In December 2006 Citrix acquired Ardence, a company providing an operating system streaming technology.
For the past year Ardence operated as an independed subsidiary, while its technology was being integrated into Citrix products, but the merge is now complete.
Last Friday Citrix published Provisioning Server for Desktops 4.5, which joins the already released Provisioning Server for Datacenters 4.5.
This new product offers two different streaming approaches: the Standard-Image Mode and the Private-Image Mode.
In the first case a common disk image is streamed to each corporate desktop (no matter which hardware differences they have) and each user modification is recorded inside a delta saved on desktops (either RAM or HD) or on server. In the second case each desktop get streamed a dedicated disk image.
Provisioning Server for Desktops 4.5 will be probably integrated with upcoming Citrix VDI connection broker called XenDesktop.
Watch a demo of Provisioning Server here.