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...

It's very important for the XenDesktop masters to know how XenDesktop worked in its previous versions and the pros and cons that led to the changes in its architectural design. We'll go through an overview of the IMA and discuss the data points on how it was before IMA, since it's closely related to XenApp.

In 2008, the initial version of XenDesktop 2.0 was built on Citrix's pre-existing flagship technologies, including the networking protocol and architecture. It featured the following:

Prior to IMA, in the versions before MetaFrame...

In 2010, Citrix released XenDesktop 5.0 designed with a completely revamped new framework architecture called FMA (FlexCast Management Architecture). FMA is primarily comprised of the delivery controller, the server side component, the virtual desktop agent, the client side component. This greatly simplified and the XenDesktop setup compared to the previous version of XenDesktop, which was based on IMA. We'll discuss the FMA components, including the delivery controller and the virtual desktop agent in the next section.

Here is how FMA addressed the scalability limitations with the previous IMA:

In 2013, Citrix released a new major version XenDesktop 7 as Project Excalibur featuring convergence of the XenApp product. Later in 2014, Citrix released XenApp again as a separate product based on FMA. This has lead to the sharing of the same FMA architecture by the XenDesktop and XenApp products. FMA is now going to be the future of both the product lines. This means that mastering FMA will get you to master the worlds of XenDesktop and the XenApp. However, in this context, we'll only see the comparisons and the benefits of FMA within the XenDesktop versions.

FMA is the first architecture from Citrix that has been designed for XenDesktop. Citrix has chosen to develop the new FMA version on the Microsoft .Net framework. Also, Citrix played an important role in choosing the relational database for storing the static configuration and the dynamic management information. Citrix FMA is fully based on the Microsoft SQL relational database and its built-in enterprise capabilities. This choice of Microsoft's native application development technologies has become the greatest strength for implementing a flexible and robust FMA. It has also made it easier to automate and integrate them through scripting for tasks, such as automation and reporting.

FMA also supports interoperability and modular management across the various Citrix technologies. FMA is a key player in the Project Avalon roadmap for supporting FlexCast, delivering models with open architecture, and supporting the Cloud infrastructures...