Citrix XenApp And XenDesktop On Windows Server 2016

The complete installation and configuration guide to get you started (work in progress).

This page was updated: 2017-03-05

Content

Prepare

Before you might think about how to integrate all of the components you might want to integrate it makes sense to have a feeling about the infrastructural changes you need in regards to an XenApp or XenDesktop environment. You might want to send your firewall team the ports you might need or…

If we look at an Citrix XenApp or XenDesktop infrastructure there are alot of components that can or need to be set up. The components depend on your Citrix license and the features you want to use.

Deploy OS

I like the concept of generic components. Therefore every component in our deployment scenario should be as “vanilla” as possible. The more components you hardcode with settings the harder it will get to troubleshoot them.

Windows Server 2016: Unattended installation

Deploy Roles And Features

Besides the standard Roles and Features on the left there are a few other ones you will need for your Citrix infrastructure Servers.

Remote Desktop Services Licensing

Remote Desktop Services Licensing is required even of you don´t want to use Microsoft Remote Desktop Services Hosts or Virtualization Hosts. Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop need a functioning RDS CAL server and you need to buy appropriate licenses for your operating system.

  • DisplayName : Remote Desktop Services
  • DisplayName : Remote Desktop Licensing
  • DisplayName : Remote Differential Compression
  • DisplayName : Remote Server Administration Tools
  • DisplayName : Role Administration Tools
  • DisplayName : Remote Desktop Services Tools
  • DisplayName : Remote Desktop Licensing Diagnoser Tools
  • DisplayName : Remote Desktop Licensing Tools

If you want to have an overview of High Availability for RDS deyploments you should check this Technet article. You also find the following statement regarding the other options of fault tollerance you might think about…

There are two deployment configurations that are not supported:

Clustering RD Connection Broker servers on RD Virtualization Host servers.
An active-active RD Connection Broker installation.

You should always search for the lowest common denominator that all of your infrastructure servers need. If you take a fresh Windows Server 2016 for example, you will see that the following Windows Features are present:

  • DisplayName : File and Storage Services
  • DisplayName : Storage Services
  • DisplayName : .NET Framework 4.6 Features
  • DisplayName : .NET Framework 4.6
  • DisplayName : WCF Services
  • DisplayName : TCP Port Sharing
  • DisplayName : SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support
  • DisplayName : Windows Defender Features
  • DisplayName : Windows Defender
  • DisplayName : GUI for Windows Defender
  • DisplayName : Windows PowerShell
  • DisplayName : Windows PowerShell 5.1
  • DisplayName : Windows PowerShell ISE
  • DisplayName : WoW64 Support

You could extend this via an unattended Script during installation or run a script after the server finished to add the missing features you want to have. On the right side you will find some scripts you can use for your own infrastructure servers.

With unattended files you can add your servers automatically to your domain and configure basic networking settings.

Citrix License Server

In smaller environments you can install the Citrix License Server on top of your Remote Desktop Services Licensing Server and it is perfectly fine to create Snapshots of this server for backup purposes. Even in enterprise environments some customers tend to keep it simple. But if you want real failover capabilities and need fault tolerance you should think about clustering the Citrix License Server component and RDS CAL server.

Dane Young wrote a good article on how to achieve this: http://blog.itvce.com/2015/02/11/creating-a-bulletproof-citrix-licensing-server-infrastructure-using-netscaler-global-server-load-balancing-gslb-and-ctxlicchk-ps1-powershell-scripts/

Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.13

In order to install all the necessary components in an automated and silent way we need to check the command line parameters for every single component. This is the first step before starting to create installation packages that you can deploy.

I love the PowerShell AppDeployment Toolkit for that purpose because it is PowerShell based and can be used as stand-alone packages as well with nearly every electronic software delivery product out there.

Command line switches

Manual Installation of Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.13

INSTALL

CONFIGURE

  • Configure – Microsoft RDS License Server
  • Configure – Microsoft SQL Server 2016
  • Configure – Citrix License Server 11.14
  • Configure – Citrix StoreFront 3.9
  • Configure – Citrix XenApp 7.13 Delivery Controller
  • Configure – Create a new Site in Citrix XenApp 7.13
  • Configure – Citrix Insight Services
  • Configure – Citrix Receiver 4.7 for Windows
  • Configure – Provisioning Services 7.13
  • Configure – AppDNA 7.12
  • Configure – Workspace Environment Management
  • Configure – Citrix Connector  3.1

CUSTOMIZE

  • How to easily Create and Assign Certificates for your lab infrastructure
  • How to create a central store for your Group Policies
  • How to organize your Citrix  infrastructure in Active Directory
  • How to create Group Policies for Citrix infrastructures in general

Troubleshoot

My Blog Posts about Troubleshooting XenApp

E2EVC Rome 2016 – Part 1 (Citrix) – Troubleshoot XenApp With Style
E2EVC Rome 2016 – Part 2 (Microsoft) – Troubleshoot XenApp With Style

Citrix Troubleshooting Articles

Using Task Scheduler to automate the collection of CDF traces
https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX221609

How to Enable Logging on Receiver for Windows Using Registry Entries
https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX132883

Citrix Receiver Logging – Reference List
https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX200282

Profile Management Configuration Checking Tool – UPMConfigCheck
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX132805

CDFControl
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX111961

How to Enable Logging on Receiver for Windows Using Registry Entries
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX132883