This post is meant to provide you with a quick comparison, a cheat sheet if you will, between the two architectures. As you all (should) know by now, with the introduction of XenDesktop 7.x XenApp became part of the Flexcast Management Architecture, or FMA in short, and with this came certain terminology and conceptual changes. Here I would like to show you how each former 6.5 (IMA) XenApp component has its equivalent in the FMA world. Although technically there are some differences, on the functional side of things there is not much between them. To be clear, I’m not focusing on features that are in IMA and (still) not in FMA.
Just short of two weeks ago I attended Citrix Synergy in Orlando and as expected a lot of new technologies, features and products were announced / released. I wrote this article a few weeks prior to Synergy but I wasn’t sure if it was wise to publish it so close to the Synergy kick-off. Because, to be honest, I expected a few changes to XenDesktop / XenApp / FMA to be announced which might have interfered with the overview below, if you know what I mean. But now that Synergy is over, unless I missed something, the XenApp / XenDesktop FMA seems unchanged, for the bigger part anyway. So without further ado.
Hope this helped. In case you would like an offline reference, I made a simple .PDF as well.
