For those of you who couldn’t make it, or are still trying to digest all of the exciting and innovative announcements you heard while you were there, here is a recap.
In Kirill Tatarinov’s first public speaking engagement as the new President & CEO of Citrix (he was just appointed in January of this year) he announced the company’s new strategy. The “new” Citrix plans to build the world’s best-integrated technology services for secure delivery of apps and data—anytime and anywhere. Citrix wants to lead customers to say “Yes!” to innovation and productivity in the workplace.
Citrix and Microsoft have always had a strong partnership but they are now even more tightly integrated with announcements including:
In an attempt to free customers from paying the vTax to VMware, Citrix announced that with the new release of XenApp and XenDesktop 7.9 there is native support with Nutanix’s AHV hypervisor. The support not only extends to power management of XenApp servers and XenDesktop VDI, but also allows for native provisioning through Machine Creation Services.
InstantON VDI was also announced, which promises desktops that are as low as $415 per. The intent is to reduce spend, improve manageability, simplify deployment and deliver great performance. Check out this video to see the savings that can be realized when running 5,000 seats of XenDesktop on VMware vSphere.
Formerly Workspace Cloud, Citrix Cloud aligns with the new company strategy to allow any product from the Citrix portfolio to be deployed on any hypervisor and in the cloud.
Major improvements have been made to the hypervisor in the areas of performance and ease of administration.
Citrix is hard at work developing hardware and peripherals. Last year we had the X1 mouse and now we have the Citrix HDX Ready Pi. The HDX Ready Pi is a $89 high performance thin client based off the new Raspberry Pi 3. This is currently OEM from Viewsonic and Micro Center.
Many new features where added to ShareFile which not only provide an enhanced user experience but also will revolutionize how businesses that use this technology will operate:
Checkout this video from the general session for a demo of the new ShareFile features.
In addition to the current SDX, MPX and VPX platforms, a new model of NetScaler was introduced, NetScaler CPX. CPX is designed for developers and runs within a Docker container and is specifically targeted towards those that run DevOps. With CPX you have the ability to deploy hundreds of instances for a fraction of the cost.
Another new and exciting announcement is the NetScaler Management and Analytics System (MAS). NetScaler MAS is designed to capture, analyze and predictively provide data about any application’s traffic that is sent through the NetScaler. MAS will flag any potential abnormalities in the flow of data from the client to the backend server even if there are no noticeable issues at that time. The speaker explained it as “separating the signal from the noise.”
Formerly CloudBridge, SD-WAN is Citrix’s SDN solution for optimizing application traffic and user experience while aggregating traffic across multiple types of connections and allowing for the duplication of data to provide resiliency against connection loss.
SD-WAN comes in three platforms:
Citrix continues to innovate Receiver across all platforms. You can download the latest version here.
For improved ease of administration, the Supportability Pack is available here. The Pack contains over 50 tools to help automate and speed up log analysis and simulate common conditions in the environment. In addition, for Long Term Support Release customers, there is an LTSR compliance analysis utility to ensure that as the LTSR version adjusts, everything remains in compliance.
Want the full Citrix Synergy experience? All of the keynotes and session highlights are available on-demand.
Final thoughts…Citrix never ceases to amaze. Another outstanding conference and I am extremely excited to see what the new Citrix brings. After watching the keynotes and sessions, if you have any questions or want more information, don’t hesitate to
Lewan Technology is a Citrix Gold Solutions Advisor and has the largest resident Citrix consulting bench in Denver, CO and the Rocky Mountain region, comprised of certified architects, engineers and administrators. We also hold the Citrix Specialist in Virtualization distinction.