Delaware Release Preview now includes EdgeSight functionality. Customers and partners who have downloaded the Delaware Release Preview can now download just the EdgeSight update to evaluate enhancements to application performance monitoring. And this is the first release of EdgeSight that adds support for Windows Server 2008 platform. The Release Preview quick start guide has been updated to include step by step instructions of installing the EdgeSight components.

Key new features in this release are

• Active Application Monitoring - It lets administrators monitor the responsiveness and availability of production applications being by Citrix XenApp. Simple scripts can be recorded and replayed to interact with a live application just as a user would, monitoring the time taken to complete tasks and produce alerts if the application becomes unresponsive, or unavailable. We built this functionality using EdgeSight for Load Testing technology. Existing scripts can be imported from EdgeSight for Load Testing or new scripts can be recorded within the Active Application Monitoring console.

• New UI design for easier troubleshooting
  • Farm Monitor - View the status of farms, folders and servers using the same topology created in the Access Management Console.
  • User Trouble-shooter - Enter a users' name to identify their sessions and applications. All performance information is retrieved in the context of that session's start and stop time and resources used to simplify the identification of performance problems
  • Report Browser - Quickly find all reports related to a specific metric such a CPU, Memory or Network

• Enhanced XenApp integration
  • ICA Channel Instrumentation -  Enables an administrator to view the bandwidth being consumed by each of the virtual channels within ICA enabling the cause of high utilization to be identified.
  • Health Assistant Integration - All Health Assistant alerts are now displayed in the EdgeSight console

And XenApp Enterprise edition customers can use this release to evaluate the resource management functionality.

Resource Manager has been a feature of XenApp Enterprise edition since MetaFrame/WinFrame days. At a high level, it monitors your XenApp servers and farm and provides visibility into the health of your XenApp environment. With our acquisition of Reflectent, we now have EdgeSight technology that not only does server monitoring but also monitors the applications and the experience of the end users who are accessing the applications. The common question I heard when we acquired Reflectent was "What are you going to do with Resource Manager?". You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out. So here is the long version of that answer.

Resource Manager on Windows Server 2008

For our upcoming XenApp on Windows Server 2008 release (Project Delaware), we will be re-architecting Resource Manager with EdgeSight technology. Instead of maintaining 2 different technology platforms for similar functionality, we are retiring the existing IMA based Resource Manager technology and replacing it with EdgeSight technology. This way Enterprise edition customers can retain their existing resource management functionality and get some additional functionality when they transition to the EdgeSight platform. Remember that Platinum customers still get the entire EdgeSight for XenApp functionality and resource management is just a subset of it (we will have the Enterprise vs. Platinum feature set comparison table when we release Delaware). Hence the same EdgeSight platform can enable resource management functionality or the full application performance monitoring functionality based on the XenApp license type.

Resource Manager on Windows Server 2003

Since there are thousands of customers using existing IMA based Resource Manager on Windows Server 2003, we will still be maintaining and supporting it but will not be adding new functionality. Since the upcoming EdgeSight release will support both 2003 & 2008 Windows platforms, XenApp Enterprise edition customers on Windows Server 2003 should plan to start migrating to the EdgeSight platform.