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XenDesktop was born in 2008 as version 2 and is currently at version 5.6. From Citrix this is their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure offering that gives each user their own Windows XP or Windows 7 desktop. The ICA protocol is used as with the XenApp product but the connections supported are single session rather than multi-session ICA connections in XenApp.
Citrix market this as “beyond VDI”, users can connect to physical machines using ICA. This may be because they need access to powerful blade style desktops that are not convenient or desirable to have on the desktop. Mostly though, VDI is used and your Virtual machine servers can be XenServer, VMWARE or Hyper-V
In this first lesson we take a look at the Proof of Concept deployment of XenDesktop or the Quick Deploy where all the server options are installed on a single host. This is, as the name suggests, simple one step wizard to show XD but is not designed to be used beyond the PoC stage of your deployment where the components would be separated out onto dedicated hardware.