Group Policies

Fast Provisioning Citrix Xenapp 6 with Worker Groups and Policies 1/3

Worker Groups and Policies are some of the feaures included in Citrix XenApp 6. I know this version isn’t deployed wildly and tehre are many reasons I won’t speak about here; you can still read a blog and very interresting comments about that here :

I work with Citrix Education to build exams for XenApp 6 Basic Administration and Advanced Administation and in order to do it, I needed to know every XenApp 6 new features. I tried everything with the Technical Preview release when XenApp 6 was still XenApp for Windows 2008 R2. Now I want to share and blog about two major features, Worker Groups and Policies because I think it can dramatically improve your productivity and accelerate your deployments.

What are Worker Groups ?

Worker groups are collections of XenApp servers, residing in the same farm, that are managed as a single unit. Using worker groups, you can:
  • Streamline application publishing to multiple farm servers
  • Load balance access to published resources
  • Filter policies so that settings are applied only to sessions hosted on a specific set of farm servers
When using worker groups, consider the following:
  • A farm server can belong to multiple worker groups
  • A worker group can include any number of XenApp servers or none at all
  • Only servers that belong to the same XenApp farm are included in a worker group

Above writting is the Citrix definition, I made a shorter version bellow :

  • Manage XenApp servers collectively as “worker groups”
  • Assign published applications and policies to worker groups
  • Worker groups contain farm servers or domain OUs
  • Servers added to a worker groups inherit settings, policies, applications  and Load Balancing Policies

(more…)

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