synergy 2015 session slides: syn316 designing your xenapp 7.6 solutions a to z

© 2015 Citrix

Welcome to SYN316-Designing your XenApp 7.6 solutions A to Z

Note: this slide deck contains multiple animations and is intended to be viewed interactively.

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© 2015 Citrix

Before we begin, feel free to blog, tweet, post, whatnot

Please use the hashtag citrixsyergy

You can also follow me on twitter

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A quick intro about me, I am the Director of Outsourcing Delivery for IPM

My focus is on Technical Project Management & Enterprise Architecture (Primarily Citrix Technologies)

I’ve been working with Citrix technologies for around 15 years

You can check out my personal blog as well as my XenApp Book published last year through Packt Publishing

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© 2015 Citrix

A quick intro about me, I am the Director of Outsourcing Delivery for IPM

My focus is on Technical Project Management & Enterprise Architecture (Primarily Citrix Technologies)

I’ve been working with Citrix technologies for around 15 years

You can check out my personal blog as well as my XenApp Book published last year through Packt Publishing

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Designing your XenApp environment should be a holistic approach

Start with a high level design: what problem are you trying to solve, what business need is driving this?

Take that through the process to a high level design, then detail, then build, test, etc

It needs to be a full life cycle, end-to-end; not just building a couple of servers and saying “here you go”

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Why does it matter?

Here is a graph from the Project VRC State of the VDI & SBC Union

This is an independent survey released each year… take it with a grain of salt since it is a single data point, but it is relevant…

As you can see, 3 of the top 4 initiatives (upgrade, BYO, DaaS) are related to XenApp

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Why does it matter?




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Why does it matter?




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There are many components to Designing your Solution…

This is a short session, so we can’t cover all these points

Our main focus is PLAN! PLAN! PLAN!

Then DEFINE & DESIGN

Implementation is such a small part and won’t be our focus today

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© 2015 Citrix

There are many components to Designing your Solution…

This is a short session, so we can’t cover all these points

Our main focus is PLAN! PLAN! PLAN!

Then DEFINE & DESIGN

Implementation is such a small part and won’t be our focus today

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I like to remind people that Citrix has been doing VDI for 20+ years

As the British say when a monarch dies… the king is dead, long live the king every year I hear about how a new technology is a “XenApp Killer…” well, it’s not dead yet

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I like to remind people that Citrix has been doing VDI for 20+ years

As the British say when a monarch dies… the king is dead, long live the king every year I hear about how a new technology is a “XenApp Killer…” well, it’s not dead yet

As a matter of fact, during the keynote, Mark reiterated, We Love XenApp

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A quick Survey… who here uses XenApp/XenDesktop? What about VMware? Something else?

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A quick Survey… who here uses XenApp/XenDesktop? What about VMware? Something else?

Now, this being Citrix Synergy, I expect the results might be a tad bit skewed,

but consider this from Project VRC’s State of the VDI and SBC Union…

You can see Citrix holds a dominate share of the SBC and VDI utilization.

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Taking that same information from Project VRC’s State of the VDI and SBC Union, I weighted the scores based upon percentage of respondents and combining by Vendor… As you can see here, when combining VDI and SBC percentages as a weighted score, you can see Citrix is by far and away the leader in the SBC/Broker space. But if we compare that to Hypervisor layer, it is almost inverse with VMware. What does that mean? Really not much, just the nerd in me appreciating data graphs. J

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The principles we discuss here apply to XenApp, XenDesktop, View, etc… the technologies may differ, but the underlying planning process is the same!

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The principles we discuss here apply to XenApp, XenDesktop, View, etc… the technologies may differ, but the underlying planning process is the same!

However, this is not the answer to life, universe and everything

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VDI is an umbrella term… it can mean different things to different people

What does VDI mean to you? – HVD: Hosted Virtual Desktop (DesktopOS / Traditional “VDI”) – HSD: Hosted Shared Desktop (ServerOS / Traditional “Published Desktop”) – SBC: Session Based Computers (ServerOS / Traditional “XenApp”)

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This is an older FlexCast diagram from Citrix, but I like it

The further right you go, the greater density, greater ROI, etc… that is the XenApp Hosted App model

I always lead with XenApp, I love XenApp… but if the right fit, I may use Virtual Desktops as well

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This is an older FlexCast diagram from Citrix, but I like it

The further right you go, the greater density, greater ROI, etc… that is the XenApp Hosted App model

I always lead with XenApp, I love XenApp… but if the right fit, I may use Virtual Desktops as well

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Whatever flavor of VDI you use, you still have common building blocks

These concerns apply in XenApp as well as XenDesktop..

How do you deliver apps, where do they live, what about data, what about personalization…

As you can see, there is a Citrix technology for every layer of the block

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Here is a project diagram straight from Citrix Consulting

It is a tried and true methodology… Define, Assess, Design, Deploy, Monitor

Nice, neat, pretty…

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© 2015 Citrix

Here is a project diagram straight from Citrix Consulting

It is a tried and true methodology… Define, Assess, Design, Deploy, Monitor

Nice, neat, pretty…

But we all know IT Project Management is never that clean..

I prefer a more representative diagram…

The focus is on analysis, then design/build. The testing/validation phase is an iterative process, going back and forth to implement changes along the way

Then we get to a small pilot, a large go-live rollout, then monitor/maintain

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Now that we have our planning, we can start to define our environment

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The first step in defining your environment is knowing your users (or customers or subscribers)…

WHO is using the system WHAT do they need – printers, scanners, etc

WHAT are they doing, what are their workflows

Here we show a basic workflow of a doctor using a badge reader to sign in and get his EMR

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The first step in defining your environment is knowing your users (or customers or subscribers)…

WHO is using the system WHAT do they need – printers, scanners, etc

WHAT are they doing, what are their workflows

Here we show a basic workflow of a doctor using a badge reader to sign in and get his EMR

But we know it’s not THAT simple… he walks up to the PC, taps his badge, the badge reader sends his credentials to Windows, which passed them to Receiver, which talks to StoreFront, which queries the Controller over XML, then connects the user to the session

Every step along the way needs to be accounted for… understand the complete workflow

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Once we know the users and how they work, we need to understand the tools they use; namely applications.

There are multiple ways to do this, and I like ALL of them

A simple survey – email, paper form, web form, survey monkey, whatever… ASK the users what they use/need, let them identify

Then audit… tools like Liquidware Labs and Lakeside Software are great for that

I even wrote a tool years ago for auditing legacy XenApp deployments

The trick is to find out WHAT they use, and how often. Sometimes users don’t always know.

You may detect an app that is only used by 10% of the people, but it is a critical app

You can use AppDNA to help determine compatibility in the new environment

The key is to pull from multiple sources to capture the whole picture.

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Users and Applications are only part of the equation… we also need to understand their devices.

What sort of endpoint are they using? PC, Tablet, Thin Client… Windows, Linux, Mac…

Also, what attachments? Client printers? USB drives? Scanners, Cameras?

All this matters because we need to know what must be supported in our final solution.

What do the users need to do their job effectively?

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Putting it all together

Users + applications + Devices feed into our Use Case

What are we trying to achieve: at the end of the day, making sure our users/customers can do their job!!!

I used to stay, it’s all about the apps… but really, it’s about the business process

Use Cases impact our overall design…

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Take for example a Medical Claims Division of 354 users… how do we determine the use case? Is it one, is it several. After all, there are 5 or 6 divisions and multiple roles in each one.

Really, use case allocation is a mix of data collection, logical groupings, and occasional best guess (at least to start)

So for this case, it makes sense to group by business function more so than department

Once we have that initial grouping, we can then refine further

So in our analysis, maybe we say that most of the users used the same data entry and reporting applications… that can become a single use case… the outliers might have more advanced requirements and become a second use case

Here we took 314 of the 354 users and are using a Hosted Shared Desktop… or XenApp… as their VDI solution because it works best

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So, we have our initial planning done… we know WHAT we are trying to support… so we can begin designing our actual XenApp environment…

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From the highest level, we have some basic tiers

•  End Point

•  Access

•  Desktop/Application

Of course, don’t forget the back-end data as well

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I always start with a “big picture”

Here I have my friend, Bob Ross, to help me paint the picture…

Whiteboards are our friends, I have a former coworker who use to say that “I can’t talk without a marker in my hand”

I love to sketch/diagram solutions… to me, it breaks down communication barriers when people can see what you have in mind

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© 2015 Citrix

I always start with a “big picture”

Here I have my friend, Bob Ross, to help me paint the picture…

Whiteboards are our friends, I have a former coworker who use to say that “I can’t talk without a marker in my hand”

I love to sketch/diagram solutions… to me, it breaks down communication barriers when people can see what you have in mind

Here is a rough sketch… it is the start of our Reference Architecture You can see the basic layout of components and flow of information…

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I take that basic whiteboard session, then convert it into a nice Visio diagram

You can see the different tiers: Access, App Delivery, Backend, etc

And the communication flows

This big picture can then be sent around to various teams for review/approval, etc

So the network and storage, and operations teams know what we are doing and can provide their own input as necessary.

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We have out big picture… lets dig deeper in to the application delivery layer… or the XenApp layer

We all know it’s not quite as simple as this diagram, but it is representative of this layer…

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First, a brief History of XenApp…

Multiuser > WinView > WinFrame > MetaFrame > Presentation Server > XenApp > XenDesktop > XenApp

Who has used Multiuser? I started here at WinFrame

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A quick comparison of old and new terminology…

For example, there are no more Farms, there are Sites

We don’t PUBLISH applications, we DELIVER Applications…

The “missing” XenApp legacy features are slowly being added back in… 7.0 was simply branded as XenDesktop, 7.5 brought back the XenApp Name… 7.6 added back in session prelaunch and linger

7.6 FP 1 – What’s New

http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/xenapp-xendesktop-75/cds-75-about-whats-new.html

http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/xenapp-xendesktop-76/xad-whats-new.html

http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/xenapp-xendesktop-76fp1/xad-whats-new-fp1.html

What’s Missing

http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/xenapp-xendesktop-76fp1/xad-features-not-in.html

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When planning out and designing your XenApp deployment, these are some things you need to consider

1 Site or Multiple Sites or even a stretched site?

One environment, or pods?

What constraints are you dealing with? Hardware, network, location, resources, etc.

Users: consider both concurrent and total…. You might have to support 10,000 users, but only 5,000 will be active at any time. In that case, do you design for 5000 or 10000 users?

Also, consider the different roles… do you combine or separate?

Ultimately, there is no right answer… but there are plenty of wrong ones.

What I mean by that… the right answer is what works best for your environment… a wrong answer is one that is not optimal.

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© 2015 Citrix

When planning out and designing your XenApp deployment, these are some things you need to consider

1 Site or Multiple Sites or even a stretched site?

One environment, or pods?

What constraints are you dealing with? Hardware, network, location, resources, etc.

Users: consider both concurrent and total…. You might have to support 10,000 users, but only 5,000 will be active at any time. In that case, do you design for 5000 or 10000 users?

Also, consider the different roles… do you combine or separate?

Ultimately, there is no right answer… but there are plenty of wrong ones.

What I mean by that… the right answer is what works best for your environment… a wrong answer is one that is not optimal.

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I like to split environments into 1 of 3 categories…

Small, Medium, Large

Small is less than 500 users or a Proof of Concept…. The danger with a PoC is they commonly become Production.

Who here has had that happen?

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I consider medium up to 5000 users

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I consider medium up to 5000 users

Large or Enterprise more than 5000 users

These are arbitrary numbers, of course…. I’ve seen small shops that want Enterprise grade architecture… OK

I’ve seen enterprises that want a small, simple design… ok

These are not set in stone

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Let's look at a small deployment

Generally this is a single site

We'll do a consolidated build and basic SQL

By consolidated build, we meant having 2 servers which host all the major roles, Director, Studio, Director, StoreFront, etc.

We may or may not use PVS. This might be PVS, might be template-based VMs

We'll probably use a virtual NetScaler appliance

The more I work with XenApp, the more I like the consolidated builds, even with larger environments, to reduce number of components and crosstalk... but that is optional

From a diagram perspectives, you can see there are not a lot of components to manage

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In a medium sized deployment, we typically break each component out to its own server

This allows segmentation of role and separate updated process

Here we'll generally use PVS for image management and SQL HA

Probably upgrading to NetScaler MPX appliances

Generally a single site, possibly a stretch site, but a more complex diagram

As you can see, multiple use cases, infrastructure redundancy, etc.

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For a large site, we are typically in a multisite build with multiple redundancies and greater scale

Maybe a large site is really 2 medium sites... or 2 PODs... or 1 big deployment

Look at scalability... each Controllers is rated to support 5000 connections, so we have 3 controllers to ensure N+1 standards.

If your standards are different, then you can build more or less as you need.

Or you may have 2 per site...

Here is a typical design with 2 data centers, 1 east 1 west

Each has the same type of designed and each is independent of the other.

Let me zoom in so you can see a little better

Much more complexity... more planning and design required.

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Once you have an idea of what you are building and how you want to build it, it’s time to do some Algebra…

I’m fairly old school, so I still use excel sheets… you can also use the Project Accelerator to help this exercise

Scalability depends on a great many factors, including your hardware platform, virtualization platform, application/desktop resource requirements, etc

How MANY VMs do you need to support your users? What resources do they need? How many can you get on a host and maintain performance

Its NOT a linear process, its an iterative process. The great thing about statistics & baselines … anytime you change one coefficient, you need to recalculate

I also warn my customers… this is a PAPER exercise… this is just a first pass. Once you build test and re-evaluate…. Pilot: test/reevaluate… Production rollout… keep re-evaluating your baseline

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When looking at Image Management, we have several options… PVS, MCS or static builds (may be SCCM, may be templates, whatever)

I will be honest, PVS is one of my favorite technologies in the Citrix stack, but it is not always the right fit.

…

MCS is typically used for smaller deployments

PVS is standard for most deployments

Some customers still prefer static / template builds, that is fine

I greatly prefer PVS due to consistency, reusability, and version controls

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Here’s a nice graph from Barry Schiffer on a MCS/PVS decision tree… as you can see, most roads lead to PVS

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Managing XenApp 7.6 is a little different from managing earlier versions For one, you no longer PUBLISH apps, you now DELIVER them That’s not just a chance in terminology… the process is different too First off, we have Machine Catalogs: This is based on Operating System AND Delivery Method Here I am making a Controller Group – this is purely optional, but I always publish my controllers for my admin team… Now, just having a Machine Catalog does nothing special for us yet other than tell our Site these machines exist With the Delivery Group, you can pick Desktops, Applications, or Both With XenApp, if you select both, the users will have the option to launch the desktop… and you can change it later if you set it incorrectly NOTE: Users are assigned to the Delivery Group, Applications are assigned to the Delivery Group… unlike older versions of XenApp, Users are NOT assigned to Applications. Not a huge deal, but definitely a different way of thinking through it. When publishing Applications, you can do multiple at the same time… The nice thing is with this version, everything you do in Studio you can do in PowerShell. And there are some things you can do in PowerShell, that are not natively available in the Studio. For example, we might want to publish, err deliver, the same application to multiple delivery groups… you can do that in PowerShell You might want to disable and hide an application… well you can disable in GUI, but not hide it, however in PowerShell each application has a Visible property which can be set to $False And of course PowerShell is great for bulk operations

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Of course, our job does not end with the design, build, and rollout We need to monitor and maintain the environment.

We have built in tools… Director and Scout

Director is useful for helpdesk and real-time monitoring Scout is part of the Citrix TaaS server, where you upload your logs and configurations and it will generate alerts

But there is still a gap… most enterprises use these tools and augment with other tools One of my personal favorites is uberAgent, which is a Splunk tool, written by Helge Klein

The key, regardless of which tools you use, is to actively monitor your environment, try to head off errors or issues before they become a major crisis.

Especially around performance and capacity Are you getting as many users or sessions as you planned? Is the user experience or login performance as expected… has it gotten better or worse over time?

Of course, based upon your performance statistics, you might need to re-evaluate your design and modify your baselines or expectations.

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There is not right or wrong answer… even with Citrix, you have reference architectures and best practices… but that might not fit YOUR specific environment

I always say, if you put 3 engineers in a room, you’ll get 10 different answers…

They key is, are you asking the right questions…

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There is not right or wrong answer… even with Citrix, you have reference architectures and best practices… but that might not fit YOUR specific environment

I always say, if you put 3 engineers in a room, you’ll get 10 different answers…

They key is, are you asking the right questions…

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synergy 2015 session slides: syn316 designing your xenapp 7.6 solutions a to z

Technology

citrix welcome

citrix technologies

xenapp book

xenapp killer

xenapp environment

main focus

project vrc state

vdi sbc union