Citrix has released version 5.2 of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product: VDI-in-a-box. Citrix acquired the VDI-in-a-box product after acquiring Kaviza in May 2011. VDI-in-a-Box offers an all-in-one VDI solution that doesn’t require shared storage and dedicated load balanced connection brokers. It consists of a single virtual appliance that provides all the functionality needed to create, provision, manage, and load balance virtual desktops. The VDI-in-a-Box appliance, known as VDI-in-a-Box Manager or vdiManager, runs as a virtual machine on a hypervisor. vdiManager creates and manages virtual desktops on the local physical server by communicating with the local hypervisor.
Besides supporting the latest hypervisors in this release, Citrix is integrating the VDI-in-a-box products more and more with its existing products, like introducing support for Cloud Gateway and the ability to export images for use with XenDesktop.
Version 5.2 provides the following new features:
- Support for the hypervisors available in Windows Server 2012, XenServer 6.1 and vSphere 5.1
- Support for StoreFront services provided by Citrix Cloud Gateway
- Support for Microsoft Lync
- Support for exporting of published images for use with Citrix XenDesktop
- Licensing Management using Citrix License Server.
- Support for multiple data stores
- Support for virtual desktops running Windows Server 2012 (accessible using RDP only)
- Automated desktop agent upgrade
- Citrix Desktop Lock support.