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.