Design and implement Citrix farms based on XenApp 6 with this book and eBook
Introducing XenApp 6
The new Citrix XenApp 6 runs only on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2. Citrix rewrote the code completely for the Windows 64-bit platform. This job provided a great opportunity to optimize the code for performance and scalability (Citrix tested XenApp 6 farms with over 1,000 member servers and 100,000 concurrent sessions) and provided new features.
Here are some of the highlights of the new XenApp 6:
In addition to these major features and enhancements, XenApp 6 included other features like great Web Interface, Single Sign-on, and SmartAuditor enhancements, new 32-bit color support, Windows 7 smart card support, and so on.
XenApp feature overview
This section provides summary descriptions of some of the most popular XenApp features. This section will help new Citrix customers to understand major features on the last three versions of XenApp (XenApp 4.5, 5.0, 6.0).
- Access applications from any device, anytime, anywhere: We can deliver any published Windows application to an extensive variety of user devices and operating systems, including Windows, Mac, Linux, UNIX, DOS, Java, and mobile devices like iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, and Android devices.
- Active Directory Federation Services support: We can use ADFS to provide business partners access to published applications.
- Application gateway: Citrix provides SSL-proxy, using both hardware (Citrix NetScaler and Citrix Access Gateway) and software (Citrix Secure Gateway) solutions, to allow remote users to access published applications in XenApp, securely.
- CPU utilization management: This feature prevents users and their processes from utilizing the CPU too much and guarantees a consistent performance level for all users on the XenApp server.
- Installation Manager: This feature allows us to remotely install applications to multiple XenApp servers simultaneously.
- Network Management Console Integration: XenApp supports SNMP monitoring and integration with third-party network management tools, including Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView, CAUnicenter.
- Novell eDirectory and NDS Support: XenApp 6 provides support for Novell eDirectory and Domain Services for Windows, allowing XenApp to authenticate Novell users.
- Power and capacity management: We can create system policies to manage server power consumption. This feature can turn on/off XenApp servers. As users log off and idle resources increase, idle servers are shut down. When users arrive in the morning and they log on to the farm, servers are powered up. Also, we can schedule time for powering on and powering off servers.
- Single Sign-On: This feature (formerly known as Password Manager) provides single sign-on access to Windows, web, and terminal emulator applications. The self-service password reset feature included in single sign-on allows users to reset their domain password or unlock their Windows account.
- SmartAuditor: Uses policies to allow us to record the on-screen activity of any user’s session, over any type of connection, from any server running XenApp. SmartAuditor records, catalogs, and archives sessions for review.
- Web interface: The web interface allows users access to published applications and content on XenApp through a standard web browser or Citrix Plug-in. Web interface provides built-in support for two-factor, RADIUS, and Smart Card authentication, simple customization through the management console and multilingual support, for the following languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese (simplified and traditional), and Korean.