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As of last Tuesday Citrix released Provisioning Server 5.1.

So.. lets take a look at the new features:

Standard Image NIC Teaming
Enables teaming of NIC’s on provisioned devices using Intel or Broadcom based NIC teaming drivers.  

This was a feature that was already available for private image mode, but is now also available for standard image mode. Especially needful in high available environments where XenApp is being provisioned.

This is actually an extremely cool feature! This greatly simplifies the process of upgrading the Provisioning Server client software, where you normally had to reverse image the vDisk to a physical harddisk in order to make changes to the Provisioning Server client drivers. You can now directly boot the vDisk in either XenServer or Hyper-V and just make the changes right there!

User Assigned vDisks
Selects the vDisk to stream to a provisioned system based on the user logging into it.

Important to know here is that during boot time the user is asked for username and domain. There is no password authentication in this functionality. The user assigned vDisks feature is only meant to identify the user and assigning the right image. This feature can be useful for schools so that students don’t have to choose their image from a menu, but get the correct image by just typing in their username.

Offline Database Support
Allows for continued operation of Provisioning Services hosts and provisioned systems in the event of a database failure or outage. 

What happens here, is that al Provisioning Services hosts have their own cached database stored locally so that when the database server fails, new booting systems can still be mapped to the correct image. During this time the PVS hosts may not be rebooted! Sounds pretty formilliar....Local Host Cache anybody?

Server Maintenance Mode
Provides a mechanism to place a Provisioning Services host into “maintenance mode”, automatically moving streaming sessions to other hosts in the farm.

Can be pretty usefull, before this release you had to just stop the streaming service so all devices would failover to the other hosts.

Multiple Partition vDisks
Enables imaging of systems that have multiple physical or logical drives into a single vDisk. 

XenConvert 2.0 is now being used for the Image Build process. XenConvert gives you the opportunity to convert up to 4 volumes to your vDisk.

Read Only vDisk Storage
Improves system performance by allowing VHD’s to be deployed on read-only volumes, reducing disk I/O. 

I don’t exactly know what is being meant here. But it looks like with this feature you’re now able to host your vDisk on SAN volumes directly attached to your PVS hosts without the need for a product like Sanbolic MelioFS.

Is there anybody that can confirm this?

Auditing and Enhanced Logging
Provides enhanced ability to monitor system and administrator activity. 

Yet another step to becoming a really mature product.

XP Embedded Streaming
Provides ability to build and stream XP Embedded images used by thin client machines. 

This is quite a nice feature for companies using Windows XP Embedded thinclients. Now you’re able to provision desktops, terminal servers and thinclients all with the same product.

Also take a look at this Q&A about the new release: