Zen: Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop become one

The rumour that Citrix will combine their XenApp and XenDesktop products into a single product (code named Excalibur) has been announced at Citrix Synergy Barcelona, and surprisingly a tech preview release will be out as soon as November 2012. This is a massive code change for Citrix as they are dropping their 10 year old Independent Management Architecture (IMA) technology in favour of the XenDesktop style Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA) architecture. I had speculated that the next version of XenApp would support only Windows Server 2012, however I am happy to see continued support for Windows Server 2008 R2.

Citrix are also including important updates to HDX to allow superior media performance on mobile devices and over slow networks.

I expect to see changes to the Citrix licensing model as Excalibur gets closer to release date. We should see a single product license for desktop virtualisation and application delivery similar to the current XenDesktop license.
We will finally have a single management console to rule them all! I’m feeling Zen already.

UPDATE: You can download the Project Avalon Excalibur Tech preview here(MyCitrix logon required), and there is a reviewers guide here.

More Excalibur info:
What’s new in Excalibur Delivery Agents
Excalibur Architecture