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Citrix drizzles lightly and briefly on VMware's parade with Xen update

Xen App and Desktop get refreshes and native Chrome OS Receiver returns

Citrix swears blind that the 7.6 release of XenApp and Xen Desktop it announced today had nuh-think at all to do with the fact VMware's VMworld colosso-conference kicks off on Sunday.

“It is a release that has been planned for a while,” insists product marketing veep for desktop and apps Calvin Hsu. “This is our second half of the year release.”

And it is a decent release on a few fronts.

Perhaps the most notable addition is a revival of Citrix's intentions to offer a Chrome OS version of its Receiver app, a decision Hsu said was taken because HTML5 alone has proven incapable of doing all the things Citrix needs it to do when piping apps and desktops into Chromebooks, largely because it is rubbish at understanding the device it runs on.

Another, entirely new feature, is “pre-launch”, which fires up sessions and apps ahead of those times of day when lots of users log on. A related update, “session linger”, preserves authentication so that users don't need to type in their credentials as often as is sometimes the case today.

There's also a new anonymous login facility, which Hsu said is designed to help professionals like doctors who hop from device to device to log in without having to enter all their credentials every time. We're waiting for details on just how that works.

Hsu also told us the company is pursuing both the federal information processing standards (FIPS) and Common Criteria Standards for its products.

On the VDI front, the company is making much of the fact that it can deliver lots of desktops at speed with commodity hardware – instead of requiring more complex and costly kit.

That's a swipe at VMware The Reg suspects Virtzilla will address, and then some, at VMworld. ®

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