. He showed us how you can push a published application from one Citrix Receiver (in this case an iPad) to another Receiver (a Windows 7 device). This is really cool but useful? I guess time will tell.

So much for the first day keynote. If you still want to know more just watch the recording of the keynote below.