The blog..

So.. Citrix and Microsoft announced a joint venture a while back. They wanted to give their customers the opportunity to deliver microsoft core components and WAN optimization to smaller branch offices. And well, this is nothing new, however the thought was to deliver these ressources to the branch office in a simple way, even in case of a WAN outage, and it would seem they succeeded.

The Citrix Branch Repeater delivers things like:

• DHCP
• Domain Authentication(Domain Controller role)
• DNS
• DFS, Giving the opportunity to deliver shares to branch offices but only having to worry about Backup centrally.
• WAN optimization based on WANScaler technology(requires WANScaler og Branch Repeater on the other end)
• Staging of XenApp Streaming packages allowing users to launch streamed applications without having to fetch the package over the WAN.

All these features are based on a Windows Server 2003 R2 and management will be done centrally and integrated with WMI and fully integrated with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. All this allows for the CBR’s to be administrated centrally.

And on the connectivity side of things Citrix has listened and to set it up, it is mainly to just connect it to the network infrastructure. IP could be configured before shipping from the Datacenter.

Citrix Branch Repeater is available in 3 models at the moment

The Citrix Branch Repeater also comes with an optional extra for ISA server web caching and i think it would be safe to assume we will see even more options in the future.

Rumors would indicate this appliance is going to have competition from other vendors like Cisco, but for now Citrix is out and with the best product.

And as i have not seen it yet i will not go into too much detail but rumor has it that next generation is going to have XenApp ICA Optimization!! what do you know, the protocol that could not be optimized is now being optimized by a factor 10?.. I will write more on this when i see it in action but again, just a factor 2 would be nice for some locations.

/Rene Vester