Citrix 2-5 FMA

FMA stands for Flexcast Management Architecture and is the desktop delivery architecture introduced with XenDesktop. It was designed to deliver applications and desktops in many different ways: as a hosted shared session on a server OS, as an application hosted by a virtual machine, as a VDI desktop, or even as remote access to a physical PC. The same idea as XenApp, but instead of a single server OS hosting many users, you can also publish an application from a Windows desktop OS like XP, Windows 7 or Windows 8.

If you publish an application from a desktop OS VM, the relationship is one-to-one between that VM and the user, so to host one hundred users you must provision one hundred VMs. That can sound like a drawback, but it gives you the flexibility to move legacy applications that only run on XP or Windows 7 out of your physical fleet. Flexcast also supports delivering an entire desktop, either as a VDI or as a shared hosted desktop running on a server OS.

What FMA introduces

• Remote PC access: users keep their physical office workstation and reach it through the same Citrix portal they already use, replacing a classic VPN.
• Role separation: the Delivery Controller is the infrastructure piece you install on its own server, not on every XenApp box.
• VDA (Virtual Delivery Agent): the software installed on each desktop, server or physical PC that registers with the Delivery Controller.
• Single management plane: the Delivery Controller routes incoming users to the right resource (VDI, shared desktop, published application or remote PC).

Thanks to this clear separation of roles, FMA is far more flexible than IMA. It lays the foundation for the convergence of XenApp and XenDesktop into a single product line. In the next video we will look at what XenApp actually is.