HDX Enlightened Data Transport (HDX Adaptive Transport) is a new HDX virtual channel data transport engine now in general release that is designed to combat challenging WAN access to published applications and desktops. Think scenarios where your resources are placed on public cloud or you simply have access back to the datacentre hosting your Citrix resources, with WAN performance that may be limited due to forms of small packet loss and high latency. With this being said, HDX EDT is just as good for handling connections inside the corporate LAN.
Configuring Citrix Receiver email based discovery
Rather than users needing to know your StoreFront or NetScaler Gateway URLs you can provide them with the option to configure Citrix Receiver using their email address. This can work for both outside and inside the corporate LAN either connection directly to StoreFront when inside the corporate network or through NetScaler Gateway when outside.
Local Host Cache XenApp & XenDesktop
Local Host Cache has been introduced to FMA with XenApp & XenDesktop 7.12+ and is the recommended component to combat database outages allowing users to connect to their resources when the database is out of reach. Connection Leasing is still around and will still be enabled in many scenarios as I will discuss later.
Unidesk Maintenance Schedules 3.x
Unidesk applies Maintenance Schedules to Desktops and Session Hosts that dictate when a desktop can be taken offline and edited to complete tasks such as new application layer assignment or removal, or configuration changes that results in a new boot image being built for the machine. Using Maintenance Schedules ensure machines are only worked on outside of business hours and whilst they are not in use.
Citrix Connection Leasing
Citrix makes use of SQL Server AlwaysOn, mirroring or clustering abilities within SQL and clustering at the Hypervisor level to ensure that Delivery Controllers have a constant connection to the SQL site database. Citrix Connection Leasing in XenApp/XenDesktop 7.6+ pushes the availability further ensuring that if in the event the database is innaccessible, users most recent connections to desktops and applications are cached on Delivery Controllers and connections can continue to be brokered.