It has been a short time since I wrote the Unidesk 3.x blog posts and a lot has changed with Unidesk in version 4. Firstly, the company itself has been bought by Citrix, which was announced at Summit in January 2017. The product is now called Citrix App Layering. At a software level, the main infrastructure components in App Layering 4.x have been simplified from 2.x and 3.x by merging them all in to one component. The deployment model has also been made easier, making App Layering the layer composer and Provisioning Services or Machine Creation Services deployer to the masses.
Active Directory user computer name caching in XenDesktop
In a XenDesktop environment, the Citrix Broker Service caches the hostname of Delivery Controllers, VDA machines and user account names in SQL. This ensures queries of Active Directory users and computers that are associated with the XenDesktop farm are quick and do not need to go across to Domain Controllers for such information.
Citrix Secure Browser
Citrix Secure Browser comes as an on-premise solution with XenApp 7.8+ or as the Secure Browser service from Citrix Cloud. The Citrix Secure Browser edition is designed to combat many different challenges that enterprise businesses face today in regards to security or the complexity found in getting all of thei different enterprise web sites working under the one browser.
Secure ICA connection to VDA using SSL
One of the requirements of using Receiver for HTML5 internally with HTTPS StoreFront sites is to encrypt the ICA connection rather than using clear text. This is a requirement since all modern browsers do not support unencrypted Web Socket connections from an HTTPS site which Receiver for HTML5 uses.
Citrix Director
Citrix Director is the excellent monitoring tool and analytics collector for XenApp and XenDesktop 7+ that is key for both helpdesk users and Citrix administrators alike as it makes for easier support and management of desktop and application services. Citrix Director records user session information, user session failures, machine resource consumption, application statistics, user logon times, trends and much more.
Import NetScaler Gateway configuration in to StoreFront
It was quoted back at Citrix Synergy 2016 that the ability to import NetScaler Gateway configurations in to StoreFront was coming and it is here. StoreFront 3.6 that was released alongside XenApp & XenDesktop 7.9 can import NetScaler Gateway configurations that have been created using NetScaler firmware versions 11.1 build 48.10 and higher. No longer do you have to manually configure the NetScaler configuration within StoreFront. NetScaler 11.1.51.21 added the ability to export multiple NetScaler Gateway configurations and StoreFront 3.9 added the ability to import multiple configurations and hand select configurations to import.