VanBragt.Net Virtualization

Failover (im)possibilities of XenDesktop 7.x Part 7 After the XenDesktop 7.13/14 release

Details: Published: 25 July 2017

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).

Determine the amount of users for XenDesktop/XenApp

Details: Published: 14 June 2017

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.

Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp 7.x LTSR or CR, which one to choose?

Details: Published: 02 May 2017

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.

Unattended Installation scripts XenDesktop 7.x Part 5

Details: Published: 16 March 2017

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.

Load Balancing Citrix Delivery Controllers via a Load Balancer necessity?

Details: Published: 16 February 2017

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.

Failover (im)possibilities of XenDesktop 7.x Part 6 After the XenDesktop 7.12 release

Details: Published: 31 January 2017

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).

Installing and configuring Citrix XenDesktop Linux VDA

Details: Published: 12 January 2017

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.

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