Citrix have released this awesome whitepaper Citrix XenServer Design: Designing XenServer Network  Configurations

Original it was created back in August 2011 and now its updated to XenServer 6.1 that includes informations about LACP bounding, and networking for Storage XenMotion. Now its updated Its a MUST read if you are designing Citrix XenServer environments so go ahead make your day.. eat Xen for breakfast

A short introduction to the Whitepaper

This guide helps you understand design your XenServer networking and design a networking configuration for XenServer environments. It includes the following topics:

• Best practice information about the management interface, NIC bonding, jumbo frames, and storage networks
• High-level information about features you may want to enable as part of your networking configuration, such as the Distributed Virtual Switch solution
• The correct sequence in which to configure XenServer networking, including guidance about cabling XenServer hosts and connecting them to physical switches
• Checklists to help you gather requirements for your XenServer networking configuration

Audience

Before reading this guide, you should have a basic knowledge of networking. This guide has several audiences:

• Systems Architects. Systems architects who are designing a virtualized environment.
• Infrastructure Engineers and Network Administrators. Networking and storage professionals who configure storage or manage the Layer 2 network infrastructure in their organizations.
• Application Administrators. XenApp and XenDesktop administrators who are implementing a virtualization solution to virtualize Citrix products, IT infrastructure, or other applications they manage.

This guide assumes that you are familiar with basic XenServer concepts, including XenServer installation, XenCenter, resource pools, and the pool master.

Purpose of the Guide

This guide is meant to provide you with the best-practice information you need to design your XenServer networks.

To provide you with the foundation you need to understand the recommendations, the first half of the guide provides an explanation of XenServer networking concepts using a scenario-based approach.

The second half of the guide provides you with information to help you select between various XenServer networking options and information about the best ways to configure them.

Because this is a design guide, it generally does not provide configuration instructions except as needed to clarify concepts. As the most common way of managing XenServer and XenServer pools is through XenCenter, this guide mainly refers to XenCenter and XenCenter help, unless specified differently.

Read the full whitepaper under Source.

Source

Read the Whitepaper – here

Citrix Consulting have released a XenApp/XenDesktop Policy Planning Guide that is a must read for architects that design XenApp/XenDesktop solutions.

Overview

Citrix policies provide the basis to configure and fine tune your XenDesktop and XenApp environments, allowing organizations to control connection, security and bandwidth settings based on various combinations of users, devices or connection types. Correctly defining an initial baseline policy and assigning additional policies based on security requirements and specific access scenarios can be important in delivering a high definition user experience.

This planning guide is intended to be a guideline during the decision process for creating a baseline policy and additional policies based on connection, security, device and profile considerations. While it creates a baseline policy and recommendations for policy settings, it should not be assumed to be a complete configuration, or absolutely correct for every customer situation. Architects should review the recommendations contained in this document against desired outcomes within the organization to ensure requirements are met.
When making policy decisions it is important to consider both Microsoft Windows and Citrix policies as components within both policy configurations have an impact on user experience and environment optimization. Within this planning guide a base set of windows policies that can be used to optimize XenApp and XenDesktop environments is presented. For more details on specific Windows related policies, refer to the Group Policy Settings Reference for Windows and Windows Server, specifically settings related to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

To help architects design a XenDesktop and XenApp solution based on real-world projects, organizations can refer to the Citrix Desktop Transformation Accelerator for step by step assessment, design and deployment guidance, and the XenDesktop Design Handbook for reference architectures, planning guides and best practices.

Read the full whitepaper here

Conclusion

Creating policies for XenDesktop and XenApp configurations involves a combination of Citrix and Microsoft Active Directory group policy settings. Correctly configuring a baseline policy configuration and keeping policy exceptions to a minimum allows organizations to create an environment that meets user experience and security requirements, while providing a policy structure that is easy to review and diagnose. This planning guide has provided a suggested set of policies as a starting point for a XenDesktop or XenApp configuration. It can be used as a basis for architects to customize an initial policy configuration for an organization.

Source

Download the Policy Planning Guide for XenApp, XenDesktop here

Citrix Worldwide Consulting Solutions have created this awesome whitepaper that i recommend you read if you are using Citrix in your organisation and want to optimize your support levels with better support methodes, tools and tier levels. This is one of the best whitepapers i have seen from Citrix Consulting and i recommend that you read the entire whitepaper and then try to build your own Operations Guide for your company where you use this whitepaper as a guide, wiki.

This whitepaper applies to XenApp, XenDesktop, Provisioning.

/Poppelgaard

Summary

When implementing Citrix environments, support and maintenance aspects for new farms often get overlooked. Effectively maintaining a Citrix environment necessitates reliable systems be in place to ensure smooth day to day operations. This document covers main duties involved in maintaining of Citrix infrastructures.

This white paper covers the following 3 sections:

• Support – When problems arise, technical support often is the first point of contact for issue resolution.  This section addresses the proper staffing, organization,  training, and tools utilized in effective support organizations.

• Testing and Change Control – Regular upgrades are required to ensure a farm environment is up to date. Change management processes are critical to ensure improvements are properly approved, tested, and validated by appropriate parties.  This section covers the proper processes that ensure changes in production environments are deliberate, proven, and accountable.

• Ongoing Operations – Maintenance, issue prevention and resolution are core responsibilities in running a Citrix infrastructure. When the responsibilities and assignments are structured properly, friction is kept to a minimum, reducing issues and their resolution times. This section discusses routine operations that Citrix environments require for optimal performance.

Source

Read the full Citrix whitepaper – Operations Guide : Support and Maintenance here.

Hi All

I wanna share this great article with you that Nick Rintalan from Citrix Consulting have wrote.

Nick have wrote multiple articles about Citrix Provisioning Services if you should virtulize PVS or not.
I really enjoy Nick’s article and that he shares he’s knowledge from the field. If you are working with Citrix Provisioning Services and you havent read any of Nicks articles before then go ahead and jump in. Its a must read about PVS.

Here is some of Nicks important quote from his article: (Read the full article to get a better understanding)

• if you are running a 10 Gb network, you will have a hard time saturating your network with PVS unless you are doing thousands and thousands of streams!  And I’ve seen a lot of production PVS implementations…we only have a few customers that fall into this category.
• Other folks might say to segment the PVS traffic to alleviate issues related to PXE, DHCP or TFTP.  With proper network design and manageable broadcast domains, many of the DHCP issues can be mitigated.  And I still find many customers and partners don’t know about our swiss army knife – BDM!  Instead of dealing with “fun” PXE traffic and trying desperately to load balance TFTP, simply boot from an ISO with BDM and you’ll eliminate a lot of the networking complexity associated with PVS deployments.
• separating PVS streaming traffic is no longer a best practice for the vast majority of our deployments.
• it might make sense –security.  The separation of traffic (whether it’s at the VLAN level or physical) reduces the possibility of someone getting into that precious streaming traffic and messing with i

Source

Read the article – Is Isolating the PVS Streaming Traffic Really a Best Practise here.

Citrix Consulting have released this awesome whitepaper that is a most read if you are an consultant, architect, administrator or you would like to learn how to design, implement XenApp / XenDesktop with the best practise advise from citrix consulting.

Overview

The foundation of any good XenDesktop or XenApp enterprise design should be adherence to a collection of best practices which are based upon knowledge gathered from previous enterprise deployments, lab validations, and lessons learned in the field. Such best practices are just a starting point for a design, as an organization’s specific design requirements will often necessitate deviation from the recommended path. By using the following recommendations as a starting point, the foundation of the design will be robust enough to support many different deployment scenarios.

This document consolidates and summarizes the best practices for XenApp and XenDesktop environments. As products evolve, best practices also change, which is why each best practice discussed in this document is associated with a specific product and version, which includes the
following:

• XenDesktop 5.0, 5.5, 5.6
• XenApp 6.0, 6.5

Additional best practices are provided for those products which provide complimentary functionality to both XenDesktop and XenApp, including:

• Citrix Provisioning Services
• Citrix XenServer
• Citrix Profile Manager
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• VMware vSphere

For further guidance and more detailed information, please refer to the XenDesktop Design Handbook.
The recommendations provided within this document may not be appropriate for every environment. Therefore, all best practices within this document should be evaluated in an isolated test environment prior to being implemented in production.

Caution: Some of the best practices in this document will require you to edit the registry. Using Registry Editor incorrectly can cause serious problems that might require you to reinstall your operating system. Citrix cannot guarantee that problems resulting from the incorrect use of Registry Editor can be solved. Use Registry Editor at your own risk. Be sure to back up the registry before you edit it

Source

Download Best practise whitepaper on XenDesktop / XenApp here