A20 Lesson 12 Publishing Applications and Session Pre-Launch

So we will delve a little into the world of published applications on Citrix XenApp 6.5 by publishing two simple apps, one with AppCenter and the other with PowerShell. We will start with this lesson in just looking at the basic application properties and then in the next lesson we can view the advanced properties.

Using the applications node of AppCenter we can right click and choose to Publish Application the simple wizard will step us through the process. For the application type will will choose accessed from the server and installed onto the server , we can look at streamed applications later. The application then must be installed on the servers we choose and we do this using worker groups.

Using PowerShell there are three cmdlets to run

1. New-XAApplication
2. Add-XAApplicationAccount
3. Set-XAApplication

New-XAApplication -BrowserName Notepad -ApplicationType ServerInstalled -DisplayName Notepad -CommandLineExecutable "notepad.exe" -WorkerGroupName Allservers -ComputerName XA1
Add-XAApplicationAccount Notepad "ExampleDomain Users" -ComputerName XA1
Set-XAApplication Notepad -Enabled $true -ComputerName XA1

We will note that launching an application for the first time takes a little while as the user has to establish the session on the server, log on and load the user’s profile, once the session is established other applications launch more quickly on the same server as their share the existing session until the user logs out from all applications. When using the services site, we can configure session pre-launch by creating a pre-launch application from one of our published apps. When a user logs onto the receiver a session then is created for them. This then give faster access to the applications as the session pre-exists. The down side is that a user license is used then as soon as the user logons onto the receiver , not just when they launch apps.