So what does XenApp 5 FP2 really mean?

So cutting through all the marketing mist what does Citrix XenApp 5 Feature Pack 2 really boil down to, well we thought we would share with you what it initially looks like:

• VM hosted apps - Lets you deliver Windows applications from centrally hosted virtual machines running Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. This feature is great for regulated applications and those which have performance bottlenecks, peripheral compatibility and general compatibility issues on Terminal Services. It's also great for applications where your ISV won't support them on Terminal Services. One thing is, for VM hosted apps, you'll need Microsoft VECD licenses, not Terminal Services CALS. Most environments will have a mix though so just keep this in mind as you consider it.
• Windows 7 and Windows Mobile support - In this release, Citrix now support access from Windows 7 devices to server and VM hosted apps, as well as streamed applications running on the users desktop. Citrix also released an updated profiler which includes Windows 7 as an option.
• Power and Capacity Management - You install an agent on your XenApp servers (whether virtual or physical) and Power and Capacity Management turns them on and off when capacity is needed based on rules you create. You tell it how much capacity you always want available on standby and it just keeps turning on servers as users log into your farm to maintain that buffer capacity. Plus, you can manage multiple farms from a single implementation. But Power management is only half of this feature. The other half is capacity management. This feature will help to keep sessions consolidated on fewer servers while maintaining adequate user performance. . You can even tell capacity management to drain sessions on servers for you so you can come back later and perform your maintenance. Available to Enterprise and Platinum customers running XenApp on Windows Server 2003.
• Provisioning Services - some key enhancements which you might already be aware of but certainly worth mentioning are multi-partition and dual NIC support for provisioning images. Plus there are some wonderful new fault tolerance improvements that have been made such as server maintenance mode which let's you transfer image management between multiple provisioning servers in the event you need to bring one down for maintenance. And of course, Provisioning services can be used to manage VM hosted applications. Enterprise edition customers can use Provisioning services to manage VM hosted apps only. Platinum customers can use Provisioning services to manage VM hosted or server hosted apps.

• Service Monitoring - Service monitoring now measures the performance of XenApp servers running on XenServer by giving you visibility into the performance of the hypervisor. This will help you better determine the right mix of physical and virtual servers in your environment. In addition, you can now measure application start up time for streamed applications - a nifty feature for testing those new performance improvements we've made with your own apps. Service monitoring is available to Platinum customers.

• HDX MediaStream for Flash - . Basically, it leverages the processing power on the users Windows device to render Flash content and applications. This offloads the server and also improves performance and fluidity for the user. What's more, if the users device isn't capable of rendering the content, it will automatically fall back to server-side rendering. Citrix call that Adaptive orchestration. It's available in Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum Edition and for XenApp running on Windows Server 2003.
• HDX Plug and Play for USB storage devices - Citrix have supported USB drive mapping before. This is just a bit different in that users can plug in their USB drive even if they are already in a session and it will be mapped automatically without their having to restart their session. It's a great usability feature and is available to Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum customers and for XenApp running on Windows Server 2003.
• Profile management - Profile management has seen some bug fixes and platform support enhancements. Plus Citrix have added a number of counters to Service monitoring that expose the performance of user profiles within your environment to give you a better idea of how performance bottlenecks in user profiles can be affecting the performance of your applications.
• EasyCall voice services - In the previous XenApp release, Citrix introduced this as a Xen-based virtual appliance available to Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum edition customers. Basically, EasyCall let's users hover their mouse over any phone number on their screen and then click to call that number. This is accomplished using a plugin on the users device. The plugin communicates call requests to the EasyCall virtual appliance and then the appliance tells the VoIP system to call the user at their current location and then to call their destination number. In this release, Citrix added a feature called Find Me which lets users configure phone numbers that EasyCall will use to redirect their calls to if they are not available, trying each one in order. EasyCall is available to Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum edition customers.