Chapter 1, Planning Desktop Virtualization, provides an overview of desktop virtualization and the associated components. This includes an overview of the building blocks of VDI and determining the right fit for your environment.

Chapter 2, Defining Your Desktop Virtualization Environment, focuses on understanding the business requirements and driving factors of your virtual desktop strategy, including creating use cases by understanding your users and applications as well as planning your overall VDI strategy.

Chapter 3, Designing Your Infrastructure, explains how to design and scale the core infrastructure to host your XenApp solution. This involves creating high-level reference architectures and planning the virtual, physical, networking, and storage infrastructures.

Chapter 4, Designing Your Access Layer, explains how to design the Access layer components, including NetScaler and StoreFront, delving into the design specifics and identifying any constraints.

Chapter 5, Designing Your Application Delivery Layer, explains how to design the Application Delivery layer components, including all of the XenApp site design elements such as controllers, session hosts, Delivery Groups, and application publishing models.

Chapter 6, Designing Your Virtual Image Delivery, focuses on workload imaging services and delivery. This includes an overview of Provisioning Services and Machine Creation Services as well as best practices and recommendations.

Chapter 7, Designing Your Supporting Infrastructure Components, focuses on the remaining supporting components for the XenApp solution, including licensing, database requirements, monitoring services, and print services.

Chapter 8, Optimizing Your XenApp^® Solution, focuses on the auxiliary components that can be used to further optimize and customize the XenApp environment. This includes profile management, Citrix policies, Active Directory policies, and printing considerations.

Chapter 9, Implementing Your XenApp^® Solution, covers the final steps to implement a XenApp solution. It focuses on building the desktop and applications for delivery, capacity planning, load testing, user acceptance testing, and production rollout planning.

This is based on Citrix XenApp 7.5 Platinum Edition and all its associated components, including StoreFront 2.5, License Server 11.11, and Provisioning Services 7.1. We will also take a look at XenServer 6.0.2, Citrix NetScaler 10.1, Microsoft SQL Server 2012, and Microsoft File Services.

In order to recreate the steps in this manual, you will need a minimum of two Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012 systems, preferably more. You will also need the downloadable Citrix XenApp 7.5 media from www.citrix.com.

This book is written for Citrix engineers, Citrix architects, virtualization consultants, and IT project managers. It is assumed that the reader has some prior experience with Citrix XenApp and related technologies or with desktop virtualization. However, prior experience is not required to understand the main concepts and flow of the material presented.

This book attempts to balance technical detail and business logic. Each topic is written using an easy-to-follow guide based on real-world experience and explains the reasoning behind the recommended design decisions.

Before we delve too deep into desktop virtualization solutions, you need to first understand more about Citrix XenApp. Citrix XenApp was previously known as Citrix Presentation Server. Prior to that, it was also known as Citrix MetaFrame Server and Citrix WinFrame Server. You may hear some of these other terms or see them mentioned in other articles or legacy documentation. With the introduction of Citrix XenDesktop 7, XenApp and XenDesktop were merged into a common code base. The material presented in this book for XenApp 7.5 applies to XenDesktop 7.5 environments as well.

Citrix XenApp operates on top of Microsoft Remote Desktop Services, also known as Terminal Services or Remote Desktop Session Host. XenApp contains its own management suite (called Studio) as well as its own transportation protocol (ICA, short for Independent Computing Architecture). The combination of management and streamlined protocol has allowed Citrix to maintain status as the industry leader in application and desktop virtualization. Combining this with other products of Citrix allows enterprises to create secure and scalable virtualization solutions.

In its most simplistic form, Citrix virtualization is about enabling users to use their applications from any device anywhere. If a user is not able to use his/her applications effectively, then there is little point to virtualization. Even in a traditional desktop environment, Citrix can be leveraged to deliver applications to users in a secure and scalable fashion.

In most environments, XenApp can deliver the entire desktop and application set. In other environments, you may see a mix of XenApp and XenDesktop, as shown in the following figure:

The distribution of XenApp and XenDesktop in VDI consulting engagements

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "This was accomplished by placing the application in a folder called VDIOnly and hiding this folder."

A block of code is set as follows:

select UserID, StartDate, MachineID from [MonitorData].[Session]
where userID = 2
order by StartDate DESC

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

# cp /usr/src/asterisk-addons/configs/cdr_mysql.conf.sample
     /etc/asterisk/cdr_mysql.conf

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on Retrieve Attributes to verify."

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.