XenApp 6 first look

Here are a few snippets gleaned from the XenApp 6 Tech Preview:

• No mixed farms. Citrix will provide a migration utility that will suck out the details from your existing farm and import them to your new XA6 farm. You can then use Web Interface to provide a seamless migration between your existing farm and the new XA6 farm.
• Server groups allow published applications to assigned to servers automatically. You can provision a new server (using Provisioning Service of course) add it to an AD OU and it will then automatically inherit the published applications available via the server group assigned to that OU. This makes adding new servers to your farm so much faster – especially if you use Provisioning Services.
• Citrix Policies can now be applied by AD Group Policy. I’ve yet to find out how you export these so you can use them in your favourite User Workspace Management tool (Appsense, RES PowerFuse etc)
• No console for print driver management. As Advanced Management Console (aka CMC) finally bites the dust, some remaining aspects have been ported into the AMC/DSC (policies and load evaluator rules for example) and others are provided by PowerShell commands only (Printer Driver replication). I can see this causing a few issues for those used to using a console to do all their driver management as scripts and a knowledge of PowerShell will now be required.
• No Resource Manager. The Edgesight Lite (renamed to Service Monitoring) is provided instead.

That’ll do for now…will post more when I’ve had some time to play with it some more.