Citrix released Provisioning Server 5.1 today.  In addition to the standard bug fixes that you come to expect from “dot one releases” Citrix has bundled in a handful of new and interesting features.

You can easily jump over to the Citrix http://support.citrix.com/product/provsvr/psv5.1 to review the entire listing of new features but I thought I would point out a few of the features that I am most excited about.

• NIC Teaming – this is huge for environments that are taking advantage of Provisioning to physical hardware for things like XenApp servers as you can now add some redundancy at the network level.
• Offline Database Support – similar to the local host cache functionality in a XenApp environment, Provisioning Server can now survive even if connectivity to the SQL database is lost.
• Windows XP Embedded Support – streaming an operating system to a thin client… what could be better?  I can’t wait to make my own Ardence video with a room full of thin clients booting into Windows XP, Vista, 7, and Red Hat!

There are still lots of other features that have come out with this new release like the offline support with Hyper-V, user assigned vDisks, and the ability to store multiple partitions within a single vDisk.