Cliff(’s) Notes: A summary from A2U IT expert on XenApp and XenDesktop 7.11
A2U Senior Technical Specialist, Cliff Miller shares his “Cliff Notes” with you (pun intended!) that summarize everything IT professionals need to know about the XenApp and XenDesktop 7.11 updates.
Cliff Miller, A2U, Senior Technical Specialist
Are you pressed to see how the updates will benefit your company? Check out the highlights Cliff put together below, broken down by the following sections: Director, StoreFront 3.7, Virtual Delivery Agents and Windows Server 2016 Support.
So, what’s new?
Director now includes the following enhancements:
Resource utilization reporting. Provides insight into historical trends data for CPU and memory usage for each VDI machine for better capacity planning.
How does this benefit my company? Administrators can now view historical performance data on the top 10 processes. This allows companies to understand the true impact of adding more applications or 10,100, or a 1,000 more users. This results in more efficient purchasing of infrastructure to support growth. This new reporting features means money saved and added insight.
Enhanced proactive monitoring and alerting. Configure proactive alerting and notifications when thresholds are reached for an extended range of conditions including CPU, Memory and ICA RTT.
How does this benefit my company? Gone are the days of reacting to poor performance reports. Companies can now be alerted before issues are reported so they can take action to correct – and they can even take it a step further and filter alerts by user to help find the root cause or end user impact. This new feature allows you to keep your environment running optimally and react before your users report issues.
StoreFront 3.7 now supports the following:
Windows Server 2016. StoreFront now allows you to stay on the cutting edge of technology.
Self Service Password Reset. Increase productivity and reduce calls to the help desk by enabling end user password resets via StoreFront.
Virtual Delivery Agents (VDAs) include the following enhancements to HDX technologies and platform support:
Seamless publishing of Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps. Add universal apps to Delivery Groups and launch from Citrix Receiver.
How does this benefit my company? Support for publishing universal apps gives users a seamless experience of new apps developed for Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 using the Universal Windows Platform (UWP).
TWAIN 2.0 support. Users can now access image processing applications which use the TWAIN 2.0 scanning protocol.
How does this benefit my company? TWAIN 2.0 support means that companies can implement a greater variety of image processing applications than ever before. Greater, higher compatibility means companies can reduce costs by virtualizing more applications and endpoints.
Support for Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V Discrete Device Assignment (DDA):
Enables GPU pass through for XenApp and XenDesktop running on Microsoft Hyper-V.
How does this benefit my company? Many companies are deploying Citrix on Hyper-V technology due to the cost savings and Citrix performance gains. However, companies are also seeing decreased capacity due to applications making more use of GPU and server hardware offloading the work to CPU. This allows both increased capacity as well as, user experience.
Support for Intel Iris Pro Graphics:
Citrix has integrated support for Intel Iris Pro graphics technology across the full Citrix app and desktop virtualization suite.
How does this benefit my company? Iris Pro support means that companies can now provide an enhanced, media-rich user experience at an affordable price. Citrix has enabled stunning graphics performance and 3D workloads for the masses.
In addition to these updates, Session Recording now includes logging of administrator activities which gives administrators the ability to download and record sessions. It also alerts administrators of unauthorized attempts to access the Administrator Logging service.
For more information on XenApp and XenDesktop 7.11, please check out the Citrix website here.
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