In Part one of my Citrix XenDesktop 7 installation guide we installed all of the XenDesktop 7 components on a single Windows Server 2012 VM. In this second edition we will setup the Citrix Studio site, which connects the XenDesktop 7 Studio to a database, vCenter, storage, and virtual networks....
In case you missed the announcement or my blog post last week, Citrix XenDesktop 7 finally hit the streets. It is a very major release of the product, merging XenDesktop and XenApp into a single management system. Gone are the days of a dozen or more different consoles to manage...
XenDesktop 7 is a milestone in the Citrix end user computing experience. Citrix has merged XenDesktop (VDI) with XenApp, into a consolidated set of common consoles with common policies and HDX experiences. It also features full Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, and SQL Server 2012 (with AlwaysOn clustering) support. Last...
For a recent project I've been configuring a Citrix NetScaler (which are wickedly cool) for load balancing of a web service over SSL. The web service is hosted on a Windows server using IIS, so I wanted to re-use the SSL certificate on the NetScaler. The steps to import IIS SSL certificate...
Of course after a weekend of creating my own spreadsheet to calculate my storage requirements for XenDesktop Andre Leibovici created a XenDesktop version of his View calculator. This is a great resource for sizing your storage, calculating IOPS, number of datastores, and other details. A sample of the fields is...
When sizing your storage subsystem for a VDI implementation, it's extremely critical to understand how your VMs will behave and the resulting IO load. Miscalculate and you will suffer poor performance and angry users. Oversize your array and you will waste money. However, measuring your VM performance may not be as...
When building vSphere VM templates best practices would recommend that a number of security lockdowns be incorporated into the template. There are a variety of sources for recommended lockdowns, such as the VMware vSphere 4.1 Hardening Guide. But what if you already have VMs in production that you need to lock down, or...
The Citrix NetScaler can be configured to authenticate users against a variety of sources including RADIUS, LDAP, TACACS, and PKI certificates. If you are going to use the NetScaler as an Access Gateway (proxy) between and untrusted network such as the internet and your corporate network, you will probably want...
When using a load balancer in an enterprise environment it opens up the possibilities for service level redundancy that you may not have thought of before. For example, maybe you have appliance devices on the network that can be Active Directory integrated, but only allow you to specify one LDAP...
When you install the Citrix NetScaler it comes with a self-signed certificate which is bound to the management IP interface for the purposes of encrypting management traffic. However, using self-signed certificates are not recommended in anything but a lab environment. So that means you need to install and configure the...