Citrix Presentation Server

The Citrix Presentation Server name came into existence with version 3.0 of the product, a major improvement to the existing Citrix MetaFrame XP product, which was available for Windows 2003 as well as Windows 2000.

Key new features included the introduction of a centralised licensing service, managed using web based licensing management console.

Improved delegation of administrative roles by controlling what aspects of the management console certain administrators had, in essence removing the blanket access to all areas management available to administrators in previous versions.

Session Reliability was introduced, allowing sessions to be paused (hour glass symbol appeared as a mouse pointer) instead of users being disconnected or reset, whilst the connectivity was being restored in the background.

The Citrix Policies introduced in the previous version's Feature Release 3, were improved to a point where they could actually be used effectively, providing greater control over applications and Citrix farms.

Application Isolation was introduced, allowing applications components such as executables, DLLs and other application files to run in their own 'sand box' type environment, without affecting other applications installed on the same Presentation Server. This approach allowed some applications with different versions to coexist on the same Citrix server.

Some applications which required a dedicated IP address, could be use the new Virtual IP functionality, tricking them in a sense to behave as though they were installed on a machine with a dedicated IP address.

The printing engine was changed to one based on Enhanced MetaFile (EMF) standard, allowing the Universal Print Driver to be more robust and versatile in challenging printing environments.

With the introduction of Memory and CPU optimisation, processor usage could assigned to applications could be controlled more effectively and memory utilisation improved using DLL rebasing techniques.

Citrix Presentation Server 4.5

Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 introduced the Advanced Management Console (AMC), moving some functionality away from the Citrix Presentation Server Console, however some tasks still had to be done on the existing console and many administrators found having to use two consoles cumbersome.

Application Streaming was introduced, where the application executables, DLLs and other application files were packaged and sent directly to the client machines. Where they were cached locally on the hard drive and run, allowing applications to use local resources without having any performance impact on the Presentation Servers.

Citrix MetaFrame 1.8

Citrix couldn't license Windows NT v4.0 from Microsoft, so agreed to work with Microsoft to develop Microsoft's Windows NT Terminal Server Edition (TSE). Citrix kept hold of it's own extensions to TSE, which were marketed as Citrix MetaFrame v1.8. This extension allowed additional functionality and used a different communications protocol developed by Citrix called Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) protocol.

The ICA protocol used UDP, a connectionless transport protocol which therefore farms based in same subnet and had to use gateways for communication between different farms in different subnets.

MetaFrame 1.8 was offered as a base product from Citrix with additional features such as Load Balancing Services (LBS), Resource Management Services (RMS) and Installation Management Services (IMS) available as add-ons for extra cost.

Citrix MetaFrame XP

MetaFrame XP was made available for Windows NT TSE as well as Windows 2000 and was packaged differently, with a single base product being replaced by three different versions, XP standard (XPs), XP Advanced (XPa) and XP Enterprise (XPe), each with different levels of functionality, with the top end XPe version coming with RMS and IMS as well as load balancing as standard.

MetaFrame XP also did away with UDP connectionless communication as sole connection mechanism and used TCP communication which due to it's routable nature, did away with the need for Citrix ICA Gateways and allowed farms to spread over multiple subnets. To further enhance manageability of the XP farms, Zones were introduced, to allow servers to be logically broken down into groups, which could be based on location.

With Feature Release 3, Citrix introduced Citrix Policies, which allowed Subscription Advantage customers to benefit from configuring changes to applications and farms, using policies rather than relying on various Citrix tools.

Citrix WinFrame

The original product in the thin client (server based computing) line for Microsoft Windows, where Citrix licensed Microsoft Windows NT 3.51 code and enhanced it to provide a multi-user capable version of Windows NT, which Citrix released as Citrix WinFrame.