The evolution of XenDesktop^® architecture

XenDesktop has gone through a long journey, and it has passed through major architectural changes. Citrix introduced a new intuitive way for businesses to manage enterprise Windows applications through a centralized application delivery technology (the XenApp). Later, it was expanded to cover virtual desktops as well (the XenDesktop). Lately, Citrix has unified both of these technologies for delivering mobile users a complete workspace with support for Cloud infrastructures under Project Avalon. This sequence of high-level integrations has led to the dissection and convergence of both the XenApp and XenDesktop architectures.

What this means for businesses its going to be a faster step to adopt one of these technologies if they already own one. Say, if a company already has the XenApp technology in place, then it's a familiar step to adopt the XenDesktop technology, since both of the products use the same HDX protocols and other networking components, such as StoreFront, NetScaler, and so on.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, Evolution and Core Strengths of XenDesktop^®, Citrix launched its very first virtual desktop delivery technology called Citrix Desktop Server 1.0 in 2007, and its later versions came to be known as XenDesktop.