Citrix XenApp “Iron Cove” 6.5 Tech. Preview (Part.3)

Citrix XenApp “Iron Cove” 6.5 Tech. Preview (Part.1)
Citrix XenApp “Iron Cove” 6.5 Tech. Preview (Part.2)
Citrix XenApp “Iron Cove” 6.5 Tech. Preview (Part.3)

With Windows 2008 and after, Remote Desktop Services included a new way to disable logon on the machine (check this article to read more about it and thanks to Laurent Falguière) the classic way when disabling logon is always bringing problems when a user tried to launch his disconnected application hosted on a disable server… Now you can manage this behavior :

• Allow logons and reconnections. Enable all logons, reconnections, and session sharing (default setting).
• Prohibit logons and reconnections. Reroute all logons, reconnections, and session sharing to other servers.
• Prohibit logons only. Reroute new connections and session sharing, but allowing users to reconnect to disconnected sessions. This state persists until you change it manually.
• Prohibit logons until server restart. Reroute new connections and session sharing, as above, but after restarting the server, the setting automatically changes back to Allow logons and reconnections.

Coming with this XenApp preview, you can find in the ISO file a new Citrix EdgeSight version, 5.4 S540 Tech Preview. Since my XenServer @ home just came back to life, I didn’t had time to go very deep with this new EdgeSight release, here are so far what I noticed :

• EdgeSight 5.4 support Microsoft SQL 2008 R2
• The new EdgeSight for XenApp client version is 5.4.0.5094 Tech Preview, only for XenApp 6 and XenApp 6.5
• Older client version doesn’t seem to work (my XenDesktop VMsare not showing up in EdgeSight console)
• EdgeSight 5.4 seems to integrate IPv6 parameters
• Some new options, like exporting licenses usage to a file (It doesn’t work yet…)

A great tool very under rated I think, this is XenApp Power and Capacity Management. This tool is going from version 1 to version 2.1. This tool helps you to switch on and off your XenApp servers regarding a load you configured within PCM console. You can read XenApp Power and Capacity Management with provisioned machines blog post I made last year.

The console doesn’t change at all, except in the Machine Manager (Connection to the hypervizor) where you can now use and connect XenApp PCM with Hyper-V, SCVMM and ESX with vCenter !

Now XenApp PCM is open to all big hypervizor on the market, I will implement it every time I’ll have a new XenApp architecture to deliver ! The bad side is no more support for HP or Dell hardware (ilo and Drake…)