A20 Lesson 2 – Installing the first XenApp 6.5 server into the farm

Now that we have the License Server in place we can install XenApp 6.5 itself. The first server will create the XenApp 6.5 farm; only XenApp 6.5 servers can exist in a 6.5 farm. The farm data is stored in a database which could be SQL or Oracle. We will use SQL Express in the demo. The database server can be shared across farms but each farm needs its own database.

XenApp will need an account to use to connect to the database, so we create an account, _CTX, and assign is the db_owner role to the database. We will use this account when configuring the farm sittings in the server configuration tool.

We can use the server role manage and the integrated installation to install XenApp; all the pre-requisite software is installed then along with XenApp. The three editions of XenApp are:

• Platinum
• Enterprise
• Advanced

Platinum is understandably the premium edition. The install will take a few minutes and then will be ready to configure the farm. This is done with the server configuration tool. We fist specify the License Server and then create the new farm pointing to the database we created. Next up is the shadowing permissions, the more restrictive we are here then the less we can control later with policies. Shadowing is remote control so there may be data protection and privacy issues here. With XenApp 6.5 we can assign session controller and session host roles to each XenApp server. Only session controllers can participate in data collector elections. Data collectors hold the dynamic information about the server load and which user is connected where. The farm database holds the static information: the servers, administrators and published applications. As this is the first server it must hold the session controller and session host roles. We also configure the XML port, client and remote desktop users before completing the configuration and rebooting the server.

Upon reboot we can check the start up license has been used. We will also see a use license in use as I am remoting in via RDP to the server for the demo. RDP connections also use Citrix user licenses. We can see that the database is replicated to each XenApp server and is called the local host cache; servers can read from this but write the the SQL database. Finally we can can use netsat or resource monitor to view the open ports used by XenApp:

• 80 XML
• 1494 ICA
• 2512 IMA
• 2513 Appcenter
• 2598 Session Reliability