Citrix has made good on their promises for their next iteration in their products, but sometimes it can be tricky to find what you’re looking for. You can find the Provisioning Services download under the XenApp or XenDesktop product headers: https://www.citrix.com/downloads/xendesktop/product-software/xendesktop-79-platinum.html
Some highlights for XenApp and XenDesktop 7.9 – From “What’s New”
Microsoft SQL Express LocalDB 2014 is installed automatically when you install a Delivery Controller. This software is not used for the Site, monitoring, or logging databases. There is no administrator interaction with this database. To prohibit its installation, install the Controller with the XenDesktopServerSetup.exe command with the /exclude ‘Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Express LocalDB’ option.
- Nutanix provisioning from Studio (MCS)
- MCS Cache-in-RAM
- Application Groups
- SAML Authentication – See Federated Authentication Service and Carl Stalhood’s walkthrough on config
- Logon Duration improvements
- Storefront 3.6 –
- Load balance non-identical farms. In previous StoreFront versions when creating equivalent farm sets using a multisite configuration, all resources had to be published by every delivery controller for load balancing to succeed. The resource enumeration process where StoreFront obtained a list of available resources contacted only one of the delivery controllers in the equivalent farm set. In StoreFront 3.6, you can have some resources that are common to all delivery controllers in the equivalent farm set and some that are published only by specific delivery controllers. You can now set StoreFront to enumerate from all of them.
It is finally possible to update a BDM. \o/
All in all, 7.9 looks like a seriously solid release. Time to take them for a test drive!