Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS) is already available for a pretty long time. Developed as an alternative for Citrix Provisioning Services (and a reaction to VMware Linked Clones). A topic for discussion between the MCS proponents and the PVS proponents. Loved by the easiness to use it, however also not much documentation available about it (because of the easiness??). In this article I would try to demystify Machine Creation Service, based on practical experiences with (troubleshooting) MCS at a customer.

Probably most people would say this is no brainer and actually it is. Of course the type of disks used for your VDI infrastructure matter for the user experience and performance of VDIs. In this article I will do a walk-through of a PoC where we have been required to investigate the impact of the disk performance on a VDI infrastructure.

XenServer is primarily being used as a hypervisor platform for XenDesktop VDIs. Although the installation of XenServer 7 is not really difficult it would be nice when installing multiple XenServer hosts that you can automate the installation part. In this article I will describe the possibilities of creating an (almost) unattended installation of XenServer 7.x I will both touch XenServer 7.0 (which we made of a customer. Long story about certification processes of software being used) and the latest version 7.2 (which also applies to 7.1).

In the earlier articles I wrote down how to install unattended the XenDesktop components. The article was based on the versions of XenDesktop 7.6 till XenDesktop 7.13 (dependent of the article). Currently Citrix is releasing every quarter a new version, so it’s time to update the articles with the new installation information of later release(s) based on XenDesktop/XenApp 7.14 and XenDesktop/XenApp 7.15.

In the earlier article series Failover (im)possibilities I wrote about the failover/load balancing possibilities in XenDesktop 7.x, where part 5 was about Desktop 7.12. In this article I will discuss the XenDesktop 7.13 and 7.14 release and will also go into a bit more detail what is expected in future releases (where possible).

At almost every project start one of the first questions how many users the environment can handle or how many hardware should be ordered so all users have a good user experience. It is probably the most difficult to answer at the start of a project. Probably if you give the right answer, which is it depends, you will get the question you have experiences in other organizations and aren’t there benchmarks or best practices available. In this article I will try to explain my vision that you cannot determine this at the start of the project, based on my practical experiences at several projects.

With the release of Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp (I will use XenDesktop for the further article) 7.6 FP3 Citrix introduced the Long Term Service Release (LTSR) and the Current Release (CR) lifecycles. Now we are sometime further it is good to take a look how this introduction involved and what should be considered for choosing one of the release cycles. In this article I will start describing what both releases actually means and provides the point that you should consider for choosing which release cycle for you organization.

In the earlier articles I wrote down how to install unattended the XenDesktop components. The article was based on the versions of XenDesktop 7.6 till XenDesktop 7.11 (dependent of the article). Currently Citrix is releasing every quarter a new version, so it’s time to update the articles with the new installation information of later release(s) based on XenDesktop/XenApp 7.12 and XenDesktop/XenApp 7.13.

At one of my projects we were discussing the high level design decisions and one of the discussion topics were setting-up the Delivery Controllers high available and redundant. During the talk we discussed the necessity of using Load Balancer appliances in front of the Delivery Controller. Based on that talk I thought it was a good idea to write an article about this topic including my opinion.

Logically we need to start which communication streams are being used to the Delivery Controllers which should be taken into account. Communicating to the delivery controller has three communication streams.

• Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) communication

• StoreFront communication Application enumeration/ICA file creation (XML broker)

• NetScaler (and StoreFront) STA communication

Let’s dig deeper in each communication stream.

In the earlier article series Failover (im)possibilities I wrote about the failover/load balancing possibilities in XenDesktop 7.x, where part 5 was about Desktop 7.11. In this article I will discuss the XenDesktop 7.12 release and will also go into a bit more detail what is expected in future releases (where possible).

Citrix released the Linux VDA back together with the XenDesktop 7.6. At the moment of writing the article Citrix released version 1.4 of the Linux VDA. For previous version Citrix released a PDF with the installation and configuration steps, for 1.4 this is currently only available in the edocs. Unfortunate both available options are not fully complete, are missing some steps (for some environments) and/or are using not the best commands or steps. Luckily I was at a customer with lots of Linux knowledge and we got is sorted pretty quickly. In this article I will write down the steps we configured the Linux VDA.

In the earlier article series Failover (im)possibilities <<LINK to part 4>> I wrote about the failover/load balancing possibilities in XenDesktop 7.x, where 4 was about Desktop 7.9. In this article I will discuss the XenDesktop 7.11 release and will also go into a bit more detail what is expected in future releases (where possible).

On 14 September Citrix released XenApp/XenDesktop 7.11. Each release Citrix adds several enhancements to the product. One of those enhancements is the new functionalities to the Zones component (which became available in version 7.9). The enhancement is a re-inventing of the Zone Preferences in Presentation Server 4.5/5 or Worker Groups in XenApp 6.5. In this article I will show the functionality, the configuration possibilities, how it works (in cooperation with the Application Priority) and if the functionality is fully comparable with the Zone Preferences and/or Worker Groups functionality.

In the earlier articles I wrote down how to install unattended the XenDesktop components. The article was based on the versions of XenDesktop 7.6 till XenDesktop 7.8 (dependent of the article). Currently Citrix is releasing every quarter a new version, so it’s time to update the articles with the new installation information of later release(s) based on XenDesktop/XenApp 7.9 and XenDesktop/XenApp 7.11.

Citrix Single Sign-On or Pass-through is already for a really long time. The configuration is not changed a lot in this years, however when I was configuring this at a customer it took me again some time before it was running. The configuration with the latest Receivers is changed a bit and there is not (I could not find it) total step by step guide for setting-up the Single Sign On (SSON). In this article I will write down the steps to set-up SSON including a granular way within an Enterprise organization using Citrix Receiver 4.x and XenApp/XenDesktop 7.x.