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