A19 Lesson 3 – Installing the First DDC

Now that we have licensing installed and ready we can look at preparing the first Desktop Delivery Controller. We will need a database server and ideally this will be a full version of SQL rather than express. This will then allow for database high availability to be implemented via clustering or database mirroring. Only SQL is supported and not Oracle. The database, though, can be created during the installation of the first controller. The database server can be shared with other Citrix products such as XenApp but the database is unique to each product.The DDC can be installed onto Server 2008 or Server 2008 R2 and as such can be 32 bit or 64 bit platform. Installing from the DVD we can use the meta-installer that will install any prerequisites for the DDC. We do this via the autosetup program at the root of the DVD. The Virtual Desktop Agent is grayed out as that is for Desktops only and the XenDesktop section is for the server components. From XenDesktop we can choose to install the server components, we will install just the Studio and Controller roles. We use Citrix Desktop Studio to configure the XenDesktop site once it is created.