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 : http://www.archy.net/2010/09/21/citrix-xenapp-6-why-it-doesnt-spread/
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 ?
- 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
- 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
