Building a Test Citrix Environment

Question

Our customers occasionally ask whether our software would run in a "Citrix environment". Which Citrix products make a typical Citrix environment?

How in general does one build a typical Citrix environment for test purposes?

Answer 1

When people talk about "Citrix" they typically mean Citrix's oldest and most widely used product XenApp (older names include Presentation Server and Metaframe). XenApp is installed on a Windows server OS and needs the server role Remote Desktop Services (in earlier versions of Windows called Terminal Services).

To build a test environment:

• Designate two physical or virtual machines (VMware Workstation can be used just fine)
• On the first machine, create a domain (if you don't have one already) by installing a Windows server OS and running "dcpromo"
• Install the role service Remote Desktop Licensing and activate it (you do not need any licenses)
• On the second machine, install a Windows Server 2008 R2 and enable the Remote Desktop Services role. Point it to your DC for licensing. Make sure you set the licensing mode to "user".
• Now you can install XenApp. You also need a Citrix license service on one of the two machines.

Note: For this scenario you need Windows OS licenses and Citrix XenApp licenses (at least for one concurrent user)

When you have installed all this you can install the Citrix client (called Online Plug-in) on any computer and connect to applications you have published on the XenApp server.