Citrix Enriches VDI in a Box

Citrix has announced this week the release of Citrix VDI-in-a-Box™ 5.1, an ideal solution for the SMB markets or discrete VDI projects within the mid market. The latest release of VDI-in-a-Box delivers end-user personalisation with personal vDisk technology that allows end-user applications and data to be preserved while adopting the single master image concept (again saving costs).

This version also includes several feature enhancements to improve ease-of-use, flexibility, and performance such as optimisations for Google Earth, support for Active Directory failover, and beta support for the upcoming
Windows 8 operating system.

VDI-in-a-Box is built upon a grid architecture without any shared storage requirements. The architecture runs on inexpensive off-the-shelf servers. Scaling simply involves adding another server, with nothing to rearchitect or reconfigure. New features within this release are:

Personalised Virtual Desktops:

VDI-in-a-Box 5.1 eliminates the need to create separate static desktops to carry forward end-user customisation by coupling single-instance management with the ability to have individual user workspaces for their applications and data.

Single Instance Management:

IT can maintain one master copy of desktop images while preserving the personalisation of user applications and data. This dramatically reduces maintenance efforts and cuts datacenter storage costs up to 90 percent.

VDI-in-a-Box 5.1 continues to simplify management; the new touchless desktop agent automatically propagates upgrades across all the images in a VDI-in-a-Box grid.

Support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 8 (Beta): VDI-in-a-Box 5.1 manages Windows 2008 R2, Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8-based virtual desktops).

All features of Windows 8 including the new Metro interface are fully supported. This feature is currently in beta pending the general availability of Windows 8.

Looking at virtual desktops, interested to know more? Contact us to see how we can help.