XenDesktop^? 5.0 and FlexCast^? Management Architecture

In 2010, Citrix released XenDesktop 5.0 designed with a completely revamped new framework architecture called FMA (FlexCast Management Architecture). FMA is primarily comprised of the delivery controller, the server side component, the virtual desktop agent, the client side component. This greatly simplified and the XenDesktop setup compared to the previous version of XenDesktop, which was based on IMA. We'll discuss the FMA components, including the delivery controller and the virtual desktop agent in the next section.

Here is how FMA addressed the scalability limitations with the previous IMA:

• To overcome the IMA data store database scalability limitations, FMA has been designed and developed on the standard relational database featuring the Microsoft SQL. This has let the XenDesktop administrators leverage the enterprise capabilities of the SQL server, such as redundancy, backup, high availability, and scalability.
• In FMA, the entire configuration and dynamic data were saved in the central SQL database and there was no LHC that had to be maintained on the member server. With this, the controllers were made truly stateless and there was no need for the master controllers. Thus, in FMA, all the controllers are equal and you can scale XenDesktop to any of the larger deployments.