Book Image

Getting Started with Citrix XenApp 6.5

Book Image

Getting Started with Citrix XenApp 6.5

Overview of this book

XenApp is the leader in application hosting and virtualization delivery, allowing users from different platforms such Windows, Mac, Linux, and mobile devices to connect to their business applications. Using XenApp, you can deploy secure applications quickly to thousands of users.XenApp 6.5 brings with it exciting new features such as a brand new management console, Instant App access, Multi-stream ICA, Single Sign-on and SmartAuditor enhancements, and more.Getting Started with Citrix XenApp 6.5 provides comprehensive details on how to design, implement, and maintain Citrix farms based on XenApp 6.5. Additionally, you will learn to use management tools and scripts for daily tasks such as managing servers, published resources, printers, and connections.Getting Started with Citrix XenApp 6.5 starts by introducing the basics and new features of the brand new version such as installing servers and configuring components, and then teaches you how to publish applications and resources on the client device before moving on to configuring content redirection. Author Guillermo Musumeci includes a use case throughout the book to explain advanced topics like creating management scripts and deploying and optimizing XenApp for Citrix XenServer, VMware ESX, and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines. It will guide you through an unattended installation of XenApp and components on physical servers. By the end of this book you will have enough knowledge to successfully design and manage your own XenApp 6.5 Farms.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Getting Started with Citrix XenApp 6.5
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Acknowledgement
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding sessions


Each time we establish a session with a XenApp server, we use a protocol called Citrix ICA (Independent Computing Architecture), created by Citrix. ICA uses virtual channels to transmit keyboard strokes and mouse movements, printing, video and audio traffic, and more from the client machine to the XenApp server and the response back from the XenApp server to the client machine.

ICA uses port 1494 by default, but when we enable the XenApp Session Reliability feature in our XenApp farm, port 2598 is used instead of port 1494.

When a client machine initiates communication to the XenApp server with an ICA client and the user is successfully authenticated against the XenApp farm, a session is created on the server. The session is the core of the XenApp experience.

We can find a session in three main states: active, idle, and disconnected.

Let's use an example to understand these states. Our friend William Empire at Brick Unit Construction starts a session in XenApp. He opens...