Citrix XenApp's new feature pack is really just a licensing change. How significant is this?

To me the best part of it is a renewed focus by Citrix on their "core" products.

Citrix have made a lot of acquistions in the last couple of years and it was starting to look like they intended to try and keep all the products "alive" as stand alone options (read extra cost) rather than using them to directly enhance the products that the company is built on.

Thanks for picking this up Brian. A couple of quick notes. First on the XenServer comment, understand that while XenServer is free, including it as a feature in XenApp means that customers get support for it as part of any support agreement they have with XenApp. This support is for XenApp servers only but this is a major value point. The same is true of the other components. Since they are a part of XenApp the customer neither has to pay for them nor needs to purchase separate support contracts for them. It's included and covered under XenApp. This is pretty important to our customers, especially since they are seriously trying to cut costs. And with all the extra functionality, they can hopefully avoid purchases they may have been thinking of making separately.

Application streaming is another thing all together. With App Streaming you could not use it with Advanced Edition AT ALL prior to this release unless you purchased separate licenses. In addition, using it with Enterprise and Platinum meant that if a user took an application offline with them then a CCU license would be checked out of your pool for the duration of the time the user had that application. For this reason, enterprise and platinum customers had to purchase additional add-on licenses for offline users. None of this is the case with this feature pack. Any user with access to hosted applications on XenApp servers can now have access to offline applications without penalizing the license pool. This is huge for customers. Again, saves a ton of money.

Thanks again! If anyone has questions, you can check out our blog or post them here. Also, there is some additional information on citrix.com/upgradetoxenapp5.

Vin

Hi,,

From that chart - Load Testing - is this the Citrix Edgesight for Load Testing product that is now bundled with Enterprise?

I think adding PVS to platinum is a big deal... Also with thing with XenServer and XenApp is a little confusing because Citrix made the Xenserver (basically the Enterprise edition) free.  So it sounds like your getting the free XenServer regardless.  Kinda like going to a casino and the waiter says you get a free drink with the purchase of a dinner entree... but everyone knows you get free drinks at the casino regardless if buy food or not.  The XenServer and XenApp deal is different in that the value add is support.  There is no free support for free XenServer, but for XenApp customers there is.

Overall I think it's a good move.  (Granted I would have liked to have seen this done much earlier)  It will force Citrix, Microsoft and VMware to move forward and continue to innovate otherwise be left behind.  

Joe

Joe

I think this is actually a big deal. XenServer is giving away a lot of free mgmt tools that VMWare charge for. So they are raising the bar, and this makes it easy for me to force the internal debate in my company as to why hypervisor x vs. hypervisor y when one charges for mgmt and the other doesn't. I think a lot of unhappy ESX or EA approaching EOL will be compelled to take a serious look at XenServer. Also the XS tweaks I find make a difference at peak session load, so scalability for the lower cost TS SBC model is a win in combination with a VDI story. So gives me flexibility.

I've just seen a demo of the StorageLink software that is to be included in the new Enterprise bundle, and all I can say is WOW!!! This is going to save so much time & hassle. Best of all it works with XenServer AND Hyper-v. I'm guessing that it's leveraging XenAPI and SCVMM API calls on top of the SMI-S API calls to do this. When are Citrix going to extend this to VMware platforms (Citrix Essentials for VMware???) as I guess they could just as easily utilise the vCenter API like they do with XenDesktop. That would rock for VMware admins, but be a massive embarresment for VMware. They've been talking about this kind of thing with Cisco for years, but Citrix have made it a reality...

Hi Brian, i miss a bit that you do a better research, because Vridhar Mullapudi and Vinny Sosa told on citrix blog, what the new features are.

The chart is a good point of view, but i miss that you dont mentioned the full detailed chart that is officiel from Citrix.

www.citrix.com/.../feature.asp

Here you can see the entire features by edition.

It gives a much better overview.

Enjoy! :o)