’Tis the season for holiday markets, snow days, family gatherings, and, one of my favorite things — gifts. I love getting gifts as much as the next person, but I love giving gifts even more. That’s why I am happy to announce that the Citrix Hypervisor team is giving you the gift of Citrix Hypervisor 8.1!
And you can get Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 Express Edition for free!
Regardless of whether you host your infrastructure on premises or in a hybrid-cloud deployment with Citrix Cloud, Citrix Hypervisor is optimized for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. And, the best part is, if you have any service offering of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, you’re already entitled to Citrix Hypervisor.
The gifts just keep coming!
What’s New
As with every Citrix Hypervisor release, we introduce quality improvements and new features. This release is no exception, with enhancements to security, user experience, and new feature insights.
With Citrix Hypervisor 8.1, we officially announced support for Guest UEFI boot, as well as secure boot. Whether your VM is running Windows 10, Windows Server 2016, or Windows Server 2019, you can now boot in UEFI mode. This functionality can significantly improve logon times for your users by reducing the Windows VM boot times.
We have also amped up security with these updates by introducing support for UEFI Secure Boot. This capability prevents incorrect binaries from being executed during the boot process, blocking malware from entering the environment before the OS is booted. Additionally, UEFI boot uses a modern device model and legacy-free firmware to reduce boot times and get your users online more quickly.
This release also comes with exciting updates for our graphics-intensive users. We’re now supporting multiple NVIDIA vGPUs on one virtual machine within Citrix Hypervisor. This allows a VM to access more than one GPU to scale application performance and dramatically speed up production workflows. This enhanced capability is available on both Windows and Linux platforms.
We take pride in continuing to make the lives of IT admins easier. That’s why we continue to make enhancements to notifications within the XenCenter management console. Moving forward, you’ll be notified when your deployment is no longer eligible for updates or has reached end of life.
The notification may look like the screenshot below, but will differ based on your deployment:
No matter what your deployment looks like, these new insights will help keep you proactive and on the latest and greatest version of Citrix Hypervisor.
Give It a Try!
Want to get your hands on the gift that keeps on giving? Download Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 today! If you’re a Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops customer, you can download Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 from the Citrix downloads page. All you need to do is point it to your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops license server.
Or if you want to get a closer look at Citrix Hypervisor and talk to an expert, request a demo of Citrix Hypervisor Premium edition to see all of the features of Citrix Hypervisor in action.
