Citrix VDI-in-a-Box Project Curacao will be released as VDI-in-a-Box 5.3 as of June 2013.

According to Gene Schmidt , this release shares some important Citrix technologies with XenDesktop 7. This means:

‘’VDI-in-a-Box is staying current:  Interested in a move to
Windows 8? VDI-in-a-Box 5.3 now supports Windows 8, just like XenDesktop; Personal vDisks are now supported on Windows 8, as well as Windows 7; and you get to take advantage of the DirectX and other video improvements provided the latest HDX technologies. And it doesn’t matter what hypervisor you want to use, as we support the latest version of XenServer, as well as Hyper-V and vSphere. If you’ve been contemplating a move to Server 2012, VDI-in-a-Box 5.3 now supports it as virtual desktop with native support of VHD and the new VHDX formats.

VDI-in-a-Box continues enhancing its integration with other Citrix products : Citrix NetScaler/Access Gateway now allows your users to sign into Access Gateway, and their credentials are passed directly to VDI-in-a-Box. The IT folks will love the informational improvements to the Image Distributing Troubleshooting Tool, as well as the centralized collection of log files – instead of having to pull them individually from each server in the grid. We also tweaked the product internals quite a bit to make VDI-in-a-Box 5.3 much more robust, and with higher performance.

VDI-in-a-Box 5.3 enhances the overall IT experience:  There have been a number of improvements focused on making IT’s job simpler. We created an SSL certificate installation user interface that vastly improves the experience when dealing with the certificates. With the new Universal Print Server – the same as XenDesktop, you no longer need to load multiple network print drivers on your images. Even the End User License Agreement (EULA) acceptance process has been improved (it’s is now done in-product, consistent with other Citrix products).’’ Has reported Gene Schmidt.