A20 Lesson 15 Group Policy Management

With XenApp 6.0 and 6.5, the main settings for clients and servers are configured via group policy objects that can be stored in the Active Directory or in the IMA database. If they are stored in the database they act as local group policies and are replicated to each XenApp server; if they are stored with and linked to Active Directory objects these policies can work across farm boundaries and also function with products such as XenDesktop. Ideally group policies are managed at the Active Directory level; but where Citrix administrators may not have the required permissions then they can be managed at the farm level via the IMA local polices.

As with all things IMA based then AppCenter would be the main tool to use and for AD policies then the group policy editor MMC is the tool to use; either way though, we must also have the Citrix group policy management extensions installed. These are installed automatically with XenApp but we will need to add them to other servers or workstations where we may want to manage GPOs with the Microsoft MMC. We show you this in the video but using group policy management from a Domain Controller; the Citrix Policies only become accessible once we have installed the group policy administration MSI from the installation DVD.

Each GPO can store both user and computer settings, the users settings are applied when the user logs onto a XenApp server and the computer settings apply to XenApp servers. This section acts as a means of introduction to XenApp policies and we look at the basics, many settings can be made and we look at more later in sections like printing. One big area we must cover though is that policies can be filtered or unfiltered. the unfiltered policy has no filter so applies to all users or all XenApp servers so lonf as it is not over written. usually we set generic settings that we would like applied to all users / servers with the unfiltered policies. Policies that are filtered then can be applied to specific users or servers based on certain settings such as the users IP address or the servers worker group.

For completeness we will look at making group policy changes via PowerShell but should not be major part of the CCA exam.