Citrix IMA vs. FMA… XenDesktop components and terminology cheat sheet

This post is meant to provide you with a quick comparison, a cheat sheet if you will, between the two architectures. As you all (should) know by now, with the introduction of XenDesktop 7.x XenApp became part of the Flexcast Management Architecture, or FMA in short, and with this came certain terminology and conceptual changes. Here I would like to show you how each former 6.5 (IMA) XenApp component has its equivalent in the FMA world. Although technically there are some differences, on the functional side of things there is not much between them. To be clear, I’m not focusing on features that are in IMA and (still) not in FMA.

Just short of two weeks ago I attended Citrix Synergy in Orlando and as expected a lot of new technologies, features and products were announced / released. I wrote this article a few weeks prior to Synergy but I wasn’t sure if it was wise to publish it so close to the Synergy kick-off. Because, to be honest, I expected a few changes to XenDesktop / XenApp / FMA to be announced which might have interfered with the overview below, if you know what I mean. But now that Synergy is over, unless I missed something, the XenApp / XenDesktop FMA seems unchanged, for the bigger part anyway. So without further ado.

Hope this helped. In case you would like an offline reference, I made a simple .PDF as well.

You can download it here.

Part of the -1000 blog series.

Bas van Kaam

Field CTO EMEA by day, author by night @ Nerdio

Father of three, EMEA Field CTO @ Nerdio, Author of the book Van de Basis tot aan Meester in de Cloud, Co-author of the book Project Byte-Sized and Yuthor of the book: Inside Citrix – The FlexCast Management Architecture, over 500 blog posts and multiple (ultimate) cheat sheets/e-books. Public speaker, sport enthusiast­­­­­­­­: above-average runner, 3 x burpee-mile finisher and a former semiprofessional snooker player. IT community participant and initiator of the AVD User group Community world wide.