Key differences between XenApp and Excalibur

In moving from a traditional XenApp environment to Excalibur, you find the following
key differences:

- Citrix Studio instead of Delivery Services Console. In Excalibur, you use Studio to
configure your environments and provide users with access to applications and
desktops.

- No IMA data store. Excalibur does not use the IMA data store as the central
database in which to store configuration information. Instead, it uses a Microsoft
SQL Server database as the data store for both configuration and session
information. This means:

• Database requirements are different: Microsoft Access and Oracle are no longersupported databases.

• Terminal Services (Remote Desktop Services) is no longer required on servers running the controller.

• There is no dedicated zone master. In XenApp, there is a zone master or datacollector responsible for user connection requests and communication with hypervisors. In this release, this function is distributed evenly across all controllers in the site.

• If you require high availability or disaster recovery for Microsoft SQL Server you
  can configure clustering or mirroring, or deploy the database as a virtual
  machine and use your hypervisor's high availability features instead.

- Delegated Administration. In XenApp, you can create custom administrators and
assign them permissions based on folders and objects. In this release, you can
create custom administrators whose permissions are based on role and scope pairs.
A role represents a job function and has defined permissions associated with it. A
scope represents a collection of objects. You use scope to group objects in a way
that is relevant to your organization (for example, the set of desktop groups used by
the Sales team). This release also offers several built-in administrator roles (other
than the full administrator role), such as help desk, applications, hosting, and
catalog. Each of these built-in roles includes specific management permissions. For
more information, see the topic "Delegated administration" in the document Project
Avalon Excalibur Technology Preview.

- No Shadow Taskbar. To view and interact with other users' sessions remotely, you
use the shadow feature launched from Director console.

- Sites instead of Farms. In this release, the XenApp "farms" are known as "sites."