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Citrix Virtual Desktop Handbook 7.x

Citrix Virtual Desktop handbook

Citrix Virtual Desktop Handbook 7.x

Citrix Worldwide Consulting have released a whitepaper called Citrix Virtual Desktop Handbook 7.x, its a 150 pages document that is a “MUST READ” document if you are about to design and implement Citrix XenDesktop 7.

About Citrix Virtual Desktop Handbook 7.x

Introduction

In traditional business environments, workers suffer from productivity loss in many ways, including  downtime during PC refreshes, patches and updates, or simply when they are away from the office.  Application and desktop virtualization centralizes apps and desktops in the datacenter, rather than on local devices. This allows IT to deliver apps and desktops to users on demand, to any device, anywhere. Take the following response from a desktop virtualization user:

Unfortunately, organizations sometimes struggle to achieve this level of success. Why does one organization succeed while another organization struggles? If we compare the factors between success and failure between desktop virtualization and other technology related projects, we see that there is little difference:

  1. Lack of justification – Without a solid business reason, desktop virtualization is simply a new way to deliver a desktop. A business justification gives the project team a goal to strive towards.
  2. Lack of a methodology – Many people who try and struggle to deploy a desktop virtualization solution do so because they jump right in without understanding or implementing the appropriate prerequisites. A structured methodology provides the path for the project.
  3. Lack of experience – For many who embark on a desktop virtualization project, there is a lack of experience, which creates a lack of confidence in the design. Architects begin to second-guess themselves and the project stalls.

Our hope is that this handbook can alleviate the anxiety associated with desktop virtualization by showing how challenges can be resolved in a manner that is technically sound, but also feasible and effective for organizations facing deadlines and other organizational challenges.

Citrix Consulting has successfully employed the methodology, experience and best practices shared within this handbook across thousands of desktop virtualization projects.

The Citrix Virtual Desktop 5.x and Virtual Desktop 7.x handbooks are not the only resource to guide you through the desktop virtualization journey. Citrix also provides Project Accelerator; an interactive online tool creating customized sizing and design recommendations based on the methodology, best practices and expert advice identified within this handbook.

Source

CTX139690 – Download Citrix Virtual Desktop 7.x handbook here

thomas poppelgaard CTP & MVP

Citrix technology professional – CTP, and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional MVP, Thomas Poppelgaard provides professional services. Write to me on my email thomas@poppelgaard.com or call on my cell +45 53540356

Whitepaper – Designing XenServer Network Configurations

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

Whitepaper – Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop Policy Planning Guide

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 Whitepaper – Operations Guide: Support and Maintenance

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.

 

Citrix Consulting – Should you isolate the PVS Streaming traffic or not.

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.